MRCTV has learned that a little-known – and constitutionally dubious – bureaucracy lodged within the already dubious “Department of Agriculture” is showering more than $70 million on specially-favored universities and attendant private researchers to steer the field of agriculture towards political ends in the service of their Quixotic fear-mongering over so-called “Climate Change.”
This includes the genetic engineering of RICE.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) recently announced a $10 million, multi-year handout called “CRISP-RICE” -standing for “Climate Resilient Innovations for Sustainable Production of Rice” – that will start in April and run to March of 2027. It’s Climate-Catastrophe propaganda “goal” is to:
“…increase the sustainability of rice farming systems in the Southern U.S. using innovative climate-resilient technologies.”
Which is precisely what private rice farmers do, every hour, every day, every year. It’s built into the system of the competitive market, working to give consumers more for less. Non-sustainable systems collapse, and sustainable systems continue. In fact, the market does better than “sustain.” It incentivizes continual improvement.
But the central-planners know better. Rather than actually leave government, stop their tax-thievery and redistribution, and peacefully start their own private rice farming endeavors to test their brilliance, these bureaucrats want to hand out other people's cash and skirt all market incentives and responsibilities.
And their goal to “increase sustainability” by “using climate-resilient technologies” sees the feds shovel cash into genetically changing what we’ll eat.
Not to trigger alarm, but the research also engages in genetic experimentation on the blight that can ruin crops. NIFA’s “Current Research Information System” tells Americans:
“Marker-assisted selection will be employed to develop breeding lines with a combination of introgressed QTLs for tolerance to multiple stresses. The genomic regions for bacterial panicle blight (BPB) will be identified and sequence variants associated with BPB resistance in a resistant mutant line will be characterized. A germplasm panel will be screened for resistance to the kernel smut fungus in the greenhouse and field conditions. The fungal isolates of kernel smut fungus will be collected and their virulence, genetic diversity, and population structure will be characterized by sequencing the ITS regions and whole genome…”
The CRISP-RICE program also will hand cash to researchers and propagandists to teach farmers “Climate Smart Practices” for “sustaining” their crops in the face of what the climate doomsayers label a “variable climate," as if farmers don't deal with changeable weather every day.
Those “Climate Smart Agriculture” practices will be tied to cash, of course, and then will see the government engage in this:
“…sociological analysis focusing on growers' social and institutional networks, institutional support structures, understanding of CSA technologies, practices, and their potential economic and environmental benefits, and perceptions of support and barriers in adopting CSA technology and practices...”
The project-pushers have no private market incentive to be careful, so if more goes wrong beyond the already established wrongdoing of tax theft, don’t expect anyone in the government or any of the researchers to shoulder the burden of financial loss due to their negligence. In fact, it would be wise to notice that this only is part of a much larger government graft machine.
On February 9, the NIFA announced its $70 million “Sustainable Agricultural Systems” porkulous, which will bless federal funds unto numerous universities to “help” them research things like greenhouses, and to start “public-private partnerships” with farmers around the nation to get their farmer-heads around the suddenly new idea of:
“…climate-smart agriculture along with strengthening regional bioeconomies in rural areas. This project involves a diverse team of 34 collaborators from 17 states. The project will train farmers to produce cover crop seed and be a catalyst to further adopt cover crops as a climate-smart practice, helping farmers adapt to climate change.”
Curiously, government “help” for any area of endeavor never is help. On the deepest functional level, the only way government can “help” one group is by taking money from another, syphoning away oodles for bureaucrats’ bank accounts, and then handing it to the “specially favored.”
On the observable, historical level, the U.S. government has been the biggest culprit for retarding agricultural advancement in the history of this continent. From FDR’s insane Agriculture Adjustment Administration literally paying farmers to destroy crops, to the W. Bush Administration pushing more inefficient corn-based ethanol into our gas, to the environmental destruction incentivized by government farm subsidies (an excellent 2018 Cato Institute overview of farm subsidies and their injurious consequences can be read here), to the regulatory burdens placed on farmers – all of those costs are, in multitudinous ways, felt by us, the people who are supposed to determine what WE value, and what sustains OUR lives.
This affrontery will not stop. It is interwoven with the unscrupulous unconstitutional system under which we toil, and it is being given extra energy thanks to the unwarranted and fact-lacking “Anthropogenic Climate Change” narrative.
This new pork is unhealthy for our wallets, our freedoms, and, possibly, for our food supply.
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