Georgia agricultural commissioner warns ESG policies will 'destroy American agriculture'

Georgia Agricultural Commissioner Tyler Harper on Friday warned that environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) policies threaten to harm national security by impacting the nation's food production.

"Agriculture is national security and protection of our ag industry, putting food on our tables, clothes on our back, shelter over our heads, are an important part of allowing our nation to be successful. A nation that can't feed itself can't sustain itself," he said on the "Just the News, No Noise" television show.

Earlier in the week, Harper and a coalition of 11 other state agriculture officials wrote to the heads of Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo, demanding they account for their participation in a climate bloc and provide documents about any policies they enacted that could impact the agricultural sector.

"[T]hese type of policies will be detrimental and destroy American agriculture and the fact that these banks have signed on to agree to implementing these policies in their financial decisions," Harper said on the program. "And targeting agriculture is concerning. And Americans should be concerned that these type of woke policies ... will have detrimental impacts on American agriculture, which in turn will impact the American economy as a whole."

The Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) is a UN-backed voluntary bloc of financial institutions committed to using their influence to push for climate policies.

"[I]t's backed up by the far left, it's backed by President Joe Biden and his team and, and in those efforts, they find ways outside of government when they can't get what they want through Congress," he said. "They'll find another way to do it."

"And I think this is a perfect example of that, where we have global elitists who are trying to make decisions and ... run our nation or run our economy by implementing policies that can drive up food cost, you know, implementing those things that to force farmers to, to go to electric tractors, to force farmers to ... not utilize commercial fertilizers that make sense in production," he continued. "And we've seen these policies implemented and other other countries around the world in Sri Lanka alone, we saw food costs skyrocket by 95%. We saw 50% of families not have food on their table when they implemented these policies in their country."

"You know, we're seeing protests in France and Germany and the Netherlands in the E.U. right now, because farmers are standing up against policies that are similar to the ones that these banks have signed on into the NCBA that they know, those farmers know will destroy their livelihood," Harper asserted. "And in America, 98% of farms in our country are family-owned operations. And those operations are vital to our economy. And these families won't be able to survive if these policies are implemented, and American agriculture will suffer, which will cause our American economy and our national security to suffer as a result."

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter.