By Michael Bielawski
The House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry has “United Nations” referenced in at least six committee documents, continuing a trend of the global organization’s influence in the Green Mountain State.
Influencing Agriculture
The “Food Security in Vermont” policy document put together by the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund references the United Nations a few times, including in its opening statement.
“Our Shared Goal: In 2035, all Vermonters will be food secure. The Vermont Food Security Roadmap to 2035 guides our way to that future. As defined by the United Nations, food security is “when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life,” it states.
Recently Vermont implemented “Universal School Meals” which some pundits think derived from a U.N. initiative.
On the United Nations webpage, it states, “The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO) committed to assisting the School Meals Coalition in which over 60 countries envision a nutritious meal in school for every child in need by 2030.”
The food security document also has the phrase “equity” 11 times. It states, “As noted in the Racial Equity in the Vermont Food System brief, racial inequities in Vermont’s food system, including the disproportionate rates of food insecurity experienced by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, are rooted in the history of our nation and state.”
Influencing Biodiversity
In H. 126, “An act relating to community resilience and biodiversity protection” the bill’s findings have a section titled “According to the United Nations” and lists the various damages to the planet that the U.N. deems the result of human activity.
These include, “one million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction” and “human activity has altered almost 75 percent of the Earth’s surface, squeezing wildlife and nature into ever-smaller natural areas of the planet.”
Sponsors include Rep. Amy Sheldon, D-Middlebury, and others.
Also dealing with biodiversity, the Senate Committee on Agriculture in January of 2023 submitted a report to the General Assembly titled “Payment for Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group Final Report”. It includes four references to the U.N.
It also implies that carbon reduction efforts will be factored into ecosystem management policies.
It states, “Still, some studies offer useful frameworks for comparing and selecting tools, such as one process defined by the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). This process recommends progressing from predefined criteria (aim, geographical zone/application, available data, time, and skills) before then identifying 1) land use activity being measured, 2) land use changes to be accounted for, and 3) greenhouse gases, carbon pools, and leakage.”
In another mention, it states “The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recommends that soil biodiversity measurements should be ‘sensitive enough to reflect the influence of management and climate on long-term changes in soil quality but not be so sensitive as to be influenced by short-term weather patterns and robust enough not to give false alarms.’”
Honorable mentions:
“United Nations” appears briefly in other documents the committee has looked at. It’s once in a document titled “Right to Repair Laws are Constitutional,” from Nebraska’s Office of the Attorney General.
It’s mentioned in a document subtitled “Building increased resilience in Vermont’s food system through agricultural surplus management” by Theresa Snow of Salvation Farms in Morrisville.
When The Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association (EMA) submitted testimony on a bill dealing with H. 81 concerning repair policies for agricultural equipment, the U.N. was referenced once.
The author is a writer for the Vermont Daily Chronicle