The UN still hasn’t come clean about the extent of bribery in its own purchasing of peacekeeping rations — but now the UN wants to mess with your meals. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization is floating proposals to “certify” fish and seafood farming products worldwide, to ensure that all seafood farmed in captivity is produced in a “sustainable, healthy, socially responsible and environmentally-friendly way.” That all sounds great, except the assumption here is that one central UN authority is going to decide just what that means in practice.

In the information age, this is exactly the kind of thing that individual countries and the global marketplace ought to be able to sort out much more efficiently — and with a lot more integrity — than the secretive, unaccountable and exploitation-prone UN globocracy. But that would not produce nearly as many jobs, per-diem conference fees and projects for the UN. So what we have right now is the FAO’s Lahsen Ababouch declaring, according to an FAO press release, that the private sector, and the decisions of sovereign states are not to be trusted, that “as certification schemes proliferate, consumers and producers face choices as to which to trust. Competing schemes could confuse consumers, causing them to loose (sic) confidence in standards and undermine the entire approach.”

Translation:

Choice for consumers? No way, the UN doesn’t want that.

Competition? Uh-uh, the UN doesn’t like that either.

Bottom line: On your dime, Mr. Ababouch and his colleagues are busy right now looking for ways they can tell you from whom you can buy your dinner, and force you to pay — in the form of higher prices, fewer choices, and of course more UN salaries — what would be, in effect, a UN fish tax.