Seeds of Destruction: The Geopolitics of GM Food

by William Engdahl

In June 2003, President George W. Bush made the issue of lifting an
8-year European Union ban on genetically modified (GM) plants a matter
of US national strategic priority. This came only days after the US
occupation of Baghdad. The timing was not accidental. Since that time,
EU resistance to GM plants has crumbled, as has that of Brazil, and
other key agriculture producing nations. One year before, the future of
GM crops was in doubt.

Now, some months and enormous pressure later, the strategists of GM
food hegemony are on the verge of a control over the global human and
animal food chain never held by any single nation or power.

The present debate over the nature of biotechnology and genetic
modification of basic food such as maize or soybeans, misses the most
essential point. The conversion of world agriculture by a small elite of
biotech companies, most US-based, has little to do with corporate greed.
It has very much to do with geopolitics and plans of some people to
control world population growth over the coming decades.

The nature of American power projection in the world today rests on
the development of key strategic advantages which no other combination
of nations can challenge, what the Pentagon planners term, "full
spectrum dominance." This includes global military dominance. It
includes dominance of the world's limited, and rapidly depleting
petroleum supplies. It includes control of the world's reserve currency,
the dollar. And today it most definitely includes future control of
world agriculture through control of GM patents and GM crops.

Before the end of the decade, if present trends continue, US global
dominance will be based on control of the food supply of most of this
planet, far more than military or even energy control. The geopolitical
dimension of this prospect bears careful examination.

A Rockefeller Trojan horse

The agency at the center of the GM controversy is the Rockefeller
Foundation in New York. Over the past decade, this influential private
foundation has spent more than $­­100 million in sponsoring research and
development of GM crops to be deployed in world food production. They
have specifically targeted key developing nations in their effort.

Their public statements suggest noble motives: "The Rockefeller
Foundation is a global foundation with a mandate and a commitment to
enrich and sustain the lives of the poor and excluded throughout the
world," said foundation president, Gordon Conway, in a 1999 speech to
the Monsanto Company, the world's largest producer of GM seeds and
pesticides. Conway cites as justification for the GM revolution in
agriculture the projections of an added 2 billion people in the world by
2020, amid a decline in existing agriculture yields, and increased
degradation of soils and ecology. All indications suggest this is not
the real reason GM plants are being promoted with a fervor.

Over the past 18 years, the Rockefeller Foundation has played a
decisive role worldwide in spreading the acceptance of radical practices
of genetic modification to countries and laboratories where a direct US
Government research program would be greeted with greatest suspicion.
The Rockefeller Foundation is, in effect, the Trojan Horse of GM
proliferation.

It has gained entry in key countries in part by selecting key
scientists from select developing countries to be educated and trained
in the US or other industrial countries under foundation programs and
auspices. It has done this by funding GM research and by using its
influence in government and other agencies and NGO's. To date more than
400 leading scientists from the Philippines to Thailand to Kenya to
China have been trained and cultivated by the foundation.

The Rockefeller Foundation has a murky past, since its creation in
1914 out of the Rockefeller family Standard Oil Trust fortune. Well
before 1945, the foundation had been a leading funder of eugenics
research, work made infamous by the Nazi race purity experiments. This
included Rockefeller support to the American Eugenics Society and the
Population Council. As the race breeding policies of the German Third
Reich came to light after the war, Rockefeller strategists shifted
profile to champion the causes of environment, resource scarcity and
over-population. The policy remained one of global population reduction.
(1).

Kissinger and NSSM 200

Since more than a quarter century, Rockefeller Foundation energy has
been focused on biotechnology and genetic engineering research and
promotion. This comes after decades of involvement in various population
control schemes for the developing world. There is no contradiction.

In 1972 President Nixon named foundation board member, John D.
Rockefeller III, to chair a Presidential Commission on "Population and
the American Future." The same Rockefeller created the Population
Council in 1952, and openly called for "zero population growth."

Rockefeller's Commission on Population and the American Future laid
the foundation for Henry Kissinger's National Security memorandum, NSSM
200, of April 1974, which cited population growth in strategic, raw
materials rich developing countries as a US national security concern of
the highest priority.

During the 1970's, when Kissinger was National Security Council
director as well as Secretary of State, food and oil emerged as
strategic US national security commodities. Kissinger initiated the
controversial "oil-for-food" strategy in which a food-deficient USSR
imported vast sums of US grain and paid it with large export of Soviet
oil for dollars. US domestic oil production, outside Alaska, had peaked
in 1970 and began a steady decline. The US was becoming increasingly an
oil import nation. National security became tied to security of cheap
imported oil, and food was a weapon in the US security arsenal from that
time on. Kissinger's Cabinet colleague, Agriculture Secretary, Earl Butz,
reflected the Kissinger policy when he stated, "Hungry men listen only
to those who have a piece of bread. Food is a tool. It is a weapon in
the US negotiating kit." Kissinger was then chief negotiator.

In 1974, Kissinger submitted the NSSM 200 memorandum to President
Nixon, naming population growth in key raw-materials rich developing
countries as, a US "national security threat." Since that time, control
of economic growth rates and population growth in key developing
countries has been US national security priority.

Kissinger owed his political career since the late 1950's to his
stint as a researcher for the Rockefeller family, and owed his rise to
power to their backing. The Rockefeller family had been at the center of
US oil and raw materials geopolitics since early in the 1900's, when the
Standard Oil Trust was built. Kissinger was well aware of the importance
of food and energy to US national interests.

With Kissinger's NSSM 200, Washington official policy was to impose
restrictions on fast-growing developing countries, policies which would
significantly cut population growth. In NSSM 200, Kissinger implied that
famine might be an effective way to reduce population: "…large-scale
famine of a kind not experienced for several decades - a kind the world
thought had been permanently banished," was foreseeable, he wrote. He
remarked that the US and other donor countries would not be likely to
provide necessary food export to the afflicted regions.

In 1975, Kissinger's successor as National Security Advisor, Brent
Scowcroft, later a Kissinger business partner, wrote, "United States
leadership is essential to combat population growth, to implement the
World Population Plan of Action and to advance United States security
and overseas interests. The President endorses…NSSM 200…," Scowcroft
added.

Kissinger's NSSM 200 document, classified secret and not made public
until 1989, took estimates of world population growth to the end of the
century and beyond, and the impact on the need for food and raw
materials, notably energy. "Growing populations will have a serious
impact on the need for food especially in the poorest, fastest growing
LDC's," Kissinger stated. "World needs for food rise by 2.5% or more a
year at a time when readily available fertilizer and well-watered land
is already largely being utilized. Therefore, additions to food
production must come from higher yields," the Government memo declared.
It was at this time that the Rockefeller Foundation also began large
research in genetic engineering of plants, including rice, ostensibly to
raise yields.

With NSSM 200, Washington made implementation of population control
programs a pre-condition for US financial aid, even famine relief.
Washington ensured that birth reduction was adopted as official policy
by the IMF, World Bank and the UN. Beginning the mid-1970's all IMF and
World Bank aid to developing target countries was tied to their
willingness to accept population control policies dictated by
Washington.

NSSM 200 explicitly listed 13 countries as "key countries" in which
the US held a "special political and strategic interest." These were:
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand, Nigeria, Philippines,
Turkey, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. Their population
growth was deemed especially worrisome to US national interests,
according to Kissinger. Notably, every key country has been subjected to
major social, economic and military upheaval since 1974. US food aid,
even in famine, was withheld from countries refusing to adopt
US-mandated birth control or population reduction policies. (2).

NSSM 200 continues as unofficial US Government policy to the present
day, despite public Bush Administration concessions to Catholic Right to
Life groups. In this, the role of the Rockefeller Foundation is central
to Washington policy regarding genetic engineering in world agriculture,
especially that in key developing nations in Asia, Africa and Latin
America.

Rockefeller's GM proliferation network

In 1971 the Rockefeller Foundation, together with the Ford Foundation
and the World Bank, established the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which runs 16 research centers around the
world, most in developing countries, spending some $­­350 million annually.
The focus of CGIAR is the spread of GM crops in the developing world.

CGIAR today operates under the umbrella of the World Bank, and has
drawn 20 developing countries in as sponsors. World Bank aid is
administered on the basis of a recipient agreeing to impose population
control policies, the present form of NSSM 200, but with Washington
officially in the background. Thus, the Rockefeller Foundation, World
Bank, Monsanto and other agri-giants and the US Government, all meet
under CGIAR auspices.

The CGIAR mission is to promote "sustainable agriculture for food
security." To do this, CGIAR has used its funds and government influence
to take control of one of the world's largest collections of plant
genetic resources. CGIAR then makes the materials available to companies
like Monsanto and Syngenta, "so that new gene combinations can be used
to increase productivity, sustainably," as they state. In turn, CGIAR
mobilizes biotechnology proliferation in developing countries. CGIAR
trains the most promising national scientists and researchers in
biotechnology, insuring that cadre of pro-GM national researchers will
promote the spread of GM agriculture and biotechnology back home.

In addition to its role in establishing CGIAR, the Rockefeller
Foundation has been a major donor to the International Service for the
Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications or ISAAA.

Every US President since George H.W. Bush in 1992, has made support
of genetically engineered crops a matter of highest national priority.
The example of US-AID backing for the Rockefeller Foundation's ISAAA is
exemplary.

The ISAAA was originally founded with Rockefeller Brothers' Fund
money for the sole purpose to "facilitate the delivery of proprietary
biotechnologies from the corporate labs of the industrialized world into
the food and farming systems of the South."

How this works becomes clear when the current financial sponsors of
the ISAAA are known. In addition to the Rockefeller Foundation, sponsors
include Monsanto (USA), Syngenta (Swiss), Dow AgroSciences (USA),
Pioneer Hi-Bred (USA), Cargill (USA), Bayer CropScience (Germany), and a
mysterious "Anonymous Donor "(USA), and US-AID of the State Department.

The argument of the institutions behind ISAAA is that the developing
world is where a rising population makes growing food demand most acute,
but where economic resources are least able to meet the needs. Hence,
ISAAA enables the introduction of corporate GM technologies and crops
from the industrial world into the South, acting as "honest brokers" in
their words.

As the Kissinger NSSM 200 targeted 13 developing countries in 1974
for population reduction, the ISAAA targets 12 countries for
introduction of GM crops. Six of these countries are the same as
Kissinger listed in 1974: Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines,
Thailand and Egypt. In addition, ISAAA lists Malaysia, Vietnam, Kenya,
Zimbabwe, Argentina and Costa Rica.

By their own admission, the ISAAA launches propaganda offensives to
counter hostility to GM crops, and they train science elites from the
target countries, often bringing them to USA or other leading GM
research centers such as the Monsanto Life Sciences Research Center, to
learn the world of GM elite research. Randy Hautea is head of the
group's SEAsia Center in the Philippines, based in the center
established by the Rockefeller Foundation's International Rice Research
Institute (IRRI).

Hautea recently stated that his group has targeted Indonesia,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam because, "they all have
the political will to pursue and adopt biotechnology applications." What
Hautea did not say was that introduction of GM seeds means introduction
of costly GM pesticides and other policies which only global
agribusiness companies are able to carry out.

Food production of target countries is being transformed into the
global agribusiness market, not longer available for national food
security. Hautea does not say how biotechnology brought in to, say,
Indonesia or Malaysia by Syngenta or Monsanto, contributes to the
benefit of small farmers, the heart of their food production. To date,
in fact, there exists no proof of any benefit from GM crops for family
farmers. In fact the opposite is the case. Farmers are often coerced or
forced to buy Monsanto GM seeds or other GM seeds by their governments.

Through ISAAA and related networks of organizations, the Rockefeller
Foundation is at the center of the worldwide actions of Monsanto,
DuPont, Cargill and Dow Agri-sciences, Syngenta, Bayer AG and other
major biotech giants, dominating the ongoing "new Green Revolution" as
Rockefeller's Conway terms it. (3).

Spreading the GM control

The list of major GM plants today includes GM rice, soybeans, corn,
oilseeds, and numerous other basic food crops. The Rockefeller
Foundation has played a key fostering role in the development of most
major new types.

More than 70% of all processed foods Americans consume comes today
from GM products. Almost all the animal feed used to feed cattle, and
other animals in the US and in major world markets today is GM feed,
mainly soymeal and corn.

Most Americans are ignorant of what they eat. The US government has
refused to label food that contains GM inputs. A new EU food labelling
law also does not require producers to identify animal products fed on
GM feed, leaving consumers ignorant of what GM products they eat. In
2003, the total acreage planted to GM seeds worldwide was 167 million
acres or 68 million hectares according to ISAAA data. This was a 15%
rise in one year. The United States is the largest GM grower with 106
million acres of genetically modified soybeans, corn and cotton.
Worldwide, 55% of all soybeans grown now are GM crops. Soymeal is one of
the most essential and richest protein sources for animal and human
consumption. Every bite of a McDonald's hamburger contains as much as
30% of GM soyameal.

Without even realizing, most people in North America, East Asia and
Europe regularly eat products or animals fed from GM crops. What is most
remarkable is the fact that farmers in North America, Australia,
Argentina, and more recently after a long battle, in Brazil, have
surrendered their control over seeds to a handful of multinational
biotech giants who have a deliberate strategy to dominate and control
the planting of basic food crops worldwide.

The terminator not dead

If emerging nations from China to India to Indonesia and beyond, were
to manage to create a food self-sufficiency independent of reliance on
US or OECD food suppliers, the ability of the United States to remain
the dominant power would diminish, regardless of military might.

What better way to control the destiny of China, India, East Asia and
the rest of the world than to establish permanent control over their
ability to grow food? Enter Monsanto and the agriculture biotechnology
cartel, who dominate GM crops globally. Just two years ago it seemed
Monsanto might be headed into financial ruin. Today, it is on the verge
of becoming the one of the single most powerful corporations in the
world.

Interestingly, it was the direct intervention of the Rockefeller
Foundation in October 1999, which was responsible for the widely-touted
decision of Monsanto "not to commercialize" its 'terminator technology'
for GM seeds. Monsanto president Robert Shapiro wrote to the Rockefeller
Foundation that it would "shelve" or put on hold its "sterile seed"
technology, formally called Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT).
The Monsanto decision was a tactical ploy, taken on advice of
Rockefeller's Conway, to defulse growing opposition to GM crops,
especially in Europe. Monsanto's terminator seed technology, in which
the US Department of Agriculture also holds part patent rights, has been
called the ultimate weapon, the 'neutron bomb' of agriculture, rightly
so.

Terminator seeds would solve a major problem for Monsanto and other
GM giants in collecting seed fees in the developing world for patented
GM seeds, something made possible a few years ago by GATT trade talks on
patent rights.

Free trade in agriculture is today at the heart of the WTO. Under the
treaty of the World Trade Organization, created by the GATT Uruguay
trade round in the early 1990's, multinational corporations now have the
right, enforced by WTO sanctions, to collect royalty payments for "intellectual
property."

The Uruguay agreement, ratified by all GATT member countries under
enormous US pressure, allows a corporation for the first time, to patent
a specific plant variety, even though that plant sort might have been in
the public domain in a country such as Pakistan or Peru for thousands of
years. The WTO term is Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights, TRIPs. Washington pushed the controversial TRIPs agreement
through GATT, accusing developing countries of 'piracy' in not paying
due royalties to multinationals, claiming US companies were losing
hundreds on millions in unpaid fees for fertilizer and seeds or drugs.
Mickey Kantor, US Trade Representative who negotiated the Uruguay Round
talks, today sits on the board of Monsanto.

The TRIPs WTO agreement includes patent rights on GM plants. Under
TRIPs the Swiss agri-tech company, Syngenta, holds control potentially
of most of the rice in Pakistan, India and Asia. Monsanto dominates
patents on soybeans, corn, cotton and other major crops. Their only
problem is how to collect royalty payments from millions of small
peasant farmers. Collecting patent payments for GM seeds in many
developing countries is extremely difficult.

Not so, if terminator seeds are sold. Terminator technology, which
Monsanto paid $­­1.6 billion to acquire, allows introduction of a 'suicide
gene' into plants such as corn or cotton or soya or potentially, even
wheat. A farmer using terminator seeds no longer will be able to share
seeds with other farmers or plant his own in following years. He will be
forced to turn to Monsanto each season to buy his existence, in the form
of more suicide seeds, as well as the special herbicides Monsanto has
developed to be used with it. The original developers of terminator
technology, Delta & Pine Land Seed, which Monsanto bought in 1998,
specifically noted that the rice and wheat markets of China, India,
Pakistan and such major population countries was the target of
terminator. The political implications of such a development are easy to
imagine.

Rockefeller Foundation funds vaccines with hidden birth-control hormones The Rockefeller Foundation is among the funders of a WHO program in "reproductive health" which has developed a tetanus vaccine that allegedly contains hidden birth-control hormones. According to a report from the Global Vaccine Institute, the WHO has overseen massive vaccination campaigns against tetanus in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines since the early 1990's. Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Catholic organization, tested numerous vials of the vaccine and found them to contain human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG), a natural hormone needed to maintain a pregnancy. When combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier, it stimulates formation of antibodies against hCG, rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. Similar reports of vaccines laced with hCG hormones have come from the Philippines and Nicaragua. The organization confirmed several other curious facts about the WHO vaccination programs. Tetanus vaccine was given only to women, between ages 15-45, not men or children. The presence of hCG is a clear contamination of the vaccine. It does not belong. With financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, the Population Council, Ford Foundation, among others, the WHO has been working for 20 years to develop an anti-fertility vaccine using hCG with tetanus and other vaccines, according to scientific articles published on the effort by WHO. This has been documented by WHO and others, including the respected British medical journal, The Lancet, June 11, 1988, "Clinical Trials of a WHO Borth Control Vaccine." To mid-1993 the WHO had spent a total of $­­365 million of such research funds on "reproductive health" including research on implanting hCG into tetanus vaccine. WHO has been unable to answer why women vaccinated were found with anti-hCG antibodies. They feebly replied it was "insignificant." The vaccine was produced by Connaught Laboratories Ltd of Canada and Intervex and CSL Laboratories of Australia. Since the 1920's the Rockefeller Foundation has been among the leading sponsors of population reduction programs worldwide. If the reports of birth control vaccines are true, it is not difficult to suspect the Rockefeller Foundation is also among those planning to use genetically modified seeds technology as a potential means to control world population growth through future control of food supply.

The Rockefeller-Monsanto public relations maneuver "not to
commercialize" terminator seeds was clearly designed to defuse growing
opposition to proliferation of GM seeds, to buy time while allowing them
to spread GM crops to the world's largest growing areas - North America,
Argentina, Brazil and now, the EU. Once spread, it is simple to shift to
terminator.

In February 2003, at a meeting of the International Seed Federation
in Lyon France, Monsanto's Roger Krueger released a paper titled, "The
Benefits of GURTs." It argued that terminator in fact would benefit poor
farmers. Monsanto argues in a new ploy, that terminator would in fact
hinder spread of unwanted GM genes to non-GM plants, promoting the same
idea in new clothes as a "biosafety" tool. Clearly they believe
opposition to terminator and GM is falling. Reports are that Monsanto
would be ready to introduce commercial terminator or GURT seeds in 3-4
years.

Dual use and GM crops: Biowarfare?

The days are long past when the USDA represented the interests of
America's family farmers. Today, US agri-business, dominated by a dozen
or more giant international concerns, is the second most profitable
industry next to pharmaceuticals, and has annual value of well over $­­800
billion. The USDA today is the organized lobby of agri-business giants,
none more influential than Monsanto. Bush Administration official, Ann
Veneman, USDA Secretary, is a former board member of a Monsanto company
and, not surprisingly, a strong advocate of GM. Several other Bush
officials have ties to Monsanto as well.

Terminator and related GM technologies in the hands of Monsanto and
less than half-a-dozen corporations worldwide, backed by the USDA,
Defense Department and State Department, could open the door to
potential forms of biological warfare against entire populations not
imagined before. A recent US Air Force study states that "biological
weapons offer greater possibilities for use than do nuclear weapons."

Washington US-AID food assistance for Africa in recent months has
been linked to willingness of a country to accept US GM crops. US
assistance to combat AIDS in Africa has similar strings. GM has clearly
become a strategic, geopolitical tool for Washington.

Defenders of GM technology argue that no one in their right mind
would consider such a drastic use of GM crops as to control entire areas
of world food supply. "We're tempted to say that nobody in their right
mind would ever use these things." Stanford biology professor Steven
Block stated in another context. Block hastened to add, "But not
everybody is in their right mind!" Block, a leading consultant to the US
Government, went on to warn, "Any technology that can be used to insert
genes into DNA can be used for either good or bad." Genetic engineering
can create rice with enhanced vitamin A, but can just as well create
seeds containing highly toxic bacteria. US researchers first did this in
1986. Genetic engineering of more toxic and harder to detect bioweapons
was a major motivation for nations to call for a stronger convention on
bioweapons.

The US Government's controversial drug eradication program in
Colombia, since discontinued, would spray crops with deadly glyphosate.
Glyphosate, under the patent name, Roundup, is the GM herbicide sold by
Monsanto also for its GM plants. The Bush Administration has repeatedly
refused to back a legally binding Biological and Toxin Weapons
Convention, arguing it needs the freedom to develop defense against
biowarfare. Freedom can work both ways however.

Genetic manipulation opens the possibilities in the hands of a
malevolent power, to unleash untold harm on the human species. Even were
it to be the case that GM plants increase yields, which is not at all
proven, this potential for control of the food supply of entire nations
is too much power to give to any single corporation or government.
Essential foods, like fresh water, are no ordinary commodities to be
sold under rules of an imposed free market. They are basic human rights
as the right to breathe. We should not tempt any government with the
power that present GM strategists advocate over our food security.

1. B.K. Eakman, "The Cloning of the American Mind," gives information
on Rockefeller Foundation funding of eugenics. www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2412/eugenic

s. Jim Heron, "Population Politics and the Shambles of Africa in
catholiceducation.org/articles.

2. National Security Strategy Memorandum, NSSM 200, "Implications of
Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests,"
National Security Council, April 24, 1974, Henry Kissinger, director,
National Security Council. "The Over-population cabal" in Mindszenty
Report, Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, April 1999,

www.mindszenty.org.report/1999/April1999.html. 

3. "ISAAA in Asia promoting corporate profits in the name of the poor,"
October 2000, in

www.grain.org/publications/reports/isaaa.html .

4. The Monsanto terminator seed plans are described in "Monsanto
Breaks Promise to Abandon Terminator Technology," April 23, 2003,

www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/promise042403 . "Biological
warfare against crops," by Simon Whitby, reviewed in

www.rainbowbody.net/Ongwhehonwhe/plantwar.htm  notes the US use
of Roundup against crops in Colombia. "Biological warfare emerges as
21st Century threat," by Mark Schwartz in Stanford Report, January 11,
2001, details the warnings of Block, a member of the top-secret
Government research group, Jason. The US Air Force has published on the
subject, "Biological Weapons for Waging Economic Warfare," by Lt. Col.
Robert Kadlec who speaks of "using biological warfare to attack
livestock, crops or ecosystems." In

www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/battle/chp10.html. 
also
www.sunshine-project.org/bwintro/gebw.html. 

Date de création : 14/02/2005 : 09:04
Dernière modification : 08/12/2006 : 23:21
Catégorie : USA

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