BIOFUELS LEADING TO LAND GRAB AROUND THE WORLD...

Biofuels and ‘Land Grabs’ in Poor Nations

By James Kanter

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/biofuels-and-land-grabs-in-poor-nations/

12 June, 2009

Current protections against land-grabs in developing countries are “absolutely insufficient,” said Olivier De Schutter, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to food.

Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, warned on Thursday that biofuels remain an important driver behind big land acquisitions and land leases in poor countries that jeopardize local inhabitants’ food security.

About one-fifth of the activities that Mr. De Schutter deemed as “land grabs” – often backed by hedge funds or sovereign wealth funds – are projects in parts of Africa and Asia aimed at growing crops to make feedstock for biofuels.

“There still is a vast market for first-generation agrofuels,” said Mr. De Schutter, who added that he considered the safeguards adopted by the European Union in 2008 “absolutely insufficient to monitor to the impacts on the countries concerned by shifts in land use for agrofuels production.”

Next-generation biofuels made from plants that would reduce competition with food crops were still in development and so the existing incentives for biofuels in the United States and European Union remained a cause for grave concern, he said.

These newer fuels “were too distant for the moment to say that we can continue to insist on the use of agrofuels for transport.”

He also underlined that second-generation agrofuels “will be hugely water consuming.”

Mr. De Schutter was in Brussels to propose a set of principles and measures to curb “land grabbing” by investors seeking agricultural lands for major crops, like soy and jatropha, which are often exported to produce food for rich-world consumers or to produce biofuels.

He said some large-scale land investments provided much-needed new infrastructure and employment.

But he said that new rules were needed because some investments were leading to evictions, sudden losses of farm and grazing lands, and greater competition for water resources.

Mr. De Schutter was appointed to his post in 2008 by the U.N. Human Rights Council.

ROCKFELLER, GMO's & THE EUGENIST AGENDA...

Beyond Golden Rice: The Rockefeller Foundation’s long-term agenda behind Genetically Modified Food

by Jurriaan Maessen

source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13944

June 11, 2009

“Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries.” Henry Kissinger, 1972 NSSM200.

‘A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.’ – Ted Turner to Audubon Magazine, 1996

In an April 18th 2009 article on the development of GM-Food for the African continent, ‘Strange Fruit: Could genetically modified foods offer a solution to the world’s food crisis? the author mentions that the Rockefeller Foundation has recently set out to fund the process of ‘biofortified rice’ for third world nations, invented by a Swiss scientist named Ingo Potrykus.

In 2000 a Swiss scientist named Ingo Potrykus modified rice, adding a bacterial gene and two genes from the daffodil, to add Vitamin A to rice. His plan was to find an easy way of countering the vitamin deficiency which causes blindness in around half a million people, mainly children, every year. Half of them die within 12 months of going blind and others die of diseases such as malaria because the deficiency affects their immune system. Professor Potrykus called his invention Golden Rice.’

But there's nothing recent about the Rockefeller Foundation's involvement in the research and development of genetically enhanced rice, as we learn from a November 14, 2000 publication by the Rockefeller Foundation in which the director of Food Security of the Rockefeller Foundation Gary H. Toenniessen states that in the early 1990's the Swiss scientist along with a colleague:

"...approached the Foundation. Dr. Ingo Potrykus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich was a specialist in plant genetic transformation and his lab was one of the first to genetically engineer rice. (...) These two scientists proposed to genetically engineer `rice with daffodil genes to produce nutritionally significant levels of beta-carotene in the rice endosperm. At a foundation-sponsored workshop, other scientists agreed that this task was difficult but achievable, and the effort was funded.'

Ten years later, it seems, the experiments had proven a great success. In a keynote speech by Rockefeller Foundation's president Judith Rodin on October 17 2008, the speaker points out that the research concerning genetically engineered rice has been underway for at least 65 years- and all this time received the generous support of the Foundation's deep pockets. Rodin explains:

'In the sixty-five years since they began, we've funded the work of Golden Rice's engineers, Dr. Peter Beyer, Dr. Ingo Potrykus, and others for more than fifteen of them. (...) I'm delighted to announce, today, that we will be providing funding to the International Rice Research Institute - which we helped establish almost fifty years ago - to shepherd Golden Rice through national, regulatory approval processes in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. And we hope this is just the beginning.'

On behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation, Representative Akinwumi Adesina stated before the Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Conference on September 28 2007 that the continent of Africa was especially chosen as the Foundation's favourite playing ground. But he laments:

'Regarding genetic engineering, by and large, African countries do not currently have in place regulatory frameworks that allow their use for food production. Many challenges face the introduction and cultivation of GM crops in Africa, including fear of GE crops.'

Adesina goes on by bringing climate change into the equation, dumping fear upon fear, and hoping perhaps that a new fear will eliminate the former one:

‘Assisting Africa to meet its food needs has other advantages for climate change. (…) Increasing population pressure and reliance on extensive agricultural practises will likely lead to further deforestations and carbon dioxide emissions and contributions to climate change.’

Under the umbrella of "climate change' all serious concern about playing God with the earth’s flora (and Fauna) can be thrown aside without a second thought it seems. Rockefeller Foundation representative Gary H. Toenniessen stated during a conference in his lecture "Opportunities for and challenges to Plant Biotechnology Adoption in Developing Countries':

'Public acceptance of transgenic crops and genetically modified (GM) food, or rather, lack thereof, is a major constraint to the adoption of plant biotechnology, particularly in Europe. (...) Orchestrated campaigns against GM foods have consequently found a receptive audience amongst urban consumers. The situation in developing countries may well be different', he adds slyly.

This same opinion is being conveyed in a 2005 "strategic review of the organisation (the Rockefeller Foundation), wherein several "challenges' are brought forward that might stand in the way of the next level of globalisation that the Foundation has mapped out for all of us, one of these being 'resistance to the development and use of genetically modified foods'.

Here comes into play the promotion of ‘global warming’. By claiming global warming will affect all nations and all peoples, and coupling the supposed climate hazard to the necessity of GM-crops lest the third world starve and die by the lack of it, the different pieces of this diabolical puzzle come together. The spectre of global climate change hangs over the world food situation, they claim, and the anticipated resistance might well be lessened if the people are adequately bamboozled into accepting the Foundation’s genetically modified foods program for fear of a vengeful God raining his wrath onto their heads. If the globalists would lie to lure the people into accepting GM foods, they would certainly not think twice about lying about the motives behind the development of these foods for mass production.

In an October 8 2006 editorial by Dean Kleckner (member emeritus of the World Food Prize Board of Advisors) on AgWeb.Com, he comments on the announced investments by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation's ambition to spark a "Green Revolution' on the impoverished continent of Africa. He states that 'The 21st-century's Green Revolution must also be a Gene Revolution.'

The Foundation itself is strangely upfront about its long-term objectives, when it bragged in the 2006 ‘The Rockefeller Foundation’s International Program on Rice Biotechnology':

‘The Rockefeller Foundation has a long, complex, and rich history in promoting agricultural development throughout the developing world. The Foundation began its major field-based program in Mexico in the 1940s, which led to the series of technologies, insights, and processes collectively known as the ‘Green Revolution’. (…) Through a series of strategically placed grants, some of the world’s premier laboratories were invited to participate in the program.’

As we learn from the 1968 Rockefeller Foundation annual report, the term Green Revolution has been around for quite a while. In the report the Foundation's president J. George Harrah already speaks of the ‘Green Revolution’, built upon ‘miracle rice’ and ‘miracle wheat’.

In a panegyric ten years later, dedicated to the Foundation’s founder John D. Rockefeller III, there is mentioned as one of his merits:

‘Mr. Rockefeller was one of the great guiding spirits of The Rockefeller Foundation over a 47-year period, and was the chairman of the Board of Trustees from 1952 to 1971. During this period, the Foundation carried out a major part of its commitment to agricultural development and the conquest of hunger, resulting in the so-called Green Revolution.’

Further on (page 21) in an unlikely frank revelation, the president of the Foundation elaborates on the true countenance of this supposed ‘Green Revolution.'

‘Because of the Green Revolution, per capita protein consumption kept pace with the doubling of populations in the less-developed countries (LDC’s) which occurred between 1950 and 1975. But it was recognised by most, and certainly by the Foundation staff, that we were merely buying time, and that the geometric expansion of population had to be reduced lest the Malthusian prediction became true globally, as contrasted with just regionally, as now applies.’

In another publication- Africa’s Turn: A New Green Revolution for the 21st century- the foundation states that ‘Before all else, the original Green Revolution was a product of philanthropy, in a carefully negotiated partnership with government.(…) After first seeking and receiving an invitation from the Mexican government, the Foundation created the Oficina de Estudios Especiales within the Mexican Department of Agriculture, initially staffed by scientists on the Rockefeller payroll.’

This is no idle bragging or foundational hubris. In an April 2008 editorial in the journal Science, Nina Fedoroff (plant geneticist, currently serving as senior scientific advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) wrote:

‘A new Green Revolution demands a global commitment to creating a modern agricultural infrastructure everywhere.’

The Rockefeller Foundation thoroughly agrees with this statement. In fact, it has for decades directed all its resources to create just such an infrastructure. To illustrate how far back the research and its intended international scope go, it will suffice to quote form a Rockefeller Foundation annual report from 1963:

‘The Foundation conducts international projects for the improvement of the world’s four most important foods- corn, wheat, potatoes, and rice.’

It is interesting to note here that in the very same year (1963) the Codex Alimentarius Commission was forced into being by the World Health Organisation and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. But then it is important to always keep in mind that these international bodies all spring from the same source and are funded by the same families. In 1984 alone, the Foundation allocated funds of millions of US dollars in appropriations to scientists on molecular genetics (Washington State University) and genetic manipulation of rice (University of Leiden). In the years after, the Foundation has energetically allocated funds every single year to research and development in GM-crops.

And the list of allocated funds literally goes on forever, with grants handed to numerous research facilities across the globe all with the aim of producing, promoting and implementing genetically modified crops in the third, second and first world. The next step in the unfolding of the Foundation's agenda was the creation of an adequate fear on which their "superfood' might thrive more rapidly. The more people who use the earth’s resources, the more a swift policy is needed to reduce global population.

But originally it was global cooling, not global warming, with which the GM-agenda was to be helped forward. In the 1974 annual report a conference on the topic of climate change was announced called "Climate Change, Food Production, and Interstate Conflict':

'This interdisciplinary conference, organised jointly by RF (Rockefeller Foundation) officers from Conflict in International Relations, Quality of the Environment, and Conquest of Hunger programs, will bring together climatologists, scientists concerned with food production (...) to examine the future implications of the global cooling trend now under way and its effects on world food production.'

In the 1973 annual report (page 54), long before the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming was injected into society's bloodstream, one of the funds approved for allocation to ‘international organisations’ to analyze the implications of climate modification for international affairs. The institute for World Order received a grant for the establishment of university-based world order studies.’

By the time it was decided by the globalists that a global warming hype would serve their interests better than a global cooling trend, they accelerated their program in a great hurry. In 1996, the Foundation mentioned in their annual report that:

‘The Rockefeller Foundation created the Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) program to cultivate a network of talented midcareer professionals from diverse disciplines and sectors committed to sustainable development.’

In regards to the many activities of LEAD, the report mentions:

‘Economic advancement and human development are predicated on sufficient supplies of energy. Yet the byproducts of fossil-fuel energy production also pose many of humankind’s greatest threats. Carbon dioxide released form fossil fuels, if allowed to build up in the earth’s atmosphere, has the potential to seal in excess heat that could LEAD to global warming.’

So what is it all about, this elaborate program of ‘magical rice’ and ‘magical wheat’, spanning many decades in slow but strategic progression? And why is "˜global warming' being mixed in the equation? In the 1968 annual Foundation report the real reason for this determined labour comes to light:

‘Major organisations such as the Population Council and the National and International Planned Parenthood Federations have been supported (read: by the Foundation) in a variety of ways. These and other existing organisations, as well as others that may come into being, represent exceedingly important instrumentalities for the extension of family planning information and contraceptive methods.’

In bone chilling language, the aims and future steps of the Foundation is being outlined (page 54):

‘It will explore potentialities of training programs, seminars, public forums, symposia, and other devices for conveying information about the impact of population growth on economic and social development to government officials from ministries of health, planning commissions, and other appropriate agencies, in the interest of motivating greater action on population policy and population control programs.'

As we know, the call for more family planning in the name of the environment has been increasingly promoted by the Malthusian minded elite. It is clear that one of the ‘other devices’ the report mentions, has been found and thoroughly exploited: the great myth of Anthropogenic Global Warming was created and covered with the subtle sauce of science to give the whole thing an air of credibility. And the eugenics agenda continues.

OGM: "L'ARME" MALTHUSIENNE DES EUGENISTES...

James Watson, le découvreur de la structure en double hélice de l'ADN, a déclaré "si l'on peut faire de meilleurs humains en ajoutant des gènes, pourquoi ne devrions-nous pas le faire ?". Enfin, Francis Fukuyama, de l'Institut for Public Policy à l'Université Georges Mason, et auteur du livre la fin de l'Histoire", a déclaré : "La biotechnologie sera capable d'accomplir ce que les idéologies du passé n'ont pas réussi à faire : créer un nouveau type d'humain... dans deux générations, nous aurons définitivement terminé avec l'Histoire humaine, parce que nous aurons aboli les humains en tant que tel. Alors, une nouvelle histoire post-humaine commencera."


Malthus et la petite graine

Le 25 mai 2009 par Simon Guibert

source: http://www.larevuedesressources.org/spip.php?article1200

Tout commence le 14 février 1766 dans le Surrey, contrée de la verte Angleterre. Thomas Robert Malthus est la sixième graine plantée par son géniteur, chef d’une famille fortunée et éclairée. C’est un ami personnel de David Hume et l’un des correspondants de Jean-Jacques Rousseau… Le petit Malthus étudie à l’université de Cambridge où il obtient une chaire en 1793. Puis il devient pasteur anglican en 1797. Cultivé et religieux, donc. L’année suivante, il publie Essai sur le principe de population, qui connaît un immense succès et déclenche de nombreuses polémiques. Il prédit que la population augmente de façon exponentielle (1, 2, 4, 8, 16...) tandis que les ressources progressent arithmétiquement (1, 2, 3, 4, 5...). Il n’y aura jamais assez de grains pour tout ce monde. On cours à la catastrophe ! Pour éviter de grands malheurs, il propose de contrôler les naissances.

L’Europe vient de prendre conscience de la délicate équation planétaire qui associe populations et ressources. Après la mort de Malthus en 1834, son Essai sur le principe de population qu’il avait réédité et retravaillé à de nombreuses reprises devint la bible d’un premier courant de pensée qui nous intéresse particulièrement. Le « malthusianisme » du XIXe siècle, entre les mains d’un groupe puissant, répandit l’idée que la reproduction des classes les plus favorisées n’était pas un problème, contrairement à celle des classes pauvres et des indigents. Fallait-il stériliser les masses laborieuses de la révolution industrielle ?

Par la suite, les choses évoluèrent et la petite graine tant questionnée par Malthus un siècle plus tôt trouva d’autres jardiniers pour se pencher sur sa croissance. A la fin du XIX° siècle, quelques esprits libertaires s’éprirent de « néo-malthusianisme ». C’était pour eux le meilleur moyen de ne pas fournir la chair à canon des conflits qui s’annonçaient. C’était également le moyen de réfléchir le corps et la dignité des classes laborieuses et de revendiquer, pour les femmes, le droit à l’avortement.

Durant tout le XX° siècle, on a entrevu des malthusiens ici et ailleurs, d’une obédience ou d’une autre. Et, pendant ce temps, l’équation planétaire populations / ressources mise en lumière par Malthus prenait une acuité toute particulière. Ni le « Péril jaune » ni la « bombe démographique » que nous prédisaient les démographes de la seconde moitié du XX° siècle n’ont finalement bouleversé la population mondiale. Aujourd’hui, les analystes avancent que le nombre de terriens continuera certes d’augmenter pour atteindre environ 9 milliards en 2050. Mais, à partir de la seconde moitié du siècle, elle amorcera une décrue spectaculaire. En fait, un nouveau phénomène dont nous allons beaucoup entendre parler est déjà à l’œuvre dans plusieurs pays : la dépopulation. Ce phénomène va modifier de fond en comble le monde dans lequel nous vivons, depuis la taille et la puissance des nations jusqu’aux facteurs de croissance économique, en passant par notre qualité de vie. C’est ainsi que la discrimination sociale par le contrôle des naissances a perdu son sens ontologique. Une partie de l’équation de Malthus rencontre une solution mais quid de l’accroissement des ressources ? La Terre pourra-t-elle nourrir neuf milliards d’êtres humains ?

Aujourd’hui, la nourriture est un marché. L’Organisation des Nations Unies, avec la Food and Agricultural Organization, la FAO et surtout le Programme Alimentaire Mondial (PAM) est un acteur du marché. L’alimentation de l’Humanité est un enjeu planétaire, comme le contrôle des naissances, l’eau ou l’énergie. L’historien Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie faisait récemment remarquer que les difficultés d’approvisionnement, les disettes, la cherté des denrées de première nécessité, et pour finir, les crises alimentaires, accompagnent les situations prérévolutionnaires. En d’autres termes, quand les peuples ont faim, les gouvernements sautent. On comprend pourquoi n’y a pas grand monde pour appeler la Révolution de ses vœux. C’est pour cela que l’on nourrit les indigents. Et, de là à penser que l’on nourrit les bouches affamées parce qu’elles sont potentiellement dangereuses, il n’y a qu’un pas…

On connaissait les crises alimentaires conséquences des catastrophes climatiques, des guerres et des tensions politiques. Voici la crise alimentaire globalisée, en proie aux marchés et à une violente déréglementation voulue par l’Organisation Mondiale du Commerce. Voici le temps de l’agriculture sans agriculteurs, comme en Argentine où les paysans et les sociétés rurales du cône sud ont été repoussées aux marges pampéennes, loin de leurs terres. Le soja transgénique a tout envahi. Des lots de milliers d’hectares sont proposés, le temps d’une récolte, sur les grandes places boursières du monde. On achète pour six mois cette terre et sa production comme un produit financier. On spécule sur la nourriture du monde. Voici le temps ou les fruits et les légumes qui poussent hors-sol sont disponibles en toute saison. Voici le temps ou la Corée se propose d’acheter un million cinq cent milles hectares à Madagascar pour assurer ses approvisionnements en riz. Le temps où l’on prévoit qu’en 2048, les pêcheurs ne remonteront plus que des méduses du fond des mers dévastées par une surpêche chronique … Voici l’impérieux moment où nous devons résoudre la seconde partie de l’équation de Malthus : la question des ressources. De la crise alimentaire que nous vivons devra sortir la réponse à deux questions qui engagent l’avenir de l’Humanité : comment nourrir les 9 milliards que nous seront en 2050 et avec quelle qualité, quel type de nourriture ? Encore les graines…

La suite est l’histoire de ce que nous mangeons, de la discrimination dont sont victimes ceux qui ne mangent pas et de la bêtise de ceux qui mangent trop. Ainsi, le professeur John Peterson Myers, chercheur en sciences pour la santé environnementale, présente les choses de la manière suivante lorsqu’il s’exprime en public : « Si vous pensez à votre famille et à vos amis proches, combien d’entre eux ont été directement ou indirectement atteint d’un cancer ? Levez la main… Atteint d’un diabète ?... Des parents ou des amis stériles ?... Maintenant, j’aimerais que tous ceux qui ont levé la main au moins une fois lèvent la main de nouveau. » Les trois quarts du public ont la main en l’air. « Regardez autour de vous, vous verrez qu’un pourcentage important de gens qui habitent notre planète est atteint d’une maladie que la science croit liée aux facteurs environnementaux. Un scientifique américain a constaté le printemps dernier que la nouvelle génération d’enfants est la première de l’histoire moderne à être en moins bonne santé que ses parents ! » Les populations des pays riches ont des problèmes de fertilité à cause de la qualité dégradée de leur alimentation : les malthusiens qui prônaient la stérilisation des pauvres doivent se retourner dans leurs tombes !

La première « révolution verte », celle de l’après Seconde Guerre mondiale, était dirigé par le secteur public. Les institutions publiques et les gouvernements contrôlaient la recherche, le développement agricole et les politiques agraires. La seconde « révolution verte », celle des biotechnologies et des Organismes Génétiquement Modifiés, est dirigée par une firme privée américaine : Monsanto. Premier semencier du monde, premier fournisseur de graines… La première « révolution verte » était bâtie sur l’utilisation massive de produits chimiques et d’équipements motorisés, mais son objectif ultime était tout de même de fournir plus de nourriture et d’assurer la sécurité alimentaire de la planète. Aujourd’hui, le bilan est là. Pour paraphraser Winston Churchill : « Il est fini le temps des promesses douteuses et des négociations stériles, voici venu le temps des conséquences ». Les sols appauvris, les pollutions massives, la qualité des aliments produits qui s’effondre et, pour finir, de nombreux problèmes de santé dans les populations. Et que dire des agriculteurs, maraîchers et autres viticulteurs atteints de leucémies, de leurs enfants souffrant de malformations congénitales après des années d’exposition familiale aux produits phytosanitaires utilisés massivement ?

La seconde « révolution verte » est dirigée par Monsanto, le roi de la graine. La seconde « révolution verte » n’a rien à voir avec la sécurité alimentaire. Encore moins avec la souveraineté alimentaire des Etats. Son but ultime est de contrôler le vivant à travers une série de brevets. Les OGM sont un moyen de privatiser la nourriture de l’Humanité et Monsanto est en position de quasi-monopole. « Nous vous possédons, nous possédons tous ceux qui achètent nos produits », déclarait un représentant de Monsanto, lors du procès que la firme intentait à un paysan américain qui refusait payer les royalties de semences qui lui avait été imposées.

Les OGM de Monsanto sont présents dans le monde entier grâce à une politique commerciale particulièrement agressive incluant la corruption de gouvernement (en Indonésie) ou de commission scientifique (au Canada), la falsification de documents (dans le magazine Science) ou l’empoisonnement de population, comme à Anniston, au Texas. Autant de comportements et de méthodes qui rappellent étrangement les politiques coloniales. Ainsi le brevetage du vivant serait une autre forme de colonisation. Selon la physicienne indienne Vandana Shiva, interrogée par Marie-Monique Robin, le brevetage du vivant est dans la continuité de la première colonisation. Le mot « patente » qui signifie « brevet » en anglais, en espagnol ou en allemand, vient de l’époque de la conquête. C’était par une « lettre patente » (du latin patens, ouvert, évident) portant le sceau des souverains d’Europe, que ceux-ci accordaient un droit exclusif à des gens d’armes pour qu’ils conquièrent des terres étrangères en leur nom. Au moment où l’Europe colonisait le monde, les « patentes » visaient une conquête territoriale, tandis que les brevets d’aujourd’hui visent une conquête économique à travers l’appropriation des organismes vivants par les nouveaux souverains que sont les multinationales comme Monsanto. Les brevets d’hier et d’aujourd’hui reposent sur un déni de la vie qui préexistait avant l’arrivée du colonisateur. Lorsque les Européens ont colonisé l’Amérique, les terres du Nouveau Monde ont été déclarées terra nulius, littéralement « terres vides », sous entendu « vides de nous, les colonisateurs ». De la même manière, le brevetage du vivant est fondé sur une hypothèse de « vie vide », car tant que les organismes vivants n’ont pas été modifiés génétiquement en laboratoire, ils n’ont pas de valeur. C’est un déni du travail et du savoir-faire de millions de personnes qui ont entretenu la biodiversité de la vie depuis des millénaires et qui, de surcroît, en vivent.

Ainsi, pour en arriver à ce stade, depuis la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale, on a sélectionné, irradié, défolié, bombardé les graines et les semences afin qu’elles donnent toujours plus. Mais plus de quoi ? Plus de nourriture ou plus de cancers et de diabètes ? En février 2009, l’Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments a rendu un avis favorable à l’introduction du maïs génétiquement modifié pour résister aux insecticides. Les tests ont concerné une génération de rats alors qu’il est avéré que les problèmes de santé induits par les OGM apparaissent après consommation par plusieurs générations…

L’essayiste Naomi Klein me confiait récemment lors d’une interview que ce n’est pas la première fois que nous assistons à ce type de comportement de domination commerciale. Il y a déjà eu de nombreux exemples, et c’est à cela qu’elle fait référence en parlant de « doctrine du choc ». De manière quasiment systématique, au cœur des crises contemporaines, qu’elles soient financières, pétrolières, ou encore alimentaires, et même dans le cas des catastrophes naturelles, on se retrouve face au programme des néo-libéraux. Ce n’est pas un secret, ce n’est pas un complot : il y a une certaine vision du monde prônée par les grandes institutions comme l’Organisation Mondiale du Commerce, ou le Fond Monétaire International. Mais ce modèle n’a pas réussi partout, il y a encore des résistances, des politiques à travers le monde qui ne s’y plient pas, et du coup, ce qui se passe en temps de crise est perçu par ces institutions comme une formidable opportunité d’imposer leur vision néo-libérales du monde. Les vieilles recettes ressurgissent, et en étant simplement reformatées, elles sont proposées comme étant soudainement les réponses à la crise, comme étant les « solutions » à la crise.

Si l’on reprend le problème de la crise alimentaire, du point de vue des attentes néo-libérales, on sait quelles politiques n’ont pas totalement fonctionné. L’une d’entre elles, qui vise tous les pays du monde, est la campagne pour autoriser la modification génétique des aliments. Il y a des pays dans lesquels, à la suite d’une forte mobilisation des agriculteurs, des associations écologiques ont réussi à faire passer des lois pour bloquer l’importation de semences génétiquement modifiées. Cela a créé une très grande frustration chez les grandes firmes agro-alimentaires. Il y a également des pays en voie de développement qui refusent de retirer totalement les moyens de protection qu’ils accordent à leurs industries agricoles nationales, en particulier parce que l’Europe et les Etats-unis continuent à subventionner leurs exportations. Ces protections publiques des agricultures nationales forment LE principal obstacle à la progression des politiques néo-libérales. C’est le grand point de frictions entre les pays africains, l’Inde et les Etats-Unis suivis par l’Europe. Depuis l’échec des négociations de Seattle, lors du sommet de l’OMC, c’est devenu LE problème majeur des néo-libéraux.

Aujourd’hui, dans le contexte actuel de crise alimentaire mondiale, de famine, de panique dû à cette crise, on assiste à un nouvel assaut néo-libéral. Une nouvelle pression de la part des grandes firmes du business agro-alimentaire américain et européen qui tentent d’éliminer les aides indispensables et élémentaires mises en place par certains Etats pour préserver leur souveraineté alimentaire. A la faveur de la crise alimentaire, le FMI, la Banque Mondiale et d’autres institutions internationales exercent de très fortes pressions afin que les Etats qui ont un besoin vital de capitaux lèvent les restrictions concernant l’importation d’OGM, les barrières qui protègent leur agriculture nationale, pour qu’ils libéralisent leurs économies. La complicité des institutions internationales avec cet état de fait a poussé de nombreux gouvernements d’Afrique et d’Amérique Latine a lancer un appel pour défendre le droit à la souveraineté alimentaire qui est réellement menacée. Cet appel revendique l’idée que la nourriture est un droit humain et non une marchandise que l’on peut traiter comme un bien de consommation. En effet, considérer la nourriture comme un simple bien est extrêmement dangereux.

L’une des ripostes au néo-libéralisme à été de relancer le débat sur le droit à la nourriture ; qu’elle ne soit pas considérée comme un produit commercial, mais envisagée comme un droit essentiel de l’Humanité. Les institutions internationales, les Nations Unies, n’ont pas défendu ce droit aussi ardemment qu’elles auraient dû le faire, elles n’ont pas pris la responsabilité qui est la leur, car la nourriture est inscrite en tant que droit fondamental dans la déclaration des Droits de l’Homme des Nations Unies.

La nourriture est en train de devenir un bien de plus en plus précieux, donc une industrie d’autant plus lucrative. Aujourd’hui, les choix politiques des gouvernements occidentaux sont clairs et les populations semblent sous le choc. Cependant, les quelques déclarations d’intentions et la couche de peinture verte passée à la hâte sur la cupidité des grands industriels de l’agro-alimentaire peuvent pousser les populations vers une pensée plus radicale. Une pensée qui amènerait à la possibilité de quitter le modèle agricole actuel. Dans un environnement de changement climatique, de raréfaction de l’eau et de crise, les grands semenciers ont une opportunité formidable d’étendre leur pouvoir sur le monde au détriment d’une nourriture de qualité, de l’environnement et du droit inaliénable de l’Humanité que représente l’accès aux ressources alimentaires. Allons-nous laisser faire ?

GMO WILL CREATE MORE HUNGER & FAMINE, says priest

National Catholic Reporter

06 June 2009

While the Pontifical Academy for Sciences discussed the pros of genetically modified organisms on Monday, Columban Missionary Fr. Sean McDonagh was across Rome making the case for the "con" point of view. McDonagh organized a small demonstration near the Piazza del Popolo, which was joined by a few left-of-center political movements in Italy. A large banner read, "No to GMOs, yes to food security," and a smaller sign addressed the Vatican gathering: "Pontifical Academy of Sciences, do not ally with those who, promoting GMOs, contribute to hunger in the world. Listen to the words of the Holy Father!" A well-known writer on environmental themes, McDonagh is a veteran Irish missionary who spent more than 20 years in the Philippines. He's an outspoken critic of GMOs; in 2003, he published Patenting Life? Stop! Is Corporate Greed Forcing us to Eat Genetically Engineered Food? McDonagh spoke to NCR on the margins of the demonstration.

Q: Promoters of GMOs bill them as a strategy for combating hunger. Why do you claim the exact opposite?

At the moment, almost all GMOs (canola, Bt corn, soy) are actually animal feeds. You're getting more of a meat dimension in the diets of people all over the world. It's estimated that with a traditional Asian diet, including a little bit of meat, we could support about eight to nine billion people on the planet. But if we go down the European route of eating a lot of meat, we'll able to support maybe one and one-half to two billion. In other words, the direction GMOs take us is going to create famine and hunger in many parts of the world. That's number one.

Number two is because all genetically modified seeds are now patented, you're giving enormous control to a handful of corporations over the seeds of the staple crops of the world. It started with rice, then corn, now they're looking to wheat and potatoes. This should be totally unacceptable to anyone. Forget about the science of whether they're safe or not. To give six Western corporations, in the United States and Europe, control over the seeds of the world is outrageous.

I have a particular problem with patenting living organisms. It entered our human reality through a decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in 1980, with Diamond v. Chakrabarty. It was never discussed in any parliament of the world. This extraordinary control, I would even call it domination, has been given to corporations. This, by the way, comes at the same time that these same people are promoting 'free trade.' The levels of mischievousness and deceit involved are actually gargantuan. If free trade is good, why shouldn't sharing knowledge freely be good?

I come at it from the perspective of a missionary. I lived in the Philippines for 25 years, and I saw the mixed results, even of the Green Revolution, on the poor. GMOs will only exacerbate that, because not only will you have to buy your seeds, but you also have to buy the glyphosate, which is the Ready Roundup (a herbicide manufactured by Monsanto designed for use with genetically modified crops.) You're getting crops now with multiple traits genetically engineered into them. There may be all kinds of problems with human health and the environment, but even if there weren't, you might not want these traits.

What about claims of dramatically improved yields?

The point of the recent "Failure to Yield" report from the Union of Concerned Scientists is that the increase in yield in crops over the last 25 to 30 years has come from conventional breeding. It has nothing to do with GMOs at all, or very little. This report was just published two weeks ago. I would consider it a very objective study. It looks at soy, at corn, at canola, and so on. There's no increase in yields at all, which there was in the Green Revolution, so it's quite different.

My main concern, however, is giving this control to corporations. For example, 60 percent of lettuce in the United States is now controlled by Monsanto. This is frightening. In the 19th century, all kinds of securities and exchanges agencies were created to move in on monopolies. Of course, those were monopolies on things like telephones. Now they want to build a monopoly on food. That, mind you, is precisely what they're after.

Feeding the world is about distributing food to those who need it, or distributing land so that people can grow their own food. I always give the example of Brazil. It's now the fourth largest exporter of food in the world, mainly animal feeds for Europe and America, and yet 35 to 36 million people go to bed hungry there every night.

Even if GMOs did increase the yield, is that extra food going to go to the people who need it? The reality is it won't, because Monsanto is not the St. Vincent DePaul Society. They're out there to make a big profit. They want to get monopoly control, and they make no bones about that.

All the experts at Catholic development agencies have taken the position that this is not the way to address food security, and that there's no magic bullet for hunger. What's needed is land reform, financial aid to small-scale farmers, markets where they can get value so they're not caught by the middle man. I've spent 40 years at this sort of work, and I know that's the way forward.

We also need to promote diversity in the diet. This is the whole problem with the supposed "golden rice." Why should you say to poor people that they have to eat rice three times a day? Why not a little bit of vegetables, so they'd get all the vitamin A they need? To me, it's extraordinary that $100 million has been spent on golden rice, when you could make a lot of vegetable seeds available in developing countries for that kind of money.

What about the safety question?

The answer is, we don't know. That's the bottom line. Studies done, for example, by Arpad Pusztai in 1999 on Bt corn, or on Bt potatoes that were fed to rats, found problems with their inner organs and also problems with their brain. Being a good scientist, he did not say, 'Now we should reject the technology.' He said we should look to see where the problem might be. He wanted to see if the problem was in the gene itself, because you're brining to the target organism a gene that normally the immune system of the target organism would attack. That's what your immune system does. He was ready to go into the various dimensions of that question - for example, is it the promoter? That is, the virus or bacteria that's actually used to bring genetic material across to another organism. What happened, of course, is history. He was fired from the Rowett Institute in Scotland. He was accused of being a bad scientist. They said he would never get his research published in The Lancet, which he actually did. All he was basically saying is that this technology creates problems and we need to look at them.

The problem with regulatory agencies at the moment is that they're much too tied to political and economic interests. The United States is a very good example. It's amazing just how hard wired Monsanto is to the Environmental Protection Agency and to the Food and Drug Administration. There's a real problem there, as a researcher showed with the Bt potato. When he went to the FDA, they said, we deal with potatoes but not the GM kind, that's over at the EPA. When he went to the EPA, they said, we don't deal with foodstuff, we deal with chemicals. Between them, they couldn't figure out which one was responsible for allowing this to be brought onto the market.

The real problem is that all the research on these genetically modified organisms is done by the corporations, who then stand to gain trillions of dollars. Biotech is one of the few industries that has not taken a dip in the current economic crisis, for the very simple reason that you have to eat every day. There's almost no independent verification. A Russian scientist named Ermakova has studied Bt soy, and found something similar to what Pusztai found with potatoes. I believe it's incumbent upon government to do public science and to protect the common good of ordinary citizens.

We are now all guinea pigs. We don't know what the impact will be, and it may be two or three generations before we find out. Don't forget, with ozone-layer-destroying CFCs it was 60 years before we knew they were harmful. They were considered to be the wonder chemical, non-toxic and so on ... you couldn't get any better. It was one man, British scientist Joe Farman, who actually found out by land research in Antarctica that they were doing irreparable damage to the ozone.

It's the same thing with impact on the environment: We don't know. But we do know that if you bring GMOs into a country like the Philippines, where we don't have any idea how many species are really there, now you're playing Russian roulette.

What other justice concerns do you have with GMOs?

I have a particular concern if they introduce, which they're threatening to do, this terminator gene, a plant whose seeds are genetically blocked from reproducing. I believe that's a huge moral issue. You're creating something that will not germinate on a second planting. I can't think of anything that's so ... I hate the word 'evil,' but certainly morally wrong. It's incredible that someone would create an organism that is deliberately sterile, particularly in the area of food. Food is a gift to all us, and obviously necessary for human life.

Companies argue that if they can't protect their investment somehow, there's no incentive to do research and to develop better products.

The evidence shows the opposite. If you look at the history of patents, most countries, including the United States, stole patents from other countries until they got their own economic and technological processes up and going. A Korean economist at Cambridge has done a very good study on that, and he calls it "kicking away the ladder." You're asking these so-called developing countries to follow these patent laws, but let's have a look at whether any of you actually followed it - beginning with post-Tudor Britain, right up to the United States, or more recent Japan and Korea.

Patents are for watches, not food. Patents always have to consider the trade off between the individual and the common good. Food, water and air should not be under a regime of patents, because we all need them. If you don't have air for five minutes you're dead, if you don't have water for five days you're dead, and if you don't have food for 60 days you're dead. For Christians, this is the first request in the Our Father: 'Give us this day our daily bread.' It's a huge issue, and I think patents are completely morally out of place. Churches, especially the Catholic church, that claim to be pro-life should have a serious moral critique of this arrogance.

It's also stealing, because what did they patent? They patented one small dimension of iot. What about the farmers in the Philippines for the last 5,000 years who created all the other traits? What about the farmers down on the altiplano in Peru who created 5,000 varieties of potatoes? Are they going to be compensated? I think governments should set up processes to say, okay, this is the money you've spent, this is the value to society as we see it, and therefore you should get 'x' amount of money. Ownership, however, is something completely different.

Here's another dimension of the injustice. The northern world, the United States and Europe, is poor biologically. Ireland, for example, has ten species of trees. Where I worked in the Philippines, I got money from the Australian government to do a study in a local forest. In a single hectare, you could get up to 130 species of trees. There are 5,000 species total in that forest. The south is rich biologically but poor financially. Northern countries are using trade agreements to go down to the south, take advantage of its diversity, change slight little bits of it, and then bring it back to patent it. It's exploitation of the worst order. It makes Magellan, Cromwell, and the Pizarro brothers look like dime-store operators.

Do you believe the Pontifical Academy for Sciences is being exploited?

It is. This is the Pontifical Academy for Sciences, so let's start with the 'pontifical' part. It's a Catholic organization. Who are the church's real experts in this area? I would say people like myself. I would say particularly the aid and development agencies, such as Misereor, Cafod, and Caritas. ... They thought so little of this expertise in the Catholic church that they didn't invite a single person from any one of those agencies.

Further, anyone who ever claims to be a scientist should hear the other side. That goes back to Plato. What are they afraid of? Why didn't they set up a decent colloquium over there? Also, why don't they take into account numerous independent studies in the last three years which have concluded that the way to food security is not through GM crops? Why just discard all that? There's a very recent study from Africa on the yields from organic farming, saying this is the kind of thing we should be promoting. I would consider this gathering grossly incompetent.

Why do you believe they're doing it this way?

They want to get rid of the very minimal regulations that we have at the moment. They said it in the introduction to the study week, and every one of them says it in his abstract. That's their goal. Bishop Sanchez Sorondo (chancellor of the Pontifical Academy) has said that the purpose is to examine whether GM crops are safe, but I'm sorry, that's not it. The purpose is to use the prestige of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and its good name to beat on governments so that you can reduce regulation.

I would also claim that they want to use something like the Potrykus rice as a battering ram against the regulatory process. The strategy is that if you get it through once, you've set the precedent. They say they want it for altruistic reasons, but this language of talking about the poor and about development is grossly misleading. I'm a professional anthropologist who has been working in the area of development economics, I think it's patronizing.

Proponents of GMOs suggest that you're guilty of neo-colonialism, in the sense that you presume to know what's best for the poor in Africa and other places.

Let them come to where I was in the Philippines, and ask there. Let's go to the southern part of Brazil, or Argentina, where this is being pushed on people. Let's do a real empirical study, and I think you'd find that the people who are affected by it are very negative towards it. I took up this issue only because I saw the impact it's had on people living there. I believe I have a better take on what's happening in the Philippines, for example, than anyone in the study week ... including the only person from the Philippines there, the director of the International Rice Research Center, but he's an American.

I was not against GMOs at first. When I arrived I taught anthropology and linguistics at the University of Mindanao in the Philippines, the biggest agricultural university in the region. At that stage, I thought, if you can plant crops as far as the eye can see, why not? It was only as I began to see the other aspects, including wiping out genetic diversity, that I changed my mind. I looked back at my Irish experience. We used to have these massive potato fields, and then suddenly in 1845, one pathogen wiped them out. I began to learn a lot about the importance of biodiversity.

The pro-GMO argument is comparable to what we used to hear from the bankers. They used to tell us we need a light touch with the regulations, because we're the entrepreneurs, we're the people who create wealth that sends the boys and girls to school and puts the Euro in the collection plate on Sunday. If a banker came to you today and tried to say that there shouldn't be any regulation, we'd all laugh. We wouldn't even engage him intellectually. The same is true with these lads. The tide has gone out on what they want, and rightly so, because we're dealing with very serious issues.

Humankind has a very bad record of moving biodiversity around to the wrong places. It's like the guy who brought rabbits out to Australia with disastrous results. This is biological science, which is different from architecture or engineering. If those guys get something wrong and the building collapses, too bad, but you can fix it. Biology reproduces. The Australian government can't fix the rabbits. The level of regulation should be multiple times more stringent than it is.

The study week invited an African bishop. What's your sense of where African Catholics stand on GMOs?

I've had conversations with African people, including religious orders, working in this area. We just had a conference in Assisi on ecology and integrity of creation at the heart of Christian mission. There are all sorts of efforts by religious to build up organic agriculture in Africa. ... I feel this man shouldn't have come here. If they'd invited me, I wouldn't go. You just give them legitimacy, and it's not properly structured. I'm not a geneticist or a plant biologist, but based on the expertise I have as a missionary, I know this is not the way to go for sustainable agriculture. If it was, they'd have the right people at this meeting.

Are you worried that the Vatican is going to come out with an official pro-GMO statement?

Not at all. We were more concerned back in 2003, when Cardinal Renato Martino began to talk about how maybe GMOs could feed the world. We were very worried then, but not so much now. The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, for example, may not yet have assessed the science, but they have begun to see the impact on developing countries. On January 1, there was an article in L'Osservatore Romano, in which Martino was quoted on that side of it.

KISSINGER'S NSSM 200: BLUEPRINT FOR MASS FAMINE & HUMAN GENOCIDE

Henry Kissinger's 1974 Plan for Food Control Genocide ( NSSM200), which is currently actively being implemented through the fraudulent and forceful widespread of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) throughout the world, will result in the largest economic, social, ecological & environmental GENOCIDE in the history of humanity...

CONTROL OIL AND YOU CONTROL NATIONS.
CONTROL FOOD AND YOU CONTROL PEOPLE.

Henry Kissinger

This article appeared as part of a feature in the December 8, 1995 issue of Executive Intelligence Review, and was circuclated extensively by the Schiller Insitute Food for Peace Movement. It is reprinted here as part of the package: “Who Is Responsible for the World Food Shortage?”

source: http://www.schillerinstitute.org/food_for_peace/kiss_nssm_jb_1995.html

Kissinger’s 1974 Plan for Food Control Genocide

by Joseph Brewda

Dec. 8, 1995

On Dec. 10, 1974, the U.S. National Security Council under Henry Kissinger completed a classified 200-page study, “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The study falsely claimed that population growth in the so-called Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) was a grave threat to U.S. national security. Adopted as official policy in November 1975 by President Gerald Ford, NSSM 200 outlined a covert plan to reduce population growth in those countries through birth control, and also, implicitly, war and famine. Brent Scowcroft, who had by then replaced Kissinger as national security adviser (the same post Scowcroft was to hold in the Bush administration), was put in charge of implementing the plan. CIA Director George Bush was ordered to assist Scowcroft, as were the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture.

The bogus arguments that Kissinger advanced were not original. One of his major sources was the Royal Commission on Population, which King George VI had created in 1944 “to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population.” The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since “a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production.” The combined effects of increasing population and industrialization in its colonies, it warned, “might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West,” especially effecting “military strength and security.”

NSSM 200 similarly concluded that the United States was threatened by population growth in the former colonial sector. It paid special attention to 13 “key countries” in which the United States had a “special political and strategic interest”: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. It claimed that population growth in those states was especially worrisome, since it would quickly increase their relative political, economic, and military strength.

For example, Nigeria: “Already the most populous country on the continent, with an estimated 55 million people in 1970, Nigeria's population by the end of this century is projected to number 135 million. This suggests a growing political and strategic role for Nigeria, at least in Africa.” Or Brazil: “Brazil clearly dominated the continent demographically.” The study warned of a “growing power status for Brazil in Latin America and on the world scene over the next 25 years.”

Food as a weapon

There were several measures that Kissinger advocated to deal with this alleged threat, most prominently, birth control and related population-reduction programs. He also warned that “population growth rates are likely to increase appreciably before they begin to decline,” even if such measures were adopted.

A second measure was curtailing food supplies to targetted states, in part to force compliance with birth control policies: “There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.”

“Mandatory programs may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now,” the document continued, adding, “Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?”

Kissinger also predicted a return of famines that could make exclusive reliance on birth control programs unnecessary. “Rapid population growth and lagging food production in developing countries, together with the sharp deterioration in the global food situation in 1972 and 1973, have raised serious concerns about the ability of the world to feed itself adequately over the next quarter of century and beyond,” he reported.

The cause of that coming food deficit was not natural, however, but was a result of western financial policy: “Capital investments for irrigation and infrastucture and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many LDCs. For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food.”

“It is questionable,” Kissinger gloated, “whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis.” Consequently, “large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades—a kind the world thought had been permanently banished,” was foreseeable—famine, which has indeed come to pass.

The official reprot can be read at the following link:

http://wlym.com/text/NSSM200.htm

GMO's: SEEDS OF ECONOMIC, SOCIAL & ECOLOGICAL GENOCIDE

Seeds of Destruction

The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

by F. William Engdahl

Seeds of Destruction: The Geopolitics of GM Food,

www.globalresearch.ca

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.More on Monsanto

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.

References

1. B.K. Eakman, "The Cloning of the American Mind," gives information on Rockefeller Foundation funding of eugenics.

s. Jim Heron, "Population Politics and the Shambles of Africa in http://catholiceducation.org/articles/population/pc0005.html.

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, http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/promise042403.cfm. "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.

source: http://www.currentconcerns.ch/archive/2004/05/20040505.php 5mar2005



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