The agricultural commissioners of 10 red states just let themselves become pawns in an attack helmed by a far-right astroturf group.
Commissioners from Iowa, West Virginia, Florida, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Carolina sent a letter to the Trump administration and GOP lawmakers on Tuesday demanding an end to federal funding for United Nations organizations that have adopted “net-zero” climate policies, which aim to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Giving even just a sliver of federal funding to those groups, according to Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, “will have devastating effects on American consumers, farmers, and ranchers, and further endanger food security for the poor in America.”
Consumers’ Research is a sort of all-purpose group that’s available to pursue whatever crank thing conservatives are currently obsessing over. It was just on the losing end of a Supreme Court case where it sought to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s requirement for telecommunications providers to contribute to a universal service fund in rural areas.
During the Biden administration, Consumers’ Research sent crank letters to Congress demanding the end of Environmental, Social, and Governance efforts and regulations on farmers. So it’s not surprising that it’s behind this pick-me attempt to get President Donald Trump’s attention, whining about the minuscule amounts of money spent on global commitments.
The groups being targeted are the United Nations International Maritime Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
The state agricultural commissioners are mad about the IMO’s recent decision to set emissions pricing rates for global shipping, making ships pay to offset emissions above a certain threshold. That may lead to higher shipping charges for U.S. ships, which Trump is probably retrofitting to run on coal these days, but it isn’t clear how that would hurt farmers.
Additionally, withdrawing funding from the IMO, which costs approximately $1.7 billion annually, would likely result in losing membership, which the United States has had since 1950. As the U.S. Coast Guard puts it, the IMO is a “comprehensive regulatory framework for worldwide shipping” and provides hundreds of recommendations and international conventions on safety, legal issues, security, efficiency, and more. Those seem like things we might want to know.
Now why are the commissioners mad at FAO? Well, because it called for reduced beef consumption, and that could hurt farmers. But the FAO isn’t calling for a decrease in meat consumption just because it’s run by a bunch of commies lying about climate change. It’s because, globally, 40% of crops are for animal feed, which means that they aren’t available to feed people, creating more global food insecurity.
More so, this anger at FAO is misplaced because the Trump administration already froze funding for it back in March, which has already led to projects and staff being cut.
There are, of course, actual things that these red-state agricultural commissioners should be worried about—like crops rotting because so many farms rely on undocumented workers who are being deported, or the Department of Agriculture yanking grants that allowed small farmers to stock local food banks and schools.
Perhaps these commissioners should worry more about the actual farmers in their states than this ridiculous effort to get Trump’s attention.
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