|
by
Stephen Lendman
Nexus Magazine
February-March 2008 and April-May
2008
from
NexusMagazine Website
Spanish version
|
F. William (Bill)
Engdahl is a leading researcher, economist and
analyst of the New World Order who has written on issues
of energy, politics and economics for over 30 years. He
is also a frequent speaker at international conferences
and is a distinguished research associate of the Centre
for Research on Globalization, where he's a regular
contributor.
He is author of A
Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New
World Order (Pluto Press, 2004) and Seeds of
Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation,
which is the subject of this review article.
- Stephen Lendman |
Part 1
Nexus Magazine
February-March 2008
With Rockefeller family
funding,
the Green Revolution
laid the groundwork for the Gene
Revolution,
allowing a handful of
Anglo-American agribusiness giants
to gain worldwide control
of the
food supply.
Genetically
Engineered Foods - An Experiment on the Masses
In 2003, Jeffrey Smith's
Seeds of Deception was published. It exposes the dangers of untested
and unregulated genetically engineered or modified (GE/GM) foods
that most people in the USA eat every day with no knowledge of the
potential health risks. Efforts to inform the public have been
quashed, and reliable science has been buried.
Consider what happened to the world's leading lectins and plant
genetic modification expert, UK-based
Arpád Pusztai.
He was
vilified and fired from his research position at Scotland's
Rowett Research Institute for publishing industry-unfriendly
data that he was commissioned to produce on the safety of GM foods.
His Rowett Research study was the first ever independent one
conducted on them anywhere. He undertook it, believing in their
promise, but became alarmed by his findings.
His results were startling and have
implications for humans eating genetically engineered/modified
foods.
Pusztai found that rats fed GM potatoes had smaller livers,
hearts, testicles and brains, as well as damaged immune systems;
they showed structural changes in their white blood cells, making
them more vulnerable to infection and disease compared to other rats
fed non-GM potatoes. It got worse. Thymus and spleen
damage showed up, as did enlarged tissues, including the pancreas
and intestines.
There were cases of liver atrophy as well as
significant proliferation of stomach and intestinal cells that could
be a sign of greater future risk of cancer. Equally alarming was
that all this happened after only 10 days of testing, and the
changes persisted after 110 days - that's the human equivalent of 10
years.
GM foods today saturate our diet, particularly in the USA.
Over 80 per cent of all processed foods sold in supermarkets contain
them. Other GM foods include grains like rice, corn and wheat;
legumes like soybeans (and a range of soy products); vegetable oils;
soft drinks; salad dressings; vegetables and fruits; dairy products
including eggs; meat and other animal products; and even infant
formula. There's also a vast array of hidden additives and
ingredients in processed foods (such as in tomato sauce, ice cream
and peanut butter).
They're unrevealed to consumers because
such labeling is prohibited - yet the more of these foods that
we eat, the greater the potential threat to our health.
Today, we're all lab rats in an uncontrolled, unregulated, mass
human experiment, the results of which are as yet unknown. The risks
from it are beyond measure, and it will take many years to discover
them. Once GM seeds are introduced to an area, the genie is out of
the bottle for keeps.
Despite the enormous risks, however, Washington and growing numbers
of governments around the world in parts of the UK, Europe, Asia,
Latin America and Africa now allow these products to be grown in
their soil or imported.
They're produced and sold to consumers
because agribusiness giants like Monsanto, DuPont,
Dow AgriSciences and Cargill have enormous clout to
demand it and a potent partner supporting them - the US
government and its agencies, including:
-
the Departments of Agriculture
and State,
-
the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA),
-
the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA)
-
and even the defense
establishment...
The World Trade Organization's (WTO's)
trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS)
patent rules also back them, along with industry-friendly WTO
rulings like the 7 February 2006 one.
The WTO favored a US challenge against European GMO (genetically
modified organisms) regulatory policies in spite of strong
consumer sentiment against these foods and ingredients on the
continent. It also violated the Biosafety Protocol that should let
nations regulate these products in the public interest - but it
doesn't because WTO trade rules sabotaged it.
Nonetheless, anti-GMO activism persists, consumers still have a say
and there are hundreds of GMO-free zones around the world, including
in the US. All this, and more, is needed to take on the agribusiness
giants that so far have everything going their way.
Washington
Launches the Gene Revolution
William F. Engdahl (Seeds
of Destruction - The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation) explains that the science of
"biological and genetic
modification of plants and other life-forms" first came out of US
research labs in the 1970s.
The Reagan administration was
determined to make America dominant in this emerging field, and the
biotech agribusiness industry was especially favored. Companies in
the early 1980s raced to develop GMO plants, livestock and GMO-based
animal drugs. Washington made it easy for them with an unregulated,
business-friendly climate that has persisted ever since under
Republicans and Democrats alike.
Leading the effort to develop GMOs is a company with a,
"long record of fraud, cover-up,
bribery deceit and disdain for the public interest:
Monsanto."
Its first product was
saccharin, which
was later proved to be a carcinogen. It then got into chemicals,
plastics and became notorious for Agent Orange that was used to
defoliate Vietnamese jungles in the 1960s and 1970s and exposed
hundreds of thousands of civilians and troops to deadly dioxin, one
of the most toxic of all known compounds.
Along with others in the industry, Monsanto is accused of being a
shameless polluter. It has a history of secretly dumping some of the
most lethal substances known into water and soil and getting away
with it.
Today on its website, however, the company ignores its
record and calls itself,
"an agricultural company [applying]
innovation and technology to help farmers around the world be
successful, produce healthier foods, better animal feeds and
more fiber, while also reducing agriculture's impact on our
environment".
Engdahl proves otherwise in his thorough
research.
In spite of its past, Monsanto and other GMO giants got unregulated
free rein in the 1980s and especially after
George H. W. Bush became
president in 1989. His administration opened "Pandora's box" so that
no "unnecessary regulations would hamper them".
Thereafter,
"not one single new regulatory law
governing biotech or GMO products was passed then or later
[despite all the] unknown risks and possible health dangers".
In a totally unfettered marketplace,
foxes now guard the henhouse because the system was made
self-regulatory.
An elder Bush executive order assured it, ruling
that GMO plants and foods are "substantially equivalent" to ordinary
ones of the same variety like corn, wheat or rice.
This established the principle of "substantial equivalence" as the "lynchpin of the whole GMO revolution". It was pseudoscientific
mumbo-jumbo but was now law, and Engdahl equates it to a
potentially biologically catastrophic "Andromeda strain" - but no
longer science fiction.
Monsanto chose milk as its first GMO product, genetically
manipulated it with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH)
and marketed it under the trade name Posilac. In 1993, the
Clinton-era FDA declared it safe and approved it for sale before any
consumer-use information was available. It's now sold in every US
state and promoted as a way that cows can produce up to 30 per cent
more milk.
Problems, however, soon appeared.
Farmers reported their stock burned out
up to two years sooner than usual, serious infections developed and
some animals couldn't walk. Other problems included the udder
inflammation mastitis as well as deformed calves being born.
The information was suppressed and rBGH milk is unlabelled, so
there's no way consumers can know. They also weren't told that
this hormone causes leukaemia and tumors in rats, and
that a European Commission committee concluded that humans
drinking rBGH milk risk breast and prostate cancers. The
European Union thus banned the product, but the US did not.
Despite clear safety issues, the FDA
failed to act and it allows hazardous milk to be sold below the
radar. It was just the beginning.
Data
Manipulation
Engdahl reviews the Pusztai affair, the toll it took
on his health, and the modest vindication he finally received.
Pusztai was already out of a job when in 1999 the 300-year-old
British Royal Society attacked him, claiming that his research
was,
"flawed in many aspects of design,
execution and analysis and that no conclusions should be drawn
from it".
This criticism had no basis in fact, and
the attack was made because Pusztai's bombshell threatened to
derail Britain's hugely profitable GMO industry and do the
same thing to its US counterpart.
As for Pusztai, after five years, several heart attacks and a ruined
career, he finally learned what had happened after he announced his
findings. Monsanto was the culprit.
The company complained to
US president Bill Clinton who, in turn, alerted the British
prime minister Tony Blair. Pusztai's findings had to be
quashed and he had to be discredited for his discoveries. He was
nonetheless able to reply with the help of the highly respected
British scientific journal, The Lancet. In spite of Royal
Society threats against Pusztai, the editor published his article
but at a cost.
After publication, the society and the
biotech industry attacked The Lancet for its action. It was a
further shameless act. As a footnote, Pusztai now lectures around
the world on his GMO research and is a consultant to start-up groups
researching the health effects of these foods. Along with him and
his wife, his co-author, Professor Stanley Ewen, also
suffered.
He lost his position at the University
of Aberdeen, and Engdahl notes that the practice of suppressing
unwanted truths and punishing whistleblowers is the rule, not
the exception. Industry demands are powerful, especially when they
affect the bottom line.
The Blair government went even further. It commissioned the private
firm Grainseed to conduct a three-year study to prove the
safety of GMO food. London's Observer newspaper later got
hold of UK Ministry of Agriculture documents which showed that the
tests were rigged and produced "some strange science". At least one
Grainseed researcher manipulated the data to "make certain seeds in
the trials appear to perform better than they really did".
Nonetheless, the Ministry recommended a GMO corn variety be
certified, and the Blair government issued a new code of conduct
under which,
"any employee of a state-funded
research institute who dared to speak out on findings into GMO
plants could face dismissal, be sued for breach of contract or
face a court injunction".
In other words, whistleblowing was
now illegal, even if public health was at stake.
Nothing would be allowed to stop the
agribusiness juggernaut from proceeding unimpeded.
The
Rockefeller Plan for Agribusiness
In the Cold War era, food became a strategic weapon by masquerading
as "Food for Peace". It was a cover for US agricultural interests to
engineer the transformation of family farming into global
agribusiness, with food the tool and small farmers eliminated so
their land could be used most effectively.
Domination of world agriculture was to
be,
"one of the central pillars of
post-war Washington policy, along with [controlling] world oil
markets and non-communist world defense sales".
The defining 1973 event was a world food
crisis.
The shortage of grain staples, along with the first of two 1970s oil
shocks, advanced a "significant new Washington policy turn". Oil and
grains were rising threefold to fourfold in price at a time when the
US was the world's largest food surplus producer with the most power
over prices and supply. It was an ideal time for a new alliance
between US-based grain-trading companies and the government.
It "laid the groundwork for the later
gene revolution".
Enter what Engdahl calls the "great train robbery", with
Henry Kissinger the culprit. He decided that US agriculture
policy was "too important to be left in the hands of the Agriculture
Department", so he took control of it himself.
Readers will know the type of future
that Kissinger had in mind when he said in 1970:
"Control oil and you control
nations; control food and you control the people".
The world desperately needed grain,
America had the greatest supply, and the scheme was to use this
power to "radically change world food markets and food trade". The
big winners were grain traders like Cargill, Archer
Daniels Midland (ADM) and Continental Grain; they were
helped by Kissinger's "new food diplomacy [to create] a global
agriculture market for the first time".
Food would "reward friends and punish
enemies", and ties bet w e e n Washington and business lay at the
heart of the strategy.
The global food market was being reorganized, corporate interests
were favored, political advantage was exploited and the groundwork
was laid for the 1990s "gene revolution".
Rockefeller interests,
including the Rockefeller Foundation, were to play the
decisive role as events unfolded over the next two decades.
This reorganization began under
President Richard Nixon as the cornerstone of his farm policy; free
trade was the mantra, corporate grain traders were the
beneficiaries, and family farms had to go so that agribusiness
giants could take over. Bankrupting family farms was the plan to
remove an "excess [of] human resources".
Engdahl calls it a "thinly veiled form
of food imperialism" as part of a scheme for the US to become "the
world granary". The family farm was to become the "factory farm" and
agriculture was to become "agribusiness", dominated by a few
corporate giants with incestuous ties to Washington.
Dollar devaluation was also part of the scheme under Nixon's New
Economic Plan (NEP), which included closing the gold window in
1971 to let the currency float freely.
Developing nations were
targeted as well with the idea that they forget about being
food-self-sufficient in grains and beef, rely on America for key
commodities and concentrate instead on small fruits, sugar and
vegetables for export. Earned foreign exchange could then buy US
imports and repay
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
and
World Bank loans that create a
never-ending cycle of debt slavery.
The General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT) was also used, as was later the WTO with
rules written by corporations to suit their own bottom-line
interests.
Drastic
Population Reduction
In the midst of a worldwide drought and a stock-market collapse,
consider Kissinger's April 1974 classified memo.
National
Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM
200) was shaped by Rockefeller interests and aimed to
adopt a "world population plan of action" for drastic global
population control, i.e.,
reduction. The US led the effort,
making birth control in developing countries a prerequisite for US
aid.
Engdahl sums it up in blunt
terms:
"if these inferior races get in the
way of our securing ample, cheap raw materials, then we must
find ways to get rid of them".
The Nazis also aimed big and sought
control.
Population culling or "eugenics" was
part of their scheme to target "inferior" races to preserve the "superior" one. Kissinger's scheme of
"simpler contraceptive methods
through bio-medical research" almost sounds like DuPont's old
slogan, "Better things for better living through chemistry".
Later on,
DuPont dropped "through chemistry"
as evidence mounted on the toxic effects of chemicals, and a
changing company in 1999 began using a new slogan, "The Miracles of
Science", in its advertising.
NSSM 200 was tied to the agribusiness agenda that began with
the 1950s and 1960s "Green Revolution" to control food production in
targeted Latin American, Asian and African countries. Kissinger's
plan had two aims: securing new US grain markets and controlling
population,
with 13 "unlucky" countries chosen
including India, Brazil, Nigeria, Mexico
and Indonesia.
Exploiting their resources depended on
instituting drastic population reductions to reduce home-grown
demand.
The scheme was ugly and was pure Kissinger. It recommended forced
population control and other measures to ensure US strategic aims.
Kissinger wanted global numbers reduced by 500 million by the year
2000 and argued for doubling the 10 million annual death rate to 20
million thereafter. Engdahl calls it "genocide", according to the
strict definition of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide statute that defines this
crime legally.
Kissinger is guilty under
it for wanting to withhold food aid to "people who can't or won't
control their population growth" - in other words, if they won't do
it, we'll do it for them.
The strategy included fertility control,
called "family planning", that was linked to the availability of key
resources. Rockefeller family members backed the plan; Kissinger was
their "hired hand" and he was well rewarded for his efforts, e.g.,
he was kept from being prosecuted where he's wanted as a war
criminal and could be arrested overseas.
Besides his better-known crimes, consider what Kissinger did to poor
Brazilian women through a policy of mass sterilization under NSSM
200. After 14 years of the program, the Brazilian Health Ministry
discovered shocking reports of an estimated 44 per cent of all
Brazilian women between ages 14 and 55 being permanently sterilized.
Organizations like the International Planned Parenthood
Federation and Family Health International were involved,
and USAID directed the program.
USAID has a long, disturbing
history of backing US imperialism, yet it claims on its website that
it extends,
"a helping hand to those people
overseas struggling to make a better life, recover[ing] from a
disaster or striving to live in a free and democratic country".
Even more disturbing is that an
estimated 90 per cent of Brazilian women of African descent were
sterilized in a nation with a black population second only to
Nigeria's. Powerful figures backed the scheme, but most influential
were the Rockefellers, with John D. III having the
most clout on population policy. In 1969, Nixon appointed him head
of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future.
The commission's earlier work laid the
ground for Kissinger's NSSM 200 and its policy of extermination
through subterfuge.
The
Brotherhood of Death
Long before Kissinger (and his assistant, Brent Scowcroft)
made population reduction official US foreign policy,
the Rockefellers were experimenting
on humans.
JD III led the effort. In the 1950s, while Nelson was
exploiting cheap Puerto Rican labour in New York and on the island,
brother JD III was conducting mass sterilization experiments on
Puerto Rican women. By the mid-1960s, Puerto Rico's Public Health
Department estimated the toll: one-third or more of unsuspecting
poor women of child-bearing age had been permanently sterilized.
JD III expressed his views in a 1961 UN Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) lecture:
"To my mind, population growth [and
its reduction] is second only to control of atomic weapons as
the paramount problem of the day".
He meant, of course, reducing unwanted
parts of the population to preserve valuable resources for the
privileged. He was also influenced by eugenicists, race theorists
and Malthusians at the Rockefeller Foundation who believed they had
the right to decide who lived or died.
Powerful figures as well as leading American business families were
behind the effort. So were notables in the UK, then and earlier,
such as Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes.
Alan Gregg, the Rockefeller Foundation Medical Division
chief for 34 years, said that,
"people pollute, so eliminate
pollution by eliminating [undesirable] people".
He compared city slums to cancerous
tumors and called them "offensive to decency and beauty". Better to
remove them and cleanse the landscape.
This was Rockefeller Foundation policy, and it is "key to
understanding [its later efforts] in the revolution in biotechnology
and plant genetics". The foundation's mission from inception was to,
"[cull] the herd, or systematically
[reduce] populations of ‘inferior breeds'".
The problem for supremacists is that too
many of a lesser element spells trouble when they demand more of
what the privileged want for themselves. Solution: remove them,
using anything from birth control and sterilization to starvation
and wars of extermination.
JD III was right in step with this thinking. He was nurtured on
Malthusian pseudoscience and embraced the dogma. In 1931 he joined
the family foundation, where
he was influenced by eugenicists like Raymond Fosdick and
Frederick Osborn, both of whom were founding members of the
American Eugenics Society.
In 1952
he used his own funds to found the New York–based Population
Council, at which he promoted openly racist studies on
overpopulation dangers. Over the next 25 years, the council spent
US$173 million on global population reduction and became the world's
most influential organization promoting these supremacist ideas.
However, it avoided the term "eugenics" because of its Nazi
association and instead used language like "birth control", "family
planning" and "free choice"; it was all the same.
Before World War II, Rockefeller associate and foundation board
member Frederick Osborn enthusiastically supported Nazi
eugenics experiments that led to mass exterminations which were
later vilified. Back then, he believed eugenics was the "most
important experiment that has ever been tried", and later he wrote a
book, The Future of Human Heredity (1968), with "eugenics" in
the subtitle. He stated that women could be convinced to reduce
their births voluntarily and he began substituting the term "genetics" for the now out-of-favor
"eugenics".
During the Cold War, population culling drew supporters that
included the cream of corporate America.
They backed private
population reduction initiatives like
Margaret Sanger's
International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). The
major media also spread the notion that "over-population in
developing countries leads to hunger and more poverty [which, in
turn, becomes] the fertile breeding ground" for international
communism. American agribusiness would later get involved through a
policy of global food control.
Food is power.
When used to cull the
population, it's a weapon of mass destruction.
Consider the current situation with the
UN FAO reporting sharply higher food prices along with severe
shortages and warning that this condition is extreme, unprecedented
and threatens billions of people with hunger and starvation. Prices
were up 40 per cent in 2007, after a nine per cent rise in 2006,
which forced developing states to pay 25 per cent more for imported
food and be unable to afford enough of it.
The FAO cites various explanations for the problem, including
growing demand, higher fuel and transportation costs, commodity
speculation, the use of corn for ethanol production (taking
one-third of the harvest, which is more than what's exported for
food) and extreme weather, while ignoring the above implications:
the power of agribusiness to manipulate supply for greater profits
and "cull the herd" in targeted Third World countries.
Affected
nations are poor, and the FAO lists 20 in Africa, nine in Asia, six
in Latin America and two in Eastern Europe that in total
represent 850 million endangered people now suffering from
chronic hunger and related poverty.
They depend on imports, and their diets
rely heavily on the types of produce that agribusiness
controls - wheat, corn, rice and soybeans.
If current prices stay high
and shortages persist, millions will die - maybe by design.
The
Subterfuge of "Food for Peace"
American elites in the late 1930s began planning an American century
in the postwar world - a Pax Americana ( "American Peace") to
succeed the fading British Empire. The New York-based Council on
Foreign Relations War and Peace Studies group led the effort,
financed by Rockefeller Foundation money. As Engdahl puts it, they'd
be paid back later "thousands-fold". First, though, America had to
achieve world dominance militarily and economically.
The US business establishment envisioned a "Grand Area" to encompass
most of the world outside the communist bloc. To exploit it, they
hid their imperial designs beneath a "liberal and benevolent garb"
by defining themselves as "selfless advocates of freedom for
colonial peoples [and] the enemy of imperialism".
They would also "champion world peace
through multinational control".
Sound familiar?
Like today, it was just subterfuge for their real aims that were
pursued under the banner of
the United Nations, the new Bretton
Woods framework, the IMF, the World Bank and the GATT.
They were established for one purpose:
to integrate the developing world
into the US-dominated Global North so its wealth could be
transferred to powerful business interests, mostly in the US.
The Rockefeller family led the effort,
the four brothers were involved, and Nelson and David were the prime
movers.
While JD III was plotting depopulation and racial purity schemes,
Nelson was working "the other side of the fence...as a
forward-looking international businessman" in the 1950s and 1960s.
Preaching greater efficiency and production in targeted countries,
he in fact schemed to open world markets for unrestricted US grain
imports. This became the "Green Revolution". Nelson concentrated
on Latin America.
During WWII, he coordinated US
intelligence and covert operations there, and those efforts laid the
groundwork for postwar family interests. They were tied to the
region's military because friendly strongmen are the type of leaders
preferred in order to guarantee a favorable business climate.
From the 1930s, Nelson Rockefeller had significant Latin
American interests, especially in areas of oil and banking. In the
early 1940s, he sought new opportunities and along with brother
Laurance bought vast amounts of cheap, high-quality farmland so
the family could get into agriculture - but it wasn't for family
farming: the Rockefellers wanted global monopolies, and their scheme
was to do in agriculture what the family patriarch had done in oil,
along with using food and agricultural technologies as Cold War
weapons.
By 1954, the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of
1954, known as PL 480 or "Food for Peace", established
surplus food as a US foreign policy tool.
Nelson used his
considerable influence on the State Department because every postwar
department secretary, from 1952 through 1979, had ties to the family
through its foundation: namely,
-
John Foster Dulles
-
Dean Rusk
-
Henry Kissinger
-
Cyrus Vance
These men supported Rockefeller views on
private business and knew that the family saw agriculture the way it
saw oil - as commodities to be "traded, controlled, [and] made scarce
or plentiful" to suit the foreign policy goals of dominant
corporations controlling their trade.
The family got into agriculture in 1947 when Nelson founded the
International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC).
Through it, he introduced,
"mass-scale agribusiness in
countries where US dollars could buy huge influence in the 1950s
and 1960s".
Nelson then allied with grain-trading
giant Cargill in Brazil, where they began developing hybrid
corn seed varieties with big plans for them.
They would make the
country "the world's third largest producer of [these] crop[s] after
the US and China". It was part of the Rockefellers' "Green
Revolution" that by the late 1950s "was rapidly becoming a strategic
US economic strategy alongside oil and military hardware".
Latin America was the beginning of a food production revolution with
big aims: to control the "basic necessities of the majority of the
world's population". With agribusiness in the 1990s, it was "the
perfect partner for the introduction...of genetically engineered
food crops or GMO plants". This marriage masqueraded as "free market
efficiency, modernization [and] feeding a malnourished world".
In fact, it was nothing of the sort. It
cleverly hid "the boldest coup over the destiny of entire nations
ever attempted".
Agribusiness
Goes Global
The "Green Revolution began in Mexico and spread across Latin
America during the 1950s and 1960s".
It was then introduced in Asia,
especially in India. It was at a time when Americans claimed that
their aim was to help the world through free-market efficiency. It
was all one way, from them to us, so that corporate investors could
profit. It gave US chemical giants and major grain traders new
markets for their products. Agribusiness was going global, and
Rockefeller interests were in the vanguard helping industry
globalization take shape.
Nelson worked with his brother, JD III, who in 1953 set up his own
Agricultural Development Council. They shared a common goal:
"cartelization of world agriculture
and food supplies under their corporate hegemony".
At its heart, it aimed to introduce
modern agricultural techniques to increase crop yields under the
false claim of wanting to reduce hunger.
The same seduction was later used to
promote the "gene revolution", with Rockefeller interests and the
same agribusiness giants backing it.
In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson also used food as a
weapon. He wanted recipient nations to agree to administration and
Rockefeller preconditions that population control and opening their
markets to US industry were part of the deal. It also involved
training developing-world agricultural scientists and agronomists in
the latest production concepts so they could apply them at home.
This "carefully constructed network
later proved crucial" to the Rockefeller strategy to "spread the use
of genetically engineered crops around the world", helped along with
USAID funding and CIA mischief.
"Green Revolution" tactics were painful and took a devastating toll
on peasant farmers, destroying their livelihoods and forcing them
into shantytown slums. These people, desperate to survive and easy
prey for any way to do it, provided cheap, exploitable labour.
The "Revolution" also harmed the land. Monocultural practices
displace diversity, destroy soil fertility and decrease crop yields
over time. The indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides can
eventually cause serious health problems. Engdahl quotes an
analyst who called the "Green Revolution" a "chemical revolution"
that developing states couldn't afford. This revolution began the
process of debt enslavement from IMF, World Bank and private bank
loans. Large landowners could afford the latter; small farmers
couldn't, and as a result were often bankrupted.
That, of course, was the whole idea.
The "Green Revolution" was based on the "proliferation of new hybrid
seeds in developing markets" - seeds that characteristically lack
reproductive capacity. Declining yields meant farmers had to buy
seeds every year from large multinational producers that control
their parental seed lines in house. A handful of company giants held
patents on them and used them to lay the groundwork for the later
GMO revolution.
Their scheme soon became evident: traditional crops
had to give way to high-yield varieties (HYV) of
hybrid wheat, corn and rice, with major chemical inputs.
Initially, growth rates were impressive but they didn't last for
long. In countries like India, agricultural output slowed down and
fell into decline. They were the losers so that agribusiness giants
could exploit large new markets for their chemicals, machinery and
other product inputs. It was the beginning of "agribusiness", and it
went hand in hand with the "Green Revolution" strategy that would
later embrace plant genetic alterations.
Two Harvard Business School professors were involved early on:
John Davis and Ray Goldberg.
They teamed up with Russian economist
Wassily Leontief, got funding from the Rockefeller and Ford
foundations and initiated a four-decade revolution to dominate the
food industry. It was based on "vertical integration", of the kind
that Congress outlawed after giant conglomerates and trusts like
Standard Oil used them to monopolize entire sectors of key
industries and crush competition.
This vertical integration was revived under President Jimmy
Carter, a
Trilateral Commission founding
member, and disguised as,
"deregulation" to dismantle "decades of
carefully constructed... health, food safety and consumer protection
laws".
These laws would now give way under this new wave of
industry-friendly vertical integration. A propaganda campaign
claimed that government was the problem, that it encroached too much
on our lives and had to be rolled back for greater personal
"freedom".
From early in the 1970s, agribusiness producers controlled US food
supplies but soon they would go global on a scale without precedent.
The goal: to make "staggering profits" by "restructur[ing] the way
Americans grew food to feed themselves and the world".
Ronald
Reagan continued Carter's policy and let the top four or five
monopoly players control it. It led to an unprecedented
"concentration and transformation of American agriculture", with
independent family farmers driven off their land through forced
sales and bankruptcies so that "more efficient" agribusiness giants
could move in with "factory farms". The remaining small producers
became virtual serfs as "contract farmers".
America's landscape was changing, with
people trampled on for the sake of profits.
Engdahl explains the gradual process of,
"wholesale merger[s]
and consolidation... of American food production... into giant
corporate global concentrations" with familiar names:
-
Cargill
-
Archer Daniels Midland
-
Smithfield Foods
-
ConAgra
As they grew bigger, so did their bottom
lines, with annual equity returns rising from 13 per cent in 1993 to
23 per cent in 1999.
Hundreds of thousands of small farmers lost out; their numbers
dropped by 300,000 from 1979 to 1998. It was even worse for hog
farmers, with a drop from 600,000 to 157,000 in the same period, so
that three per cent of producers could control 50 per cent of the
market. The social costs were staggering (and continue to be),
as "entire rural communities collapsed and rural towns became ghost
towns".
Consider the consequences.
By 2004:
-
the four largest beef packers
controlled 84 per cent of steer and heifer slaughter: Tyson,
Cargill, Swift and National Beef Packing
-
four giants controlled 64 per
cent of hog production: Smithfield Foods, Tyson, Swift and
Hormel Foods
-
three companies controlled 71
per cent of soybean crushing: Cargill, ADM and Bunge
-
three giants controlled 63 per
cent of all flour milling
-
five companies controlled 90 per
cent of the global grain trade
-
four other companies controlled
89 per cent of the breakfast cereal market - Kellogg, General
Mills, Kraft Foods and Quaker Oats
-
Cargill, having acquired
Continental Grain in 1998, controlled 40 per cent of
national grain elevator capacity
-
four large agrichemical/seed
giants controlled over 75 per cent of the nation's seed corn
sales and 60 per cent of it for soybeans, while also having
the largest share of the agricultural chemical market:
Monsanto, Novartis, Dow Chemical and DuPont
-
six companies controlled
three-fourths of the global pesticides market
-
Monsanto and DuPont controlled
60 per cent of the US corn and soybean seed market - all of it
patented GMO seeds.
In addition:
Part 2
Nexus Magazine
April-May 2008
The Gene Revolution,
spurred on by a handful of biotechnology transnationals
and aided by Rockefeller
funding,
has created a world
where feeding the hungry
is akin to an
act of genocide.
Merging Big
Pharma with Big Food
At the dawn of a new century, family farming was decimated by
corporate agribusiness's vertically integrated powers that surpassed
their earlier 1920s heyday dominance.
The industry was now the
second-most-profitable national one after pharmaceuticals, with
domestic annual sales exceeding US$400 billion. The next aim was
merging
Big Pharma with Big Food-producing giants.
The Pentagon's National Defense
University took note in a 2003-issued paper:
"Agribusiness [now] is to the United
States what oil is to the Middle East".
It's now considered a "strategic weapon
in the arsenal of the world's only superpower", but at a huge cost
to consumers everywhere.
Agribusiness was on a roll, the US
government supporting it with tens of billions of dollars in annual
subsidies. The 1996 Farm Bill suspended the US Secretary of
Agriculture's power to balance supply and demand, henceforth
allowing unrestricted production. Food-producing giants took full
advantage to control market forces. They crushed family farmers by
overproducing and forcing down prices.
They also pressured land
values as small operators failed, and thus created opportunities for
land acquisition on the cheap for greater concentration and
dominance.
Next came integrating the Gene Revolution into agribusiness,
the way Harvard's Ray Goldberg saw it coming. Entire new
sectors were to be created from genetic engineering, including
genetically engineered/modified drugs from GE/GM plants in a new
"agri-ceutical system". Goldberg predicted a "genetic revolution
[through] an industrial convergence of food, health, medicine, fibre
and energy businesses" in a totally unregulated marketplace.
Unmentioned was a threatening consumer
nightmare hidden from view.
Food is Power
Rockefeller Foundation funding was the Gene Revolution's
catalyst in 1985, with big aims: to learn if GM plants were
commercially feasible and, if so, to spread them everywhere. It was
the "new eugenics", says Engdahl, and the culmination of
earlier research from the 1930s.
It was also based on the idea that human
problems can be,
"solved by genetic and chemical
manipulations... as the ultimate means of social control and
social engineering".
Foundation scientists sought ways to do
this by reducing life's infinite complexities to "simple,
deterministic and predictive models" under their diabolical
scheme - mapping gene structures to "correct social and moral problems
including crime, poverty, hunger and political instability".
With
the development of essential genetic engineering techniques
in 1973, they were on their way.
They're based on what's called recombinant DNA (rDNA),
and it works by genetically introducing foreign DNA into plants and
animals to create genetically modified organisms (GMOs),
but not without risks.
London Institute of Science in Society
chief biologist Dr Mae-Wan Ho explains that there are dangers
because the process is imprecise.
"It is uncontrollable and
unreliable, and typically ends up damaging and scrambling the
host genome, with entirely unpredictable consequences" that
might unleash a deadly unrecallable "Andromeda Strain".
Research continued anyway, amidst lies
that risks were minimal and a promised future lay ahead. All that
mattered were huge potential profits and geopolitical gain - so let
the good times roll and the chips fall where they may.
One project was to map the rice genome.
It launched a 17-year effort to spread
GMO rice around the world, with Rockefeller Foundation money behind
it. It spent millions funding 46 science labs worldwide.
It also
financed the training of hundreds of graduate students and developed
an "elite fraternity" of top scientific researchers at
Foundation-backed research institutes. It was a diabolical scheme
aiming big: to control the staple food for 2.4 billion people and,
in the process, destroy the biological diversity of over 140,000
developed varieties that can withstand droughts and pests and can
grow in every imaginable climate.
Asia was the prime target, and Engdahl explains the sinister tale of
the Philippines-based, Foundation-funded, International Rice
Research Institute (IRRI). It had a gene bank with
"every
significant rice variety known" that comprised one-fifth of all
varieties. IRRI let agribusiness giants illegally use the seeds for
exclusive, patented, genetic modification so they could introduce
them in markets and dominate them by requiring farmers to be
licensed and forced to pay annual royalty fees.
By 2000, a successful "Golden Rice" was developed that was enriched
with beta carotene (vitamin A). It was marketed on the fraudulent
claim that a daily bowl could prevent blindness and other vitamin A
deficiencies. It was a scam, as other products are far better
sources of this nutrient, and to get enough of it requires eating an
impossible nine kilograms (about 20 pounds) of rice daily.
Nonetheless, Gene Revolution backers were ready for their
next move, "the consolidation of global control over humankind's
food supply", with a new tool to do it: the
World Trade
Organization.
Corporate giants wrote its rules to
favor themselves at the expense of shut-out developing nations.
Unleashing GMO
Seeds - A Revolution in World Food Production Begins
By the end of the 1980s, a global network of molecular biologists
trained in genetic engineering was ready to kick off the "Second
Green Revolution". Argentina was its first test laboratory, the
first "guinea pig" nation in a reckless experiment with untested and
potentially hazardous new foods.
Argentina was an easy mark when Carlos Menem became President
in July 1989.
He was a corporatist's dream, a
willing Washington Consensus subject, and he even let
David Rockefeller's New York and Washington friends draft his
economic program with Chicago School dogma at its heart:
By 1991, Argentina was already a "secret
experimental laboratory for developing genetically engineered
crops".
In effect, the country's agriculture had been handed to
Monsanto, Dow, DuPont and other GMO giants to exploit for profit.
Things would never be the same again. By the mid-1990s, Menem was
"revolutionizing] Argentina's traditional productive agriculture" to
one based on monoculture for global export.
From 1996 to 2004, worldwide GMO crop plantings expanded to 167
million acres, a 40-fold increase using 25 per cent of total
worldwide arable land. An astonishing two-thirds of the acreage (106
million acres, or 43 million hectares) was in the USA.
By 2004, Argentina was in second place
with 34 million acres (14 million hectares), while production was
expanding in Brazil, China, Canada, South Africa, Indonesia, India,
The Philippines, Colombia, Honduras, Spain and Eastern Europe
(Poland, Romania and Bulgaria). The revolution was on a roll; now it
looks unstoppable.
In 1995, Monsanto introduced Roundup Ready (RR)
soybeans with its special gene-gun-inserted bacterium that allows
the plant to survive being sprayed by the glyphosate herbicide,
Roundup. GMO soybeans are thus protected from the same product
which is used in Colombia to eradicate drugs but harms legal crops
and humans at the same time.
After Monsanto's RR soybeans were
licensed by the US FDA in 1996, in Argentina,
"a once-productive national
family-farm-based agriculture system [was turned into] a
neo-feudal state system dominated by a handful of powerful,
wealthy" owners who exploited it for profit.
Menem went along. In less than a
decade, he had allowed the nation's corn, wheat and
cattle diversity to be replaced by corporate-controlled
monoculture. It was a Faustian sellout, and it helped Monsanto's
stock price hit an all-time high by the end of 2007.
Earlier decades of diversity and crop rotation preserved the
country's soil quality, but this changed after soybean monoculture
moved in, with its heavy dependence on chemical fertilizers.
Traditional Argentine crops vanished, and cattle were forced into
cramped feedlots the way they are in the United States. Engdahl
quotes a leading agro-ecologist who predicts that these practices
will destroy the land in 50 years' time if they continue. Nothing
suggests there'll be a stoppage.
Argentina's economic crisis of the late 1990s-early 2000s made vast,
additional amounts of land available, and bankrupted farmers had to
give up their holdings for a few cents in the dollar. Corporate
predators and latifundista landholders took full advantage. With
mechanized GMO soybean monoculture, the country's dairy farms were
reduced by half and "hundreds of thousands of workers [were forced]
off the land" into poverty.
Monsanto was on a roll and used various exploitative schemes. In
1999, the company got Menem to allow it to collect "extended
royalties", even though Argentine law prohibited the practice.
Smuggling Roundup Ready soybean seeds into Brazil, Paraguay,
Bolivia and Uruguay also went on sub rosa.
Monsanto then pressured the government of Argentina to recognize its
"technology license fee".
A Technology Compensation Fund was
established and managed by the Ministry of Agriculture. It forced
farmers to pay a near-one-per-cent fee on GMO soybean sales;
Monsanto and other GMO seed suppliers got the funds. By 2004, nearly
half the nation's crop land was being used for GM soybean production
and over 90 per cent of this was solely for Monsanto's Roundup Ready
brand.
Engdahl puts it this way:
"Argentina had become the world's
largest uncontrolled experimental laboratory for GMO".
Its people had become unwitting lab
rats.
In 2005, Brazil's government relented and legalized GMO seeds for
the first time. By 2006, the USA, Argentina and Brazil accounted
for over 81 per cent of world GM soybean production.
This,
"ensure[s] that practically every
animal in the world fed soymeal [is] eating genetically
engineered soybeans".
It also means that everyone eating these
animals does the same thing unwittingly.
Argentina has experienced more fallout which threatens to spread.
Its soybean monoculture has affected the countryside hugely, and
vast tracts of forest lands have been destroyed. Traditional farmers
close to soybean plantings have been seriously harmed by aerial
spraying of Roundup. Their crops have been destroyed, because that's
what this herbicide is engineered to do: kill all plants without
gene-modified resistance.
They report that their chickens died and
their horses were gravely harmed by the aerial spraying. Humans have
also been affected, and can show violent symptoms of nausea,
diarrhea and vomiting as well as skin lesions. Other reports claim
further fallout: animals born with severe organ deformities,
deformed bananas and sweet potatoes, and lakes filled with dead
fish. In addition, rural families say that their children developed
"grotesque blotches on their bodies" from the aerial spraying.
As for higher promised yields from GM soy, results showed harvests
reduced by 5–15 per cent compared with traditional soybean crops
plus "vicious new weeds" that need up to triple the amount of
herbicide to destroy.
By the time farmers learn this, it's too
late.
Engdahl summarizes the farmers' plight:
"A more perfect scheme of human
bondage would be hard to imagine".
And it was even worse than that.
Argentina was the first test case,
"in a global plan that was decades
in the making and absolutely shocking and awesome in its scope".
Iraq Gets
American Seeds of Democracy
Democracy for Iraq meant erasing the "cradle of civilization" for
unfettered free-market capitalism. In 2003, Iraq was conquered for
its oil but also to make the country a gigantic free-trade paradise.
The scheme was diabolical, elaborate and
ugly:
-
blitzkrieg "shock and awe"
-
elaborate PsyOps
-
fear as a weapon
-
repressive occupation
-
mass detention and torture
-
the fastest, most sweeping
country remake in history
It happened in weeks.
Iraq no longer exists, the
country is a wasteland, its people are devastated, and a blank slate
was created for unrestrained corporate pillage on a
near-unimaginable scale.
Part of the scheme was for GMO agribusiness giants to have free rein
over that part of the economy, to radically transform Iraq's food
production system into a model for GMO seeds and plants. It was
mandated under several of the 100 swiftly implemented "Bremer Laws",
but Iraqis had no say in them as the country was now governed out of
Washington and its branch office inside the heavily fortified Green
Zone in the largest US embassy in the world.
Bremer Laws imposed the harshest-ever Chicago School–style
"shock therapy", of the kind that devastated countries around the
world since introduced in 1973 in Chile under Pinochet.
The formula was familiar:
-
mass firings of state employees
in the hundreds of thousands
-
unrestricted imports with no
tariffs, duties, inspections or taxes
-
deregulation
-
the largest state liquidation
sale and privatization plan since the Soviet Union collapsed
Corporate taxes were lowered from 40 per
cent to a flat 15 per cent.
Foreign investors could own 100 per cent
of Iraqi assets other than oil; they could also repatriate all their
profits without being taxed on them and had no obligation to
reinvest in the country. Further, they were given 40-year oil
production leases. The only Saddam-era laws remaining were those
restricting trade unions and collective bargaining.
Foreign transnationals, mainly US ones,
swooped in and devoured everything. Iraqis couldn't compete, and the
occupation laws assured it.
Consider Bremer Order 81 of 26 April
2004 covering patents and their duration. It states:
"Farmers shall be prohibited from
reusing seeds of protected varieties or any variety".
It gave plant varieties patent-holders
absolute rights over farmers using their seeds for 20 years. These
seeds are genetically engineered and owned by transnationals. Iraqi
farmers using them have to sign an agreement stipulating they must
pay a "technology fee" as well as an annual license fee.
Using seeds "similar" to protected,
patented varieties could result in severe fines and imprisonment. "Plant
Variety Protection" (PVP) is at the core of this
order - and GMO seeds got protection to displace 10,000 years of
development of plant varieties.
Iraq's fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is
ideal for crop planting. Since 8000 BC, farmers have used it to
develop "rich seeds of almost every variety of wheat used in the
world today". These varieties have now been erased through this GMO
modernization and industrialization scheme so that agribusiness
could get a foothold in the region and supply the world market.
While Iraqis suffer and starve, GMO giants run the country's
agriculture for export.
Iraqi farmers are now agribusiness serfs and
are forced to grow products foreign to the native diet, like wheat
designed for pasta production. Bremer Laws mandate this and
are inviolable under Article 26 the US-drafted constitution. This
Article states that the Iraqi government is powerless to change laws
made by a foreign occupier. To assure it, US sympathizers are in
every ministry, with those most trusted in key ones.
Engdahl sums up the damage to agriculture:
"The forced transformation of Iraq's
food production into patented GMO crops is one of the clearest
examples of [how] Monsanto and other GMO giants are forcing
[these] crops onto an unwilling or unknowing world population".
They're infesting the planet with them,
one country at a time, and it's futile trying to undo the damage
they cause.
Planting the
"Garden of Earthly Delights"
On 1 January 1995, the WTO was officially established, with
powers to enforce its corporate-written laws on member states. US
agribusiness was already dominant, but it now had a new, unelected,
supranational body to advance its private agenda on a global scale.
WTO is a "policeman" for global free
trade and a predatory "battering ram for the trillion-dollar annual
world agribusiness" part of it for its giants.
Its rules were written with teeth for
"punitive leverage" to levy heavy financial and other penalties on
rule violators. Under them, agriculture is a priority because
American companies are dominant. Cargill wrote the rules that
Engdahl calls the "Cargill Plan."
They:
-
ban all government farm programs
and price supports worldwide (but wink and nod at massive US
subsidies)
-
prohibit countries from imposing
import controls to defend their own agricultural production
-
ban agricultural export
controls, even in times of famine, so that Cargill can
dominate the world export grain trade
-
forbid countries from
restricting trade through food safety laws called "trade
barriers"
-
this demand also opens world
markets to unrestricted imports of GMO foods, with no need
for their safety to be proved.
The International Food & Agricultural
Trade Policy Council (IPC) lobby worked with Cargill
and US agribusiness to advance this agenda.
The so-called Group of Four
(Quad) countries took the lead:
-
the United States
-
Canada
-
Japan
-
the European Union (EU)
Meeting in secret, they set policy for
all 134 WTO members that for agriculture was drafted by US
agribusiness giants including Cargill, Monsanto, ADM and DuPont,
along with EU giants Nestlé and Unilever.
Their policy was designed
to erase national laws and safeguards in favor of unrestricted free
markets favoring Global North countries.
Through patents, GMO giants control staple crop seeds and need WTO
leverage to force them on a skeptical world. It's done through the
WTO's Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), along with its
Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS). Until the advent of agribusiness, food
production and markets were local. That's now changed, with
corporate giants in control and able to set prices by manipulating
supply.
AoA rules were established to help.
They
also enforce agribusiness's highest priority:
"a free and integrated
global market for its products".
Included are GMO ones which the
senior Bush administration ruled are "substantially equivalent" to
ordinary seeds and crops and need no government regulation.
That
provision is written into WTO rules under the Sanitary and
Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement. It states that national
laws banning GMO products are "unfair trade practices", even when
they endanger human health.
Other WTO rules, under the Agreement on Technical Barriers to
Trade, are in place which prohibit GMO labeling. As a result,
consumers don't know what they're eating and can't avoid these
potentially hazardous foods. The 1996 Biosafety Protocol was
drafted to solve this problem, and it should be in place for that
purpose.
Developing-country demands, however, were
"ambushed by the
powerful organized government and agribusiness lobby". It sabotaged
talks and insisted biosafety measures be subordinate to WTO trade
rules favoring developed states. As a result, talks collapsed,
safety concerns were ignored and the path was cleared for the
unrestricted spread of GMO seeds worldwide.
Under the WTO's TRIPS rules, all member states must pass
patent-protecting intellectual property laws that make knowledge
property. That, in turn, "open[s] the floodgates" nearly everywhere
for the proliferation of GMO seeds and foods, even in violation of
national food safety laws.
GMO giants have powerful friends in government backing their
agenda.
George W. Bush is one of them,
and in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, he made the proliferation
of GMO seeds his top priority. With that support, GMO companies have
been pushing things to the limit.
Engdahl gives a brazen example involving the Texas biotech
company, RiceTec. It schemed to patent basmati rice, the
dietary staple across Asia for thousands of years. With IRRI
collusion, the company stole the seeds and patented them under
Rockefeller Foundation–crafted rules. The 2001 US Supreme Court
decision in Ag Supply v. Pioneer Hi-Bred made this possible;
it,
"enshrined the principle of allowing
patents on plant forms and other forms of life".
Under the ruling, GMO plant breeds can
be patented - and US government agencies are complicit in helping
agribusiness giants ensure that nothing stops them from doing it. As
a result, the GMO monoculture onslaught threatens plant species
diversity everywhere.
With full backing from Washington and the WTO, major biotech
companies are patenting every plant imaginable in GMO form.
Engdahl refers to the "Gene Revolution
[as being a] monsoon force in world agriculture" by the beginning of
the new millennium, with four dominant companies controlling GMOs
and related agrichemical markets:
-
Monsanto, DuPont and Dow
AgroSciences in the USA
-
Syngenta in Switzerland (created
from the merger of the agriculture divisions of Novartis and
AstraZeneca)
The "world's number one" is Monsanto.
The company was discussed in part one of this review, and Engdahl
quotes its chairman as saying his goal is a global fusion of,
"three of the largest industries in
the world - agriculture, food and health - that now operate
[separately, but] changes... will lead to their integration".
That was over seven years ago.
Now it's happening.
Engdahl covers pertinent information on the industry that
might otherwise have gone unnoticed: that the three US GMO giants
have a long and sordid association with the Pentagon,
supplying massively destructive chemicals like Agent Orange,
napalm and others. They now want to be trusted with the most
important things we ingest - our food and drugs - in the face of strong
evidence that their GMO varieties harm human health.
Their history of concern for public
safety is atrocious.
Like it or not, they're advancing their agenda, and a 2004
Rockefeller Foundation report shows it. GM crop production achieved
double-digit increases for nine consecutive years since 1996. More
than eight million farmers in 17 countries now plant GM crops, over
90 per cent in developing nations.
Far and away, the US is the world's
leader,
"with aggressive Government
promotion, absence of labeling, and the domination of US farm
production".
Here,
"genetically engineered crops [have]
essentially taken over the American food chain".
In 2004, over 85 per cent of soybeans
and 45 per cent of corn seeds were genetically modified, and, since
animal feed is mainly from these crops,
"the entire meat production of the
nation [and exports] has been fed on genetically modified animal
feed".
What animals eat, so do humans.
It gets even worse. Wind and air proliferate GM seeds to adjacent
fields, including organic ones which are now to some degree
contaminated.
Engdahl explains:
"...after just six years, an
estimated 67 per cent of all US farm acreage has been
[irredeemably] contaminated with genetically engineered seeds.
The genie was out of the bottle".
Nothing known to science can reverse
this condition.
This renders "pure organic" growing an
impossibility, except perhaps in very isolated farms that comprise a
small percentage of the industry. Even so, organic crops are
safer than chemically treated ones and hugely preferable to any that
are genetically modified. That said, as the Gene Revolution
advances worldwide, the future of organic farming is imperiled - to
the horror of people who, like this writer, depend on it.
Consider further the way GMO giants gain market share with
government and WTO backing, helped by the imposition of rigid
licensing and technology agreements on farmers who must pay annual
fees. They're binding and enforced through Technology Use
Agreements that farmers have to sign and, by so doing, entrap
themselves in a "new form of serfdom".
Each year, they must buy new
seeds and they're forbidden to reuse any from previous years as was
customary before GMO introductions. Failure to observe the
agreements can result in severe legal damages or even imprisonment
and possible loss of their land.
Complicit government agencies and clever marketing schemes
aid the "Gene Revolution" through "lies and damn lies" that GMO
crops have higher yields and can solve world hunger problems. The
evidence proves otherwise. In addition, resistant "superweeds"
develop over time and crop yields drop. Farmers must use greater
amounts of herbicides, are locked into high user-fees and end up
losing money.
The bottom line:
the case for "genetically engineered
seeds for agriculture [was] based on a citadel of scientific
fraud and corporate lies".
This information is hidden from the
public, and it's too late once unwary farmers learn they've been
had.
Evidence was growing on GMO dangers, and the industry was alarmed.
By 2005, Russian science showed that GMOs cause harm that can start
in utero: over half the offspring of rats fed a genetically modified
soybean diet died in their first three weeks of life - six times the
normal rate.
Population
Control - Terminators, Traitors and Contraceptive Corn Seed
Crucial to its strategy, GMO giants needed a "new technology which
would allow them to sell seed that would not reproduce".
They developed genetic use
restriction technologies (GURTs) that produce so-called
"Terminator" seeds. The process is patented and applies to seeds of
all plant species. Replanting them doesn't work: they won't grow.
It's the industry's solution to controlling world food production
and assuring themselves big profits as a result. What a discovery!
Terminator corn, soybean and other seeds
have been "genetically modified to ‘commit suicide' after one
harvest season" by a toxin-producing inbuilt gene.
A closely related, second-generation technology, T-GURT, produces
seeds nicknamed "Traitor" seeds. The technology relies on
controlling a plant's fertility and genetic characteristics with "an
inducible gene promoter" called a "gene switch".
GMO crops that are pest- and
disease-resistant only work by using a specific chemical compound
that companies like Monsanto make. Farmers buying seeds illegally
won't get the compound to "turn on" the resistant gene. Traitor
technology thus creates a captive new market for the GMO giants,
and Traitor seeds are cheaper to produce than Terminator seeds.
Combined, these two technologies give agribusiness giants
unprecedented powers:
"For the first time in history, it
[lets] three or four private multinational seed companies...
dictate terms to world farmers for their seed".
It's a biological warfare tool
almost "too good to believe", in the face of the open citizen
opposition which the industry and the US Department of Agriculture
(USDA) aim to quash.
Engdahl quotes USDA spokesman Willard
Phelps from a June 1998 interview, saying the agency wanted
Terminator technology to be "widely licensed and made
expeditiously available to many seed companies".
Hidden was the
reason why: to introduce these seeds to the developing world as the
prime Rockefeller Foundation strategy.
Engdahl calls it a,
"Trojan Horse for Western GMO seed
giants to get control over Third World food supplies in areas
with weak or non-existent patent laws".
It became an urgent Foundation priority
to spread the seeds worldwide to capture world markets irreversibly.
The USDA fully backed the scheme.
That kind of muscle (along with WTO rules) is overwhelming. It's the
tactic used when the US Departments of State and Agriculture
coordinate famine relief using surplus US genetically engineered
commodities. Farmers getting GMO seeds aren't told what they are:
they plant them unwittingly for the next harvest and get hooked.
And the proliferation isn't restricted
to Africa. The industry's goal is to introduce GMOs everywhere,
through coercion, bribery and other illegal tactics, but especially
in highly indebted developing states. In the case of Poland, the
soil - which was amongst the richest in Europe - is now spoiled by
genetic contamination.
Consider how the scheme ties in with Rockefeller Foundation
population control strategy. In 2001, the scheme was aided when the
privately owned biotech company Epicyte announced it had
successfully developed the "ultimate GMO crop": contraceptive corn
seed.
It was called a solution to world
"over-population", but news about it vanished after Biolex
acquired the company.
One way or another, the Rockefeller Foundation aims to reduce
population. It's also doing it cooperatively with the UN World
Health Organization (WHO) by quietly funding its
"reproductive health" program through the use of a tetanus vaccine.
Combined with hCG natural hormones, it's an abortion agent that
prevents pregnancy, but women getting it aren't being told.
Nothing is said about the Pentagon's view of population reduction
as a sophisticated form of "'biological warfare' [to] solve world
hunger".
Avian Flu
Panic and GMO Chickens
In 2005, George W. Bush duped the public into believing that
a so-called avian (bird) flu epidemic threatened to become a
pandemic if not addressed.
The solution, as always, was to turn to
the private sector and reward his friends. In this case, he asked
Congress to appropriate an emergency one billion taxpayer-dollars
for a drug, Tamiflu.
Unmentioned was a key fact: it was
developed and patented by Gilead Science - whose chairman prior
to becoming US Defense Secretary was Donald Rumsfeld and who
was still a major stockholder.
The scare, combined with government
funding and a rising stock price, stood to make him a fortune, just
as
Dick Cheney has profited as Vice President from his
Halliburton ties.
Engdahl asks:
"Was the avian flu scare
another Pentagon hoax" with an unknown aim?
Based on known and suppressed past
government actions, "a supposedly deadly" new flu strain "had to be
treated with more than a little suspicion". It was being used to
advance global agribusiness and poultry factory farm interests "along the model of Arkansas-based Tyson Foods".
Consider the facts. Factory farms are
breeding grounds for potential disease proliferation because of
their cramped, overcrowded conditions, but this was never mentioned
as a threat. Instead, small family-run free-range chicken farms were
cited as culprits, especially in Asia, when, in fact, that notion is
at least very unlikely. Small farms like these are the safest, but
an industry–government propaganda campaign claimed otherwise.
The scheme is clear.
Five multinational giants dominate US
chicken meat production and processing:
-
Tyson (the largest)
-
Gold Kist
-
Pilgrim's Pride
-
ConAgra Poultry
-
Perdue Farms
They produce chicken meat under
"atrocious health and safety conditions".
According to the US GAO
(Government Accountability Office), workers in these
processing plants have "one of the highest rates of injury and
illness of any industry". Cited was exposure to "dangerous
chemicals, blood, fecal matter, exacerbated by poor ventilation and
often extreme temperatures".
In addition, chickens are tightly
cramped and,
"prevented from moving or getting
any exercise on factory farms [so they can] grow... much larger
[and faster] than ever before".
Growth boosters are also used, which
create health problems.
Growing numbers of animal experts believe these farms, not small
Asian ones, are the real source of dangerous new diseases like avian
flu. That information is suppressed in the mainstream, so the public
is duped. It's so that chicken-processing giants can globalize world
production, with the avian flu scare "gift from heaven" to help
them.
If small Asian chicken farmers can be squeezed out, Tyson
and the others can access the huge Asian poultry market. That's
their aim, and removing competition is their method - with help from
friends in high places.
Creating the first GMO animal population is also part of the scheme,
with the prospect of transforming the world's chickens into GMO
birds.
Engdahl puts it this way:
"By 2006, riding the fear of an
avian flu human epidemic, the GMO or Gene Revolution players
were clearly aiming to conquer the world's most important source
of meat protein, poultry".
But another scheme to dominate world
food production also lay ahead:
"Terminator was about to come
into the control of the world's largest GMO agribusiness seed
giant".
Genetic Armageddon -
Terminators and Patents on Pigs
In 2007, Monsanto acquired Delta & Pine
Land (D&PL) to complete its aborted 1999 takeover attempt.
D&PL had global Terminator patent
rights and successfully extended them on GURTs. The deal made
Monsanto "the overwhelming monopolist of agricultural seeds of
nearly every variety", including fruits and vegetables taken up in
the company's acquisition of Seminis a year earlier. With
that company, Monsanto is now first in vegetables and fruits, second
in agronomic crops, and the third-largest agrichemical company in
the world.
With D&PL, the company has absolute control over the majority of
agricultural plant seeds as well. In addition, it's getting into the
genetic engineering and patenting of animals.
In 2005,
Monsanto applied to the WTO for international patent
rights for its claimed genetic engineering of a means to identify
pig genes derived from patented swine semen. The company also wants
patents and the right to collect license fees for particular farm
animals and livestock herds.
If granted,
"[a]ny pigs that would be produced
using this reproductive technique would be covered by these
patents".
Several techniques are being used and
patented as fast as GMO lawyers can submit applications to lock up
animal life as intellectual property.
Companies like Monsanto and Cargill have invested huge
amounts to genetically modify animals for profit. They thus want
patent and licensing rights to the results, even though this
represents a controversial goal to patent life itself.
A 1980 US
Supreme Court decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, however,
gave them an opening by ruling that "anything under the sun that is
made by man" is patentable. It paved the way for a landmark patent
of the "Harvard mouse" that was genetically engineered to be
susceptible to cancer.
Engdahl explains how four agribusiness giants used "stealth,
system, and a well-supported campaign of lies and distortion" to
progress toward Henry Kissinger's ultimate goal: controlling oil
to control nations, and food to control people.
The pursuit of both are ongoing, with
little public knowledge of how far advanced things are and how
reckless the scheme is: to genetically engineer all plants and
life-forms and to control world population by culling its "unwanted"
parts.
Afterword -
Marshalling Opposition
A September 2006 WTO tribunal ruled for the US and against the EU.
In so doing, it threatens to open this important agricultural region
to the "forced introduction [of] genetically manipulated plants and
food products".
It recommended the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB)
require the EU to conform with its obligations under WTO's SPS
Agreement that lets agribusiness ignore national laws and rights
that protect public health and safety. Failure to comply can cost EU
countries hundreds of millions of dollars in annual fines, so this
issue is crucial to both sides.
At the time of Engdahl's writing, it was unclear if the "GMO
juggernaut would be stopped globally".
It's still uncertain, but as
of December 2007 only nine biotech food products are authorized for
sale in the EU. So far, most US corn exports are blocked and trade
in other products is hindered in spite of dozens of applications
pending in the pipeline, their fate undecided.
Several EU countries, including France, Germany, Austria and
Denmark, even ban some EU-approved biotech food products, further
clouding the outlook. Polls show why, with European public opinion
strongly opposed to GMO foods and ingredients. Hostility levels in
France are as high as 89 per cent, with 79 per cent wanting
governments to ban them.
This shows that European consumers are far ahead of Americans
and much better protected (so far) by their overall
exclusion as well as having labeling requirements for those products
allowed to be sold. That provision is crucial as it empowers
consumers to decide whether to use or avoid these foods. If enough
people abstain, food outlets won't carry them.
Engdahl ends on a high note by observing how vulnerable GMO
giants are to criticism. Thrusting untested products down consumers'
throats is "grounds for organizing a global ban or moratorium on
them" if enough vocal opposition can be marshaled. Throughout his
book, he sounds the alarm with reams of carefully documented facts
on the industry, its products and goals.
Converting world agriculture to GMOs, allowing agribusiness free
rein over them, and combining that scheme with a diabolical
population-culling agenda add up to solving world hunger through
genocide and endangering the rest of us in the process.
So far, Washington and the industry are on a roll towards
controlling oil and food. Hundreds of millions around
the world stand opposed, but it's unclear if that's enough.
Engdahl's book is a wake-up call for every friend of the Earth to
understand that issues this crucial can't be left in the hands of
unscrupulous business giants and their supportive friends in high
places everywhere. The book has reams of ammunition against them. It
needs to be thoroughly read and its information used. The stakes are
much too high.
Human health and safety must never be
compromised for profit.
Video
On March 11, 2008, a new documentary was
aired on French television - a documentary that Americans won't
ever see.
The gigantic bio-tech corporation
Monsanto is
threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has
served mankind for thousands of years
The World According to Monsanto
A Documentary That Americans Won't Ever
See
Spanish
version
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Polychlorinated Biphenyl
(PCB)
Bifenilos policlorados
from
Wikipedia Website
Labeling transformers containing PCBs. Polychlorinated
biphenyls (PCBs) are a class of organic compounds with 1
to 10 chlorine atoms attached to biphenyl which is a
molecule composed of two benzene rings each containing
six carbon atoms.
Bovine somatotropin
from
Wikipedia Website
Bovine somatotropin (abbreviated bST and BST) is a
protein hormone produced in the pituitary glands of
cattle. It is also called bovine growth hormone, or BGH.
BST can be produced synthetically, using recombinant DNA
technology.
The resulting product is called recombinant
bovine somatotropin (rBST), recombinant bovine growth
hormone (rBGH), or artificial growth hormone.
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