How To Engineer A Food Crisis

Via UNSHADOWED Substack,The UK paid farmers to stop producing, and now blames a food crisis on the weather...The UK seems to be in a world of hurt.The media has been abuzz about the need to stock canned goods due to "food shortages," blaming global warming and hostile nations:- Guardian, August 25, 2026Remarkably, these were exactly the causes blamed in many tabletop exercises, including Food Chain Reaction Game 2015 - keynoted by none other than John Podesta - which, unsurprisingly, demanded "better global governance."But the genesis of this "new" food crisis, being used to justify an acceleration of gene-edited crops and other unpopular measures advancing the technocratic takeover of food, lies not in Russian aggression or CO2, but in bad policies and economic warfare against farmers for generations.The Food Crisis is Coming from Inside the HouseThough several novels could be dedicated to the systematic strangulation of British agriculture, I will highlight only a select few to paint the rough picture:Inheritance TaxWhile the UK's general inheritance tax (IHT) sits at 40%, farms historically have been shielded from this by an "Agricultural Property Relief" policy. Family farms were handed down from one generation to the next, as has been done by humans since the dawn of time.That ended on April 6, 2026.IHT relief for agricultural property was capped this year to £2.5 million - which really doesn't go far considering the value of farmland and requisite equipment. Everything thereafter is subject to an effective IHT of 20% on farm land and assets that are already running on a very thin margin. This is how a cash-poor, asset-rich farm gets sold to pay the tax bill.This is staggeringly bad policy, forcing experienced farmers off their land. It is also, in my view, wholly immoral - but we'll set that aside.Unplugging the Life SupportThe UK has cut off financial support from farms. Britain once paid farmers to grow food. The EU turned that into a land cheque called the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS). After Brexit, this subsidy to producers (now called 'delinked payments') was set to expire gradually over time, shifting instead to a "Sustainable Farming Incentive."While the BPS began at £180-£230/ha, resulting in an average payment of £28,400/year, the delinked payments are this year (2026) capped at £600. Yet the SFI "replacing" it was shut down in 2025 when its budget was exhausted. Thousands of producers were left out to dry:"We'd spent months putting the application together, we'd paid over £1,000 in agent's fees, we were just doing the final checks. Then the government shut the applications down, without any warning."For us it is tens of thousands of pounds of lost income. We now have a massive black hole in our budget for this year," added Mrs Godwin.- BBC, March 27, 2025These payments to farmers to ensure food security, which began post-WW2 and upon which farmers became dependent, have been unceremoniously eroded. This, alone, has been a disaster for British producers, pushing many into a cash flow crisis.Shutting Down FarmsNow that the farms were unprofitable, the UK went further, actively incentivizing some producers to stop farming their land and shed their livestock. This was achieved through a new Land Use plan which even the Guardian was forced to summarize as "taking farms out of food production:"- The Guardian, July 3, 2025The January 2025 blueprint set specific goals: more than 10% of England's farmland should stop producing food by 2050, with grassland for livestock taking the largest cut. Farms were incentivized to transition to hosting agritourism activities like glamping (glamour camping) or, worse yet, solar farms.Right about now you might be shaking your head, "They set a goal of stopping farms from growing food?" Yes. Yes, they did.The Knepp Castle Estate is one such example. Their homepage tells the story quite clearly. Where once winter wheat, barley, oats, maize were grown, and 600 dairy cows and sheep were raised, now one finds yurts available for rental:Food security explicitly took a backseat to the 30x30 plan, as adopted at COP15, and the idea that land should be released back to nature and "rewilded."But ... Putin's Carbon Footprint!Now, with yields indeed at historic lows, we see the headlines blaming Russia and climate change. We hear the National Farmers' Union president Tom Bradshaw saying it "does feel like there is going to be some shortages," and, in the same breath, that many producers may not have the cash to plant next year.And yet, somehow, this entirely relevant backstory is lost, eclipsed by the administration's rush to adopt gene-edited food and drone-surveilled precision agriculture.They did not need to ban traditional farming. They simply made the farm economically unviable, paid producers to do anything other than produce, and are now calling the missing food a "climate emergency."While the British have been quite explicit about the process, fundamentally their actions have been unexceptional:In the Netherlands, nitrogen rules and buyout schemes have already taken hundreds of livestock farms outIn Germany, too, farmers associations are warning producers may not have the cash to plant the next crop [full report here]Don't let them call this climate change. This food crisis was engineered through policy, and is now being marketed as weather.And that is all the more reason we should be growing more food and redoubling efforts at creating lasting food security for our families and communities.