For Immediate Release: January 3, 2024
Contact: R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard
Phone: (406) 252-2516; r-calfusa@r-calfusa.com
Please find below R-CALF USA’s weekly opinion/commentary that discusses how American ranchers’ independence is threatened by the Environmental, Social, and Governance or ESG movement that involves reporting, measuring, and regulating. It is in three formats: written, audio and video. Anyone is welcome to use it for broadcasting or reporting.
Silent Night
Commentary by Bill Bullard, CEO, R-CALF USA
Over the past several years we’ve attempted to inform you about the dark side of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef or GRSB, characterizing it as a transnational private corporation that’s trying to coerce livestock producers into reporting their animal husbandry and grazing practices so those practices can later be measured by the global corporation.
And once measured, those practices can then be regulated by requiring producers to jump on the path of continual improvement in return for access to the market. In other words, the GRSB wants to control how ranchers ranch.
Importantly, the means of measuring where a particular rancher falls along this path of continual improvement can only be achieved when ranchers join up with their livestock herds identified with an electronic form of identification, like radio frequency identification or RFID eartags recorded in a central data base.
And while we were cautioning producers about the link between RFID eartags and the GRSB, another global initiative raised its head. This new one was called ESG and it stands for environmental, social, and governance standards that world banks are using to decide which global corporations will receive loans and which will not.
What was apparent at the outset was that the road to continual improvement under the GRSB was simply the precursor to the ESG initiative as the standards imposed by each are essentially the same. In other words, the ESG standards are incorporated in GRSBs path to continual improvement.
Now all of this was sounding like some wild-eyed conspiracy theory until the governments of the Netherlands and Ireland each made the leap from reporting to measuring to controlling. You see their measurements led them to conclude that they must depopulate their respective livestock herds to meet their ESG goals and that caused the livestock farmers over there to begin protesting en masse.
But in America, what was going on across the pond was out of sight and out of mind until our own government, through the Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC announced it was going to require publicly traded corporations to not only report and measure their own compliance to these arbitrary environmental, social, and governance standards; but also, it was going to require those corporations to report and measure the compliance of their suppliers.
In other words, the corporate packers would be obligated to report and measure where each livestock producer was stationed along the path of continual improvement.
Of course, the danger here is that when the SEC mandates reporting by the packers, it tacitly authorizes those packers to impose requirements on individual livestock producers. So, you can see how all of this threatens the freedom and liberty that ranchers currently have to decide on their own how they will run their ranches.
But all of this still sounded far-fetched to independent American ranchers whose daily routines were focused on caring for their livestock and land; and not on the unfolding plans of the global elitists in their pin-striped suits who want to dictate how ranchers ranch.
In August, we helped shine a light on all this by inviting a journalist and internationally renowned political commentator from the Netherlands to keynote our annual convention to describe the level of control that Dutch livestock producers were being subjected to by their Dutch government and by global corporations.
The operative word here is “helped.” We certainly did not reach every American livestock producer with this message.
But they’re all about to be reached now!
You see, Journalist Jim Mundorf of Lonesome Lands recently disclosed that the U.S. Department of Agriculture or USDA is giving billions of dollars away to large agricultural corporations, associations, and universities to help it, as he puts it, “manipulate farmers and ranchers into calculating their greenhouse gas emissions, . . . so that those emissions can then be regulated.”
Jim points out that the USDA paid $40 million dollars to the largest agricultural media corporation, Farm Journal, and he asked the obvious question: “Why would the government pay a media company $40 million to implement an environmental program?”
And then he answered his own question: “Control the messenger, control the message, aka state run media.”
And so it is that our government is billions of dollars deep in coercing American livestock producers through the agricultural media and through the marketing system to jump on the path of continual improvement so it can begin telling ranchers how to ranch.
Just know that the recipients of those billions of dollars will try to convince every American rancher that “All Is Calm, All Is Bright,” but don’t believe that for a second. Stand up for your freedom, liberty, and independence by telling your members of Congress that the government must stop infringing on the ranchers’ right to ranch.
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R-CALF USA’s weekly opinion/commentary educates and informs both consumers and producers about timely issues important to the U.S. cattle and sheep industries and rural America.
Ranchers Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America (R-CALF USA) is the largest producer-only trade association in the United States. It is a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring the continued profitability and viability of the U.S. cattle and sheep industries. For more information visit www.r-calfusa.com or call (406) 252-2516.
