Hungry Corps and Seeds of Bondage

"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." - Seeds of Destruction, William Engdahl

If developing nations like Phillipines, India, Indonesia or Mexico were to create food self-sufficiency independent of reliance on external aid, the ability of the Superpower Nations to remain the dominant power would diminish, regardless of their 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?

F. William Engdahl's "Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation" is a book that describes how four Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide control of our food supply and our lives. Engdahl says that part of the Rockefeller Foundation's decade-long focus, what has been called The Project, was to turn science to the service of eugenics in a hideous version of racial purity. Eugenics was later renamed genetics and the aim of the Project was to create a genetically-engineered master race. Engdahl calls the Rockefeller Foundation the ‘Trojan horse of GM proliferation.'

The book makes shocking statements-

"The eugenics of Hitler was financed to a major extent by Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet. Now this is getting really intriguing. The same Rockefeller Foundation created the pseudo-science discipline of molecular biology in their relentless pursuit of reducing human life down to the ‘defining gene sequence' which, they hoped, could then be modified in order to change human traits at will. Hitler's eugenics scientists, many of whom were quietly brought to the United States after the War to continue their biological eugenics research, laid much of the groundwork of genetic engineering of various life forms, much of it supported openly until well into the Third Reich by Rockefeller Foundation generous grants.

The same Rockefeller Foundation created the so-called Green Revolution, out of a trip to Mexico in 1946 by Nelson Rockefeller and former New Deal Secretary of Agriculture and founder of the Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Company, Henry Wallace.

In reality, as it years later emerged, the Green Revolution was a brilliant Rockefeller family scheme to develop a globalized agribusiness which they then could monopolize just as they had done in the world oil industry beginning a half century before. As Henry Kissinger declared in the 1970's, ‘If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.'"

Engdahl substantiates his theory, saying Washington's policy makers' intent was to reduce World population to 1750's level of 770 million if the planet was to survive in post oil era. This was known to a small group in the US back in 1974 and the plan for culling world population was set in motion by Henry Kissinger, endorsed by Jimmy Carter, furthered by Reagan, George Bush senior, Clinton, and now, the son George Bush.

Rockefeller's Commission on Population and the American Future laid the foundation for Henry Kissinger's National Security memorandum (NSSM) 200, of 1974.

NSSM 200, which was made policy by President Ford in 1975, made population control and birth reduction official U.S. foreign policy. NSSM 200 cited how population growth, where it may impact access to mineral resources in developing countries, becomes a U.S. national security concern of the highest priority.

The problem for the ‘superior races' was ‘too many of a lesser element spells trouble when they demand more of what the privileged want for themselves. Solution - remove them with lots of ways to do it from birth control to sterilization to starvation to wars of extermination.' "Humanitarian" organizations, such as the World Health Organization, the IMF and World Bank, provide aid on the basis of a recipient agreeing to impose population control policies.

A crucial aspect driving the interest of the Rockefeller Foundation and US agribusiness companies was the fact that the Green Revolution of the 1960's was based on proliferation of new hybrid seeds in developing markets. The results of the Green Revolution were quite different from what had been promised. The mono-culture cultivation of new hybrid seed varieties decreased soil fertility and yields over time. Also, the technology used huge amounts of petroleum-based fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, commodities controlled by the Rockefeller-dominated oil companies. Various government programs provided loans, which often went to rich farmers, to purchase seeds and fertilizers. Poor farmers had to borrow from the private sector at exorbitant interest rates.

The Great "Gene Robbery" : Since the start of the `green revolution' in the 1960s, international agricultural research centres had been building up vast "gene banks." These gene banks are something like seed libraries, serving as a reservoir of genetic diversity: vast collections of different types of rice, corn, wheat or potatoes, held under special storage conditions for long shelf-life.

In 1971 the Rockefeller Foundation, together with the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, established the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which ran these agricultural research centres around the world, mostly in developing countries.

To ensure maximum impact, CGIAR drew in the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN Development Program too. CGIAR and FAO made an agreement to protect the world's ‘gene banks' of major food crop genetic resources from abuse, but used its funds and government influence to take control of plant genetic resources and made the materials available to companies like Monsanto and Syngenta, ostensibly "to use new gene combinations to increase productivity sustainably." In just a decade, what was supposed to be in 'public domain' became ‘private monopoly control' via patents, without sharing the benefits with the farming communities, who are the real ‘donors' of the six million accessions -or entries -in the gene banks.

The focus of CGIAR was the spread of GM crops in the developing world. CGIAR trained the most promising researchers in biotechnology in the developing countries, insuring that they would promote the spread of GM agriculture and biotechnology back home.

From early 1960s, Dr M.S Swaminathan had been the front of the Rockefellers in India. The Indira Gandhi Krishi Vidyalaya (IGKV) had collection of 20000 indigenous varieties of rice seeds available at the institute. These seeds or 'germ-plasms' were painstakingly collected by the famous Indian rice researcher Dr. Richaria who documented facts about each seed variety in minute detail from the farmers. Dr Claude Alvarez, in an article in The Illustrated Weekly of India, March 23-April 5, 1986 says that in the early 1960s, Swaminathan "stole" the gene bank of rice, evolved over decades by Dr Riccharia, and passed it over to the Americans. India had 120,000 varieties of rice seeds; today, no more than 50 are available. [Source: www.GMWatch.org, http://www.globalresearch.ca/ ]

Bio-piracy and Intellectual Property Rights: 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 for thousands of years. Their only problem is how to collect royalty payments from millions of small peasant farmers. To ease the problem, Terminator technology that allows introduction of a 'suicide gene' into plants was developed. A farmer using terminator seeds no longer will be able to share seeds with other farmers or plant his own and will be forced to turn to Monsanto for purchase. To counter the opposition to terminator seeds, Monsanto argues that terminator would benefit poor farmers by hindering spread of unwanted GM genes to non-GM plants.

Harassing and punishing whistleblowers: Ignatio Chapela, a microbiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his student David Quist discovered in 2000 genetically engineered contamination of Mexican corn in violation of a government ban on these crops in 1998. Chapela and Quist found the contamination to be widespread and to have extended to the country's far South till Oaxaca. The GM giants immediately tried to discredit everything, including Chapela's verified findings, and pressurized the research publication Nature to retract.

The other man attacked was on the UK-based GM expert, Arpad Pusztai for publishing data on the safety of GMO foods. Pusztai found that rats fed on GMO potatoes had smaller livers, hearts, testicles and brains, damaged immune systems, spleens and thymus, and showed structural changes in their white blood cells. The Clinton and Blair governments were determined to suppress them because they were spending billions promoting GMO crops and a future biotech revolution. Pusztai was vilified and fired from his research position at Scotland's Rowett Research Institute The 300-year old British Royal Society attacked him in 1999 and claimed his research was flawed. Engdahl says that 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.

Essential foods, like fresh water, are no ordinary commodities to be sold under rules of an imposed free market. They are basic human rights just as the right to breathe.