By William Engdahl
PART II
The Rockefeller Plan
CHAPTER 3
"Tricky" Dick Nixon
and Trickier Rockefellers
America's Vietnam Paradigm Shift
When Richard Nixon stepped into the White House as
President in January 1969, the United States of America was
in a deep crisis. A very select few saw the crisis as a long-awaited
opportunity. Most Americans, however, did not.
For the next six years, Nixon was to preside over the first major
military defeat ever suffered by the United States, the loss of the
war in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of American students
were marching on Washington in protest against a war which
seemed utterly senseless. Morale among young Army draftee soldiers
in Vietnam had collapsed to an all-time low, with drug addiction
rampant among GI's, and enraged rebellious soldiers "fragging"
or killing their company commanders in the field. America's youth
were being brought back home in body bags by the thousands. In
those days the Pentagon still allowed the press to photograph the
returning dead.
The US economy was in severe shock. It was the first time its
post-war superiority was being eclipsed by newer and more efficient
industries in Western Europe and Japan. By 1969, as Nixon took office, the US dollar itself had entered a terminal crisis as foreign
central banks demanded gold instead of paper dollars for their
growing trade surpluses with the United States. The post-war profit
rate of American corporations, which had peaked in 1965, was now
in steady decline.
American corporations found that they could make higher .profits
by going abroad and buying foreign companies. It was the beginning
of significant American corporate multi-nationalism, the precursor
to the later phenomenon of globalization. US jobs were disappearing
in traditional domestic industries, and the Rust Belt was
spreading across once-thriving steel producing regions. The post-war
pillar of American industrial superiority was vanishing, and fast.
American industry was rusting as its factories, most of which
were built before and during the war, had become obsolescent compared
with the modern new post-war industry in Western Europe
and Japan. Corporate America faced severe recession and its banks
were hard pressed to find profitable areas for lending.
From 1960 to 1974, debt began to grow at an explosive rate in
every corner of the US economy. By 1974, corporate debt, home
mortgage debt, consumer debt and local government debt had
risen by a combined 300%. During the same IS-year period, the
debt of the US Government had risen by an even more impressive
1,000%. By the early 1970's, the United States was by every traditional
measure in a deep economic crisis. Little wonder there was
growing skepticism abroad that the US dollar would continue to
hold its value against gold.
Within a quarter century after the 1944 creation of the Bretton
Woods monetary system, the establishment's version of an
American Century dominating world affairs was rapidly running
up against fundamental problems, problems which led to bold new
searches among the US establishment and its wealthiest families, for
new areas of profit.
Food or, as it was about to be renamed, US agribusiness, was to
become a vital pillar of a new American economic domination by
the 1960's, along with a far more expensive petroleum. It was a
paradigm shift.1
The Vietnam War and its divisive sodal impact were to last until
the humiliating resignation of Nixon in August 1974, a losing victim
of power struggles within the US establishment.
No figure had played a more decisive role in those power plays
than former New York Governor, Nelson Rockefeller, a man who
desperately wanted to be President if he could. To reach that goal
in the midst of Nixon's crisis was in fact the main aim of Nelson
Rockefeller. Rockefeller, together with his brothers David, Laurance,
John, and Winthrop, ran the family's foundation along with numerous
other tax-exempt entities such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
At the beginning of the crisis-torn 1970's, certain influential
persons within the American establishment had clearly decided a
drastic shift in direction of US global policy was in order.
The most influential persons were David and Nelson Rockefeller,
and the group of influential political and business figures around
the Rockefeller family. The family's power center was the exclusive
organization created in the aftermath of World War I, the New
York Council on Foreign Relations.
In the 1960's the Rockefellers were at the power center of the
US establishment. The family and its various foundations dominated
think-tanks, academia, government and private business in
the 1960's in a manner no other single family in United States history had managed to then. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had
been their hand-picked protege, recruited from Harvard in the late
1950's to work for a new Rockefeller Foundation project 2
David Rockefeller's "Crisis of Democracy"
One response by the US establishment inner-circles to the late 1960's
crisis in the American hegemony, was a decision to create a
new division of the global economic spoils, for the first time inviting
Japan into the "rich-men's club".
In 1973, following a meeting of some 300 influential, hand picked friends of the Rockefeller brothers from Europe, North
America and Japan, David Rockefeller expanded the influence of his
establishment friends and founded a powerful new global policy circle, the Trilateral Commission. The "triangle" included North
America, Europe and now, Japan.
Among the 1973 founding members of David Rockefeller's
Trilateral Commission were Zbigniew Brzezinski, and a Georgia
Governor and peanut farmer, James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, along
with George H.W. Bush, Paul Volcker, later named by President
Jimmy Carter as Federal Reserve chairman, and Alan Greenspan,
then a Wall Street investment banker. It was no small-time
operation.
The idea of a new, top organization similar to the US Council
on Foreign Relations, incorporating not only Western European
policy elites, but also Japan for the first time, grew from talks
between David Rockefeller and his Maine neighbor, Zbigniew
Brzezinski. Brzezinski was then Professor at Columbia University's
Russian Studies Center, a recipient of generous Rockefeller
Foundation funding.
Brzezinski had just written a book where he proposed the idea
of consolidation of American corporate and banking influence
worldwide via a series of regular closed-door policy meetings
between the select business elites of Europe, North America and
Japan.
His personal views were not exactly the stuff of traditional
American democracy and liberty. In this little-known book, Between
Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, published in 1970,
Brzezinski referred to the significant policy voices in the United
States as, "the ruling elite:' stating bluntly that, "Society would be
dominated by an elite ... which would not hesitate to achieve its
political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing
public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and
control." .
Brzezinski was chosen by David Rockefeller to be the first
Executive Director for Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission.
The Trilateral Commission, a private elite organization, laid the
basis of a new global strategy for a network of interlinked international
elites, many of them business partners of the Rockefellers,
whose combined financial, economic and political weight was unparalleled. Its ambition was to create what Trilateral member
George H.W. Bush later called a "new world order:' constructed
on the designs of Rockefeller and kindred wealthy interests. The
Trilateral group laid the foundation of what by the 1990's came to
be called "globalization."
One of the first policy papers issued by David Rockefeller's
Trilateral Commission group was drafted by Harvard Professor
Samuel Huntington, the person who was to draft a controversial
"Clash of Civilizations" thesis in the mid-1990's, which laid the
basis for the later Bush Administration War on Terror.
The 1975 Huntington report was titled: "The Crisis of
Democracy."3
For Huntington and David Rockefeller's establishment associates
at the Trilateral Commission, the "crisis:' however, was the fact
that hundreds of thousands of ordinary American citizens had
begun to protest their government's policies. America, or at least its
power elite, was threatened, Huntington declared by an "excess of
democracy:' The unruly "natives" were clearly getting too "restless"
for the elite circles of the establishment around Huntington and
David Rockefeller.
Huntington went on to warn, "The effective operation of a democratic
political system usually requires some measure of apathy and
non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups." He
also insisted that, " ... secrecy and deception ... are ... inescapable
. attributes of ... government."4
The unreliable nature of democratic governments, subject to
the pressures of an unpredictable popular mood, only demonstrated
for these circles around Huntington and David Rockefeller's
Trilateral Commission the wisdom of, among other things, privatizing
public enterprise and deregulating industry. The movement
to deregulate and privatize government services actually began
under President Jimmy Carter, a hand-picked David Rockefeller
candidate, and a Trilateral Commission founding member.
This was hardly the song of "America, the Beautiful:' The document
was an alarm call from the US power establishment and its
wealthy patrons. Drastic situations required drastic measures.
Kissinger and Food Politics
Henry Kissinger was moving to take complete control over the US
foreign policy apparatus by 1973.
And as both Secretary of State and the President's National
Security Adviser, Kissinger was to make food a centerpiece of his
diplomacy along with oil geopolitics.5
Food had played a strategic, albeit less central role in post-war
US foreign policy with the onset of the Cold War. It was masked
under the rhetoric of programs with positive sounding names,
such as Food for Peace (P.L. 480). Often Washington daimed its
food exports subsidies were tied to domestic pressure from its
farmers. This was far from the real reason, but it served to cover the
true situation, that American agriculture was in the process of being
transformed from family-run small farms to global agribusiness ·
concerns.
Domination of global agriculture trade was to be one of the
central pillars of post-war Washington policy, along with domination
of world oil markets and non-communist world defense
sales. Henry Kissinger reportedly declared to one journalist at the
time, "If you control oil, you control nations. If you control food,
you control people."
By the early 1970's, Washington, or more accurately, very powerful
private cirdes, including the Rockefeller family, were about to
try to control both, in a process whose daunting scope was perhaps
its best deception.
Initially, the agriculture weapon was used by Washington more
as a dub to hit other countries .. Starting in the 1970's, there was a
major shift in food policy. This redirection was a precursor to the
agro-chemical cartels of the 1970's.
The defining event for the emergence of a new US food policy was
a world food crisis in 1973, which took place at the same time that
Henry Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy" triggered the OPEC 400%
increase in world oil prices. The combination of a drastic energy
price shock and a global food shortage for grain staples, was the
breeding ground for a significant new Washington policy turn. The
turn was wrapped in "national security" secrecy.
In 1974 the United Nations held a major UN World Food
Conference in Rome. The Rome conference discussed two main
themes, largely on the initiative of the United States. The first was
supposedly alarming population growth in the context of world
food shortages, a one-sided formulation of the problem. The second
theme was how to deal with sudden changes in world food
supply and rises in prices. Prices for oil and grains were both rising
on international markets at annual rates of 300 to 400% at that
time.
A convenient if unintended consequence of the food crisis, was
a strategic increase in the geopolitical power of the world's largest
food surplus producer, the United States, over the world food supply
and, hence, global food prices. It was during this time that a
new alliance grew up between private US-based grain trading companies
and the US Government. That alliance laid the ground for
the later gene revolution.
The "Great Grain Robbery"
As Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger had made an internal power
play to control US agriculture policy, traditionally the domain of
the US Department of Agriculture. Kissinger did this through his
role in negotiating huge US grain sales to the Soviet Union in
exchange for Russian oil, in the months before the Rome Food
Conference.
The Soviets agreed to buy an unprecedented 30 million tons of
grain from the United States under the Kissinger deal. The amounts
were so huge that Washington turned to the private grain traders
like Cargill, not to its usual Government reserves, to sell Russia the
needed grain. That was part of the Kissinger plan. As an aide to
Kissinger explained at the time, "Agriculture policy is too important
to be left in the hands of the Agriculture Department." [I wish this POS would just f#*k off and die already.One of the worst things that ever happened to this country was this prick making policy D.C]
The Soviet grain sale was so large that it depleted world reserves
and allowed the trading companies to raise wheat and rice prices
by 70% and more in a matter of months. Wheat went from $65 a
ton to $110 a ton. Soybean prices doubled. At the same time, severe
drought had cut the grain harvests in India, China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Australia and other countries. The world was desperate
for imported grain and Washington was preparing to take
advantage of that desperation to radically change world food
markets and food trade.
The deal was called the "great grain robbery" in reference to the
overly friendly terms of sale to Moscow and the low price that year
paid to US farmers for the same grain. Kissinger had negotiated
the Soviet sale with the enticement of generous US Export-Import
Bank credits and other subsidies.6
The big winners were the US-based grain traders such as Cargill,
Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Continental Grain, who
emerged as true global agribusiness giants. Kissinger's new food
diplomacy created a global agriculture market for the first time.
This potential,for power and control over whole areas of the planet
was not lost on the US establishment, least of all, not on Kissinger.
In 1974 the world was reeling under the shock of the 400%
increase in world oil prices, a shock Kissinger had more than a little
to do with from behind the scenes.7
During this period, as world oil prices were going through the
roof, there was a catastrophic world harvest failure. The Soviet
grain harvest had been devastated through crop failure and other
problems. The United States was the world's only major surplus
supplier of wheat and other agriculture commodities. It marked a
major shift for Washington agriculture export policy.
Kissinger was both Secretary of State and National Security
Adviser to the President in early 1974. The Secretary of Agriculture
was Earl Lauer Butz, a friend of agribusiness, an avid promoter of
population control, a racist whose remarks about blacks cost him
his job, and who later was convicted for tax evasion.
Time magazine on November 11, 1974, concluded a special
report on the world food crisis, explaining why they were in favor
of triage, the wartime practice of deciding which war-wounded .
can survive and which left to die:
In the West, there is increasing talk of triage .... If the US decides
that the grant would simply go down the drain as a mere palliative
because the recipient country was doing little to improve its food
distribution or start a population control program, no help would
be sent. This may be a brutal policy, but it is perhaps the only kind
that can have any long-range impact. A triage approach could also
demand political concessions ... . Washington may feel no obligation
to help countries that consistently and strongly oppose it. As Earl
Butz told Time, "Food is a weapon. It is now one of the principal
tools in our negotiating kit."8
Providing food, however, was not to be the real weapon. The
denial of food-famine-was.
"When in Rome ... "
During the Cold War, Washington consistently opposed the creation
of internationally held grain reserves. The virtual depletion of
world food stocks prompted the 1974 UN World Food Conference
meeting in Rome. In 1972, when the world suffered an exceptionally
poor harvest, there were 209 million metric tons of grain, some
66 days' worth, in world reserve. In .1974 there were record grain
crops worldwide, yet the grain reserve was reduced to 25 million
metric tons, or 37 days. In 1975 there was estimated to be a 27-day
reserve after exceptionally large grain harvests.9
The problem was that the grain was there, but it was in the hands
of a handful of giant grain trading companies, all of them American.
This was the element that Kissinger had in mind when he spoke of
food as a weapon.
George McGovern, chairman of the Senate Committee on
Human Nutrition, stated at the time, "Private traders are in business
to turn investments into profit as rapidly as possible ... In
reality a reserve in private hands is no reserve at all. It is indeed
precisely the same market mechanism which has produced the situation
we face today."10
McGovern was not appreciated by the US establishment for
such comments. His bid against Nixon for the Presidency in 1972
was doomed to be a disastrous defeat for traditional elements in the Democratic Party. The trading giants were deliberately manipulating
available grain supply to hike prices. Because the US government
required no accurate grain reporting, only the grain giants like
Cargill and Continental Grain knew what they had.
James McHale, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Agriculture, had gone
to Rome in 1974 to plead for a sensible international food policy. He
pointed out that 95 percent of all grain reserves in the world at the
time were under the control of six multinational agribusiness corporations-Cargill
Grain Company, Continental Grain Company,
Cook Industries Inc., Dreyfus, Bunge Company and Archer-Daniel
Midland. All of them were American-based companies.11
This connection between Washington and the grain giants was
the heart of Kissinger's food weapon. Jean Pierre Laviec of the
International Union of Food Workers said in a statement released
at the Rome Food Conference, referring to the Big Six, "They decide
the quantities of vital inputs to be produced, the quantities of agricultural
products to be bought, where plants will be built and
investments made. The growth rate of agribusiness has risen during
the last ten years and ... has been directly proportional to the
increase of hunger and scarcity."12
What was to come in the following ten years and more would
far surpass what Laviec warned of in 1974. The United States was
about to reorganize the global food market along private corporate
lines, laying the background for the later "Gene Revolution" of the
1990's.
No one group played a more decisive role in that reshaping of
global agriculture during the next two decades than the Rockefeller
interests and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Nixon's Agriculture Export Strategy
The emergence of a US-dominated global market in grain and
agriculture commodities was part of a long-term US strategy which
began in the early 1970's under Richard Nixon. In August 1971,
Nixon had taken the dollar off the gold exchange standard of the
1944 Bretton Woods monetary system. He let it devalue in a freefall,
or float, as it was called. This was part of a strategy which included making US grain exports strategically competitive in
Europe and around the world.
Free trade was the war cry of the Nixon Administration. Cargill,
Continental Grain, Archer Daniels Midland were its new warriors.
In 1972, William Pearce became Nixon's Special Deputy
Representative for Trade Negotiations, with rank of Ambassador. He
had been one of the chief policy members of the President's
Commission on International Trade and Investment Policy, a special
trade group chaired by the former President of IBM, Albert Williams.
At that time Pearce was Cargill's Vice President for Public Affairs.
Not surprisingly, Pearce saw to it that the final Williams
Commission report to the President recommended that the US
should pressure other countries to eliminate agriculture trade barriers
which blocked imports of US agriculture products, and it
argued against policies that supported what Pearce preferred to
call "inefficient farmers." Pearce ensured that the Williams report
focused on how to expand US food exports.
Some years later, Cargill Vice Chairman, Walter B. Saunders, told
a National Grain and Feed Association convention in New Orleans,
"The fundamental problem with farm policy goes back nearly
50 years to the belief that the best way to protect farm income is to
link it to price .... Income must become less dependent on unit
prices and more dependent of production efficiencies, diversification
of income sources, better marketing and greater volume." 13 In
clear words, the family farmer had to get out of the way and let the
new giant agribusiness conglomerates dominate.
This policy shift, all in the name of the American virtue of "efficiency;'
was to have fateful consequences over the following three
decades.
Cargill's Pearce argued that American agriculture had unique
advantages of scale and efficiency, technology and capital, which
made it the natural contender for world export leader. Countries
trying to defend their own farmers such as the European Economic
Community, by his argument, were defending "inefficiency."
Washington was out to dismantle the European Common Agriculture
Policy, the backbone of France's post -war political stability.
The Williams-Pearce report used the global security umbrella
argument, pointing out, "many of the economic problems we face
today grow out of the overseas responsibilities the US has assumed
as the major power of the non-communist world." It forgot to
mention the deliberate background to that United States global
"policeman" role. It was a thinly veiled argument to justify US pressure
on its trading partners to open their markets to Cargill and
other US agribusiness giants, to "help repay" the US for its Cold
War role.
Pearce's strategy became a central part of the 1972 Nixon New
Economic Policy. Two years later, Cargill's Pearce was on the
President's Committee for Economic Development, where he developed
domestic US agriculture policy. There his target was to remove
US farming's "excess human resources" (sic), to drive hundreds of
thousands of family farmers into bankruptcy to make room for
vast agribusiness farming. He then went back to Cargill, yet another
practitioner of the revolving door system between select private
companies and the Government agencies they depend on.
The Pearce strategy, adopted by the Nixon Administration, was
a thinly veiled form of food imperialism. Europe, Japan and other
industrialized countries should give up their domestic agriculture
self-sufficiency support, and open the way for the United States to
become the world granary, the most "rational" use of world
resources. Anything else was patently "inefficient."
Washington would use the classic British "free trade" argument,
in play since the 1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws, where the dominate economic and trade power benefits from forcing removal of
trade protection of weaker competitors.
Pearce's, or more accurately, Cargill's strategy was to shape US
trade policy for the following three decades, and play a decisive
role in the ability of a handful of giant American agri-chemical
corporations to take over the world market in seeds and pesticides
with their GMO plants.
In order to become the world's most efficient agriculture producer,
Pearce argued, traditional American family-based farming
must give way to a major revolution in production. The family farm was to become the "factory farm," and agriculture was to
become "agribusiness."
The Williams Commission believed. that to carry out such "free
trade" policies, US agriculture would have to be converted into an
efficient export industry, phasing out domestic farm programs
designed to protect farm income and move to a "free market" oriented
agriculture. This approach was widely supported by corporate
agribusiness, big New York banks and investment firms who
saw the emerging agribusiness as a potential group of new "hot"
stocks for Wall Street. It became the cornerstone of the Nixon
Administration's farm policy.
Agribusiness and international trading giants like Cargill and
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), would set the priorities of US
agriculture policy. The idea of US food self-sufficiency was replaced
by a simple motto: what's good for Cargill and the grain export
trading companies was "good for American agriculture:' The family
farmer got lost somewhere in the shuffle, along with his Senate
champion, George McGovern.
By devaluing the dollar in August 1971, and adopting his New
Economic Plan (NEP), Nixon took a first step in carrying out the
new export policies. As the president of the National Grain and Feed
Association described it, "the NEP was very important in giving US
agriculture an advantage due to the devaluation of the dollar:'14
Pearce further argued that Third World countries should give up
trying to be food self-sufficient in wheat, rice, and other grains or
beef, and focus instead on small fruits, sugar or vegetables. They
should import the more efficient US grains and other commodities,
naturally shipped by Cargill at prices controlled by Cargill,
paying for it by export of the fruit and vegetables. In the bargain
they would also lose food self-sufficiency. This was to open a vastly
more strategic lever over developing countries over the next three
decades, control of their food.
When a poorer or less developed land removed defenses against
foreign food imports and opened its markets to mass-produced
US products, the results could be predicted, as Pearce and Cargill
well knew. According to economist J.W. Smith:
Highly mechanized farms on large acreages can produce units of food
cheaper than even the poorest paid farmers of the Third World. When
this cheap food is sold, or given, to the Third World, the local farm
economy is destroyed. If the poor and unemployed of the Third World
were given access to land, access to industrial tools, and protection
from cheap imports, they could plant high-protein/high calorie crops
and become self-sufficient in food. Reclaiming their land and utilizing
the unemployed would cost these societies almost nothing, feed
them well, and save far more money than they now pay for the socalled
"cheap" imported foods. 15
But such a sensible alternative was not to be allowed. The Nixon
Administration began the process of destroying the domestic food
production of developing countries as the opening shot in an undeclared
war to create a vast new global market in "efficient" American
food exports. Nixon also used the post-war trade regime known
as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to advance
this new global agribusiness export agenda. .
.
In 1972, the Nixon Administration, with Cargill's Pearce in the
key post of White House Deputy Trade Representative, and Peter
Flanigan as head of Nixon's Council on International Economic
Policy, developed the negotiating strategy for the upcoming GATT
multilateral trade and tariff negotiations. Their main target in the
next phase of their war for domination of world agriculture markets
was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European
Common Market countries, the European Community.16
The CAP had been built around protective tariffs when the
European Economic Community was first created in the late 1950's,
to prevent dumping of US and other agriculture products onto
the fragile post-war European market.
Pearce negotiated Congressional passage of the Trade Reform Act
of 1974, which directed US negotiators to trade off concessions
from the US in the industrial sector, in exchange for concessions to
the US in the agricultural sector. This only accelerated the decline
of many long-time US industries, like steel, which soon left an
unseemly residue in the jobless and abandoned communities of
the so-called "rust belt" scattered throughout the northeastern USA. Steel was called a "sunset" industry, while agribusiness was to
become a "sunrise" industry in the parlance of the day.
"Food as a Weapon"
Backed by Cargill and the giant US grain trade conglomerates,
Henry Kissinger began an aggressive diplomacy, which he referred
to as "Food as a Weapon." The Russian "grain robbery" had been
one example of his diplomacy with the food weapon, a "carrot"
approach. Another was his use of P.L. 480 in Vietnam during the
War.
As popular opposition to the Vietnam War grew, it became·
difficult for the Administration to get funding from Congress for
economic and military aid to South Vietnam. Congress was putting
limitations on aid and the White House was looking for ways to
avoid this kind of interference. One solution was to divert US aid
through multilateral institutions dominated by the US, and another
was to use food aid to support US diplomatic and military
objectives.
P.L. 480 programs were not subject to annual Congressional
appropriations review and Nixon could spend up to $2.5 billion
by borrowing from the Department of Agriculture's Commodity
Credit Corporation, the same agency used some years later to
covertly funnel US military aid to Saddam Hussein. With commercial
markets booming and government reserves exhausted the
Agriculture Department no longer needed P.L. 480 to dispose of
surplus grain and food. The State Department played a major role
in determining where the aid went. Kissinger's motto was clearly one
of "rewarding friends and punishing enemies".
P.L. 480 became a direct military subsidy for the Indochina war
machine. In the beginning of 1974 the food aid to South Vietnam
was $207 million. When Congress cut economic aid by 20%, the
White House increased the P.L. 480 allocation to $499 million.
Kissinger added a special provision so Vietnam and Cambodia
could use 100% of counterpart funds for direct military purposes. 17
When Congress passed an amendment in 1974 requiring that
70% of food aid be given to countries on the UN's list of the Most Seriously Affected countries, Kissinger tried to get the UN to put
South Vietnam on its list, which failed. Ultimately the White House
circumvented Congress by just upping the amount of PL 480 aid
from $1 billion to $1.6 billion. 18
Kissinger then aimed his food weapon at Chile.
Like other forms of US aid to Chile, PL 480 was turned "off"
when the socialist government of Salvador Allende came into power
and began to implement a series of economic reforms. The aid cutoff
was done on Kissinger's orders. It was turned back "on" as soon
as the US-backed military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet was in power.
Food played a key part in the Kissinger-orchestrated coup against
Allende in 1973. Supported by the State Department and the CIA,
right-wing wealthy Chilean landowners sabotaged food production,
doubling food imports and exhausting Chile's foreign reserves. 19
This made it very difficult for Chile to import food. The ensuing
food shortages created middle class discontent. Allende's request for
food credit was denied by the US State Department, even though
it should have been the Department of Agriculture's domain.
Kissinger had stolen the turf from Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz.
After the 1973 military coup, the US food aid granted to Chile
was sold on the domestic market by the Pinochet government.
That did nothing to ease the plight of the workers there because of
massive inflation and erosion of purchasing power. The military
junta was the main beneficiary because the influx of food aid eased
balance of payments difficulties and freed up money for the military,
at the time the 9th largest importer of US arms. 20
Back in 1948, as the Cold War was heating up, and Washington
was setting up NATO, the man who was the architect of the US
policy of "containment" of the Soviet Union, State Department
senior planning official George Kennan noted in a Top Secret
memorandum to the Secretary of State:
We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population
.. . . In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envY and
resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern
of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so,
we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming;
and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our
immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we
can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.21
Such a steel-cold assessment of the role of the United States in
the early 1970's found receptive ears with Henry Kissinger, a devotee
of unsentimental balance of power Realpolitik. Nixon had also
given Kissinger the task of heading a top secret Government task
force to examine the relation between population growth in developing
nations, and its relation to US national security.
The motivation behind the secret task force had come from
John D. Rockefeller and the Rockefeller Population Council. The
core idea went back to the 1939 Council on Foreign Relations' War
and Peace Studies Project leader, Isaiah Bowman. Global depopulation
and food control were to become US strategic policy under
Kissinger. This was to be the new "solution" to the threats to US
global power and to its continued access to cheap raw materials
from the developing world.
CHAPTER 4
A Secret US National Security Memo
"Control oil and you control the nations; control
food and you control the people .. . "
Henry Kissinger
Population Growth and National Security
In April 1974, as a worldwide drought and the transformation
of American farm policy was in full gear, Nixon's Secretary of
State and National Security Adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, sent out
a classified memo to select cabinet officials, including the Secretary
of Defense, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Deputy Secretary of
State and the CIA Director.
66s
The title of the top secret memo was Implications of Worldwide
Population Growth for us Security and Overseas Interests. The memo ,
dealt with food policy, population growth and strategic raw materials.
It had been commissioned by Nixon on the recommendation of John D. Rockefeller III. The secret project came to be called
in Washington bureaucratic shorthand, NSSM 200, or National
Security Study Memorandum 200. 1
It was deemed that, should it ever be publicized or leaked, NSSM 200 would be explosive. It was kept secret for almost 15 years until private legal action by organizations associated with the Catholic Church finally forced its declassification in 1989. After a disgraced 'Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal in 1975, his successor, Gerald Ford, wasted no time in signing the Executive Order making NSSM 200 official US government policy.
The US decision to draft the policy came after the 1974 UN Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania, at which the UN failed to adopt the US position. That position had been shaped by the Rockefeller Foundation and most directly, by John D. Rockefeller III, and consisted in adopting a "world population plan of action" for drastic global population reduction policies. A fierce resistance from the Catholic Church, from every Communist country except Romania, as well as from Latin American and Asian nations, convinced leading US policy circles that covert means were needed to implement their project. It was entrusted to Henry Kissinger to draft that strategy, NSSM 200.
In his original initiating memo, Kissinger stated:
The President has directed a study of the impact of world population growth on US security and overseas interests. The study should look forward at least until the year 2000, and use several alternative reasonable projections of population growth.
- In terms of each projection, the study should assess:
- the corresponding pace of development, especially in poorer countries;
- the demand for US exports, especially of food, and the trade problems the US may face arising from competition for resources; and
- the likelihood that population growth or imbalances will produce disruptive foreign policies and international instability.
The study should focus on the international political and economic implications of population growth rather than its ecological, sociological or other aspects.
The study would then offer possible courses of action for the United States in dealing with population matters abroad, particularly ip. developing countries, with special attention to these questions:
- What, if any, new initiatives by the United States are needed to focus international attention on the population problem?
- Can technological innovations or development reduce growth or ameliorate its effects?2
By December 1974, Kissinger had completed his policy document which included precise conclusions pertaining to global population growth:
The most serious consequence for the short and middle term is the possibility of massive famines iri certain parts of the world, especially the poorest regions. World needs for food rise by 2-1/2 percent or more per year ... at a time when readily available fertilizer and well-watered land is already largely being utilized. Therefore, additions to food production must come mainly from higher yields. Countries with large population growth cannot afford constantly growing imports, but for them to raise food output steadily by two to four percent over the next generation or two is a formidable challenge. Capital and foreign exchange requirements for intensive agriculture are heavy, and are aggravated by energy cost increases and fertilizer scarcities and price rises. The institutional, technical, and · economic problems of transforming traditional agriculture are also very difficult to overcome.3
In December 1974, the world was in the early weeks of an oil price shock which saw oil prices explode by a staggering 400% within the coming six months, with profound consequences for world economic growth. Kissinger had personally played the key, ·behind-the-scenes role in manipulating that oil shock. He knew very well the impact that higher petroleum prices would have on world food supply. He was determined to use these higher oil prices to U.S. strategic advantage.
Kissinger wrote in his NSSM report, referring to the poorer developing countries using the term, Least Developing Countries (LDCs):
The world is increasingly dependent on mineral supplies from developing countries, and if rapid population growth frustrates their prospects for economic development and social progress, the resulting instability may undermine the conditions for expanded output and sustained flows of such resources.
There will be serious problems for some of the poorest LDCs with rapid population growth. They will increasingly find it difficult to pay for needed raw materials and energy. Fertilizer, vital for their own agricultural production, will be difficult to obtain for the next few years. Imports for fuel and other materials will cause grave problems which could impinge on the US, both through the need to supply greater financial support and in LDC efforts to obtain better terms of trade through higher prices for exports.
Economic Development and Population Growth
Rapid population growth creates a severe drag on rates of economic development .otherwise attainable, sometimes to the point of preventing any increase in per capita incomes. In addition to the overall impact on per capita incomes, rapid population growth seriously affects a vast range of other aspects of the quality of life important to social and economic progress in the LDC's.4
The Washington blueprint was explicit. The United States should be in the forefront in promoting population reduction programs, both directly through the aid programs of the Government, making acceptance of birth reduction programs a prerequisite for US help. Or it should act indirectly, via the UN or the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF and World Bank).
Bluntly, the new US policy was to be, "if these inferior races get in the way of our securing ample, cheap raw materials, then we must find ways to get rid of them." This was the actual meaning of NSSM 200, in refined bureaucratic language.
Explicitly on population control, the NSSM 200 declared,
The US strategy should support general activities capable of achieving major breakthroughs in key problems which hinder attainment of fertility control objectives. For example, the development of more effective, simpler contraceptive methods through bio-medical research will benefit all countries which face the problem of rapid population growth; improvements in methods for measuring demographic changes will assist a number of LDes in determining current population growth rates and evaluating the impact over time of population/family planning activities.5
Kissinger knew what he referred to when he spoke of "simpler contraceptive methods through bio-medical research." He was in close contact with the Rockefeller family and that wing of the US establishment which promoted bio-medical research as a new form of population control. Auschwitz revelations regarding its use had made the term un savoury. Before World War II, it was known as eugenics. It was renamed by its promoters the more euphemistic "population control" after the war. The content was unchanged: reduce "inferior" races and populations in order to preserve the control by "superior" races.
Food for Cargill & Co.
The NSSM 200 also bore the strong mark of William Pearce and the Cargill agribusiness trade lobby. In a section titled, "Food for Peace and Population," Kissinger wrote, "One of the most fundamental aspects of the impact of population growth on the political and economic well-being of the globe is its relationship to food. Here the problem of the interrelationship of population, national resources, environment, productivity and political and economic stability come together when shortages of this basic human need occur."6
He continued, "The major challenge will be to increase food production in the LDCs themselves, and to liberalize the system in which grain is transferred commercially from producer to consumer countries:"
In effect, he proposed spreading the Rockefeller Foundation's Green Revolution while also demanding removal of protective national trade barriers. The objective was to open the way for a flood of US grain imports in key developing markets. Explicitly, Kissinger proposed, "Expansion of production of the input elements of food production (i.e., fertilizer, availability of water and high yield seed stocks) and increased incentives for expanded agricultural productivity"-the essence of the Green Revolution. It went without saying that US agribusiness companies would supply the needed fertilizer and special high-yield seeds. That was what the so-called Green Revolution had really been about in the 1960's.
NSSM 200 called for, "New international trade arrangements for agricultural products, open enough to permit maximum production by efficient producers ... ," not coincidentally, just the' demand of Cargill, ADM, Continental Grain, Bunge and the giant agribusiness corporations then emerging as major US nationally strategic corporations.
The NSSM document packaged the earlier Kissinger "food as a weapon" policy in new clothes: .
Food is another special concern in any population strategy. Adequate food stocks need to be created to provide for periods of severe shortages and LDC food production efforts must be re-enforced to meet increased demand resulting from population and income growth. US agricultural production goals should take account of the normal import requirements of LDCs (as well as developed countries) and of likely occasional crop failures in major parts of the LDC world. Without improved food security, there will be pressure leading to possible conflict and the desire for large families for insurance purposes, thus undermining ... population control efforts.
To maximize progress toward population stability, primary emphasis would be placed on the largest and fastest growing developing countries where the imbalance between growing numbers and development potential most seriously risks instability, unrest, and international tensions. These countries are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, The Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Colombia .. .. This group of priority countries includes some with virtually no government interest in family planning and others with active government family 'planning programs which require and would welcome enlarged technical and financial assistance. These countries should be given the highest priority within AID's population program in terms of resource allocations and/or leadership efforts to encourage action by other donors and organizations 7
The Unlucky Thirteen ...
Thirteen developing countries, including India, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, and Colombia, encompassed some of the most resource-rich areas on the planet. Over the following three decades they were also to be among the most politically unstable. The NSSM 200 policy argued that only a drastic reduction in their populations would allow US exploitation of their raw materials.
Naturally, Kissinger knew that if it were be revealed that the US Government was actively promoting population reduction in raw materials-rich developing countries, Washington would be accused of imperialist ambitions, genocide and worse. He proposed a slick propaganda campaign to hide this aspect of NSSM 200:
The US can help to minimize charges of an imperialist motivation behind its support of population activities by repeatedly asserting that such support derives from a concern with:
a) the right of the individual couple to determine freely and responsibly their number and spacing of children and to have information, education, and means to do so; and
b) the fundamental social and economic development of poor countries in which rapid population growth is both a contributing cause and a consequence of widespread poverty.
Furthermore, the US should also take steps to convey the message that the control of world population growth is in the mutual interest of the developed and developing countries alike.8
In so many words, population control on a global scale was now to be called, "freedom of choice:' and "sustainable development:' George Orwell could not have done better. The language had been lifted from an earlier Report to President Nixon from John D. Rockefeller III.
NSSM 200 noted that the volume of grain imports needed by developing countries would "grow significantly." It called for trade liberalization in grain imports around the world to address this alleged problem, a "free market" not unlike the one Britain demanded when its manufactured goods dominated world markets after the Corn Laws repeal in 1846.
Like the "population bomb," the food crisis was also a manufactured hype in the 1970's, a hype helped by the sudden oil price shock on developing economies. The image of vast areas of the world, teeming with "overpopulation" and riotings or killings, were run repeatedly on American TV to drive the point home. In reality, the "problems" in developing sector agriculture were mainly that it didn't offer enough opportunities for the major US agribusiness companies. Cargill and the giant US grain trading companies were not far away from Kissinger's door.
The NSSM report added that, "The location of known reserves of higher-grade ores of most minerals favors increasing dependence' of all industrialized regions on imports from less developed countries. The real problems of mineral supplies lie, not in basic physical sufficiency, but in the politico-economic issues of access, terms for exploration ·and exploitation, and division of the benefits among producers, consumers, and host country governments:' Forced population control programs and other measures were to be deployed if necessary, to ensure US access to such strategic raw materials.
The document concluded, "In the longer run, LDCs must both decrease population growth and increase agricultural production significantly:"
While arguing for reducing global population growth by 500 million people by the year 2000, curiously enough, Kissinger noted elsewhere in his report that the population problem was already causing 10 million deaths yearly. In short he advocated doubling the death rate to at least 20 million, in the name of addressing the problem of deaths due to lack of sufficient food. The public would be led to believe that the new policy, at least what would be made public, was a positive one. In the strict definition of the UN Convention of 1948, it was genocide.
Kissinger went on to suggest the kinds of coercive measures the US policy elite now envisioned. He bluntly stated that food aid should be considered, "an instrument of national power:' Then, in a stark comment, he suggested the US would ration its food aid to "help people who can't or won't control their population growth." (emphasis added). Sterilize or starve ... It was little wonder the document was classified "Top Secret."
NSSM 200 was remarkable in many respects. It made depopulation in foreign developing countries an explicit, if secret, strategic national security priority of the United States Government for the first time. It outlined what was to become a strategy to promote fertility control under the rubric "family planning;' and it linked the population growth issue to the availability of strategic minerals. However, one of the most significant aspects of NSSM 200 was that it reflected an emerging consensus with some of America's wealthiest families, its most influential establishment.
Kissinger was, in effect, a hired hand within the Government, but not hired by a mere President of the United States. He was hired to act and negotiate on behalf of the most powerful family within the postwar US establishment at the time,the Rockefellers.
In 1955 Nelson Rockefeller had invited Kissinger to become a study director for the Council on Foreign Relations. One year later, Kissinger became Director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, where he came to know the family on a first-name basis. Kissinger later married a Rockefeller employee, Nancy Maginnes, to round the connection.
By November 1975, Richard Nixon had been forced from office in the mysterious Watergate affair, some suspected on the machinations of a politically ambitious. Nelson Rockefeller, working with Kissinger and Alexander Haig. Nixon's successor, a nondescript Gerald Ford, appointed Nelson Rockefeller to be his Vice President. Nelson was in effect, "a heartbeat away" from his dream of being President. Nelson's old friend Kissinger was Secretary of State.
On November 1975, President Ford signed off on Kissinger's NSSM 200 as official US foreign policy. Kissinger had been replaced by his assistant and later business partner, Brent Scowcroft, as NSC head. Scowcroft dutifully submitted Kissinger's NSSM 200 draft, to the new President for signature. Kissinger remained Secretary of . State and Nelson Rockefeller, Vice President. The US was going into the depopulation business big time, and food control was to playa. central role in that business.
Brazil as NSSM 200 "Model"
The secret Kissinger plan was implemented immediately. The thirteen priority countries for population reduction were to undergo drastic changes in their affairs over the following thirty years. Most would not even be aware of what was happening.
Brazil was one of the most clearly documented examples of NSSM 200. Beginning in the late 1980's, almost 14 years into the implementation of NSSM 200, the Brazilian Ministry of Health began to investigate reports of massive sterilization of Brazilian women. The government investigation was the result of a formal Congressional inquiry, sponsored by more than 165 legislators from every political party represented in the Brazilian legislature.9
The investigation had been initiated after information about the secret US National Security Council memorandum on American population control objectives in developing countries was published in the Jornal de Brasilia, Hova do Povo (Rio de Janeiro), Jornal do Brasil,and other major Brazilian newspapers in May 1991.
The Brazilian government was shocked to find that an estimated 44% of all Brazilian women aged between 14 and 55 had been permanently sterilized. Most of the older women had been sterilized when the program started in the mid-1970's. The Government found that the sterilizations had been carried out by a variety of different organizations and agencies, some Brazilian. They included the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the US Pathfinder Fund, the Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception, Family Health International-all programs under the aegis and guidance of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).10
By 1989, the Brazilian government, which initially had been convinced to cooperate in the int~rest of economic growth and poverty alleviation, protested to USAID that the sterilization programs had become "overwhelming and unnecessary." According to some reports, under the program, as many as 90% of all Brazilian women of African descent had been sterilized, which would eliminate future generations in a nation whose Black population is second only to Nigeria's. Almost half of Brazil's 154 million people in the 1980's were believed to be of African ancestry. 11
Kissinger in NSSM 200 had noted the special role of Brazil. It was on the target list of thirteen countries because "it clearly dominates the Continent [South America] demographically," and its population would be projected to equal that of the United States by the year 2000. Such growth from Brazil, the NSSM memo warned, . implied "a growing power status for Brazil in Latin America and on . the world scene over the next 25 years." 12
Behind Kissinger, Scowcroft and the assorted Washington civil servants who carried out the new NSSM 200 policy, stood a circle of private, enormously influential persons. None were more influential at the time than the Rockefeller brothers. On population policy, no Rockefeller held more clout than John D. Rockefeller III, grandson of the Standard Oil founder.
John D. Rockefeller III was appointed by President Nixon in July 1969 to head the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. Their report prepared the ground for Kissinger's NSSM 200. In 1972, some months before Kissinger's secret project began, Rockefeller presented his report to the President. In the election year, Nixon decided to downplay the report and, as a result, it got little press attention. Its policy recommend~tions, however, received major priority. Rockefeller proposed what were then drastic measures to stem an alleged population explosion in the United States. 13
Among his recommendations were the establishment of sex education programs in all schools, population education so that the public appreciated the supposed crisis, and the repeal of all laws that hindered contraceptive means to minors and adults. It proposed making voluntary sterilization easier and liberalizing state laws against abortion. Abortion had been regarded as a major vehicle for fertility control by the Rockefeller circles for decades, hindered by strong opposition from church and other groups.
What came next under NSSM 200 could only be understood from the vantage point of the background to John D. Rockefeller III's obsession with population growth. Henry Kissinger's National Security Council NSSM 200 paper on population control (1974) expressed the assumptions of a decades old effort to breed human traits, known until the end of the Third Reich as Eugenics
NEXT
The Brotherhood of Death
It was deemed that, should it ever be publicized or leaked, NSSM 200 would be explosive. It was kept secret for almost 15 years until private legal action by organizations associated with the Catholic Church finally forced its declassification in 1989. After a disgraced 'Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal in 1975, his successor, Gerald Ford, wasted no time in signing the Executive Order making NSSM 200 official US government policy.
The US decision to draft the policy came after the 1974 UN Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania, at which the UN failed to adopt the US position. That position had been shaped by the Rockefeller Foundation and most directly, by John D. Rockefeller III, and consisted in adopting a "world population plan of action" for drastic global population reduction policies. A fierce resistance from the Catholic Church, from every Communist country except Romania, as well as from Latin American and Asian nations, convinced leading US policy circles that covert means were needed to implement their project. It was entrusted to Henry Kissinger to draft that strategy, NSSM 200.
In his original initiating memo, Kissinger stated:
The President has directed a study of the impact of world population growth on US security and overseas interests. The study should look forward at least until the year 2000, and use several alternative reasonable projections of population growth.
- In terms of each projection, the study should assess:
- the corresponding pace of development, especially in poorer countries;
- the demand for US exports, especially of food, and the trade problems the US may face arising from competition for resources; and
- the likelihood that population growth or imbalances will produce disruptive foreign policies and international instability.
The study should focus on the international political and economic implications of population growth rather than its ecological, sociological or other aspects.
The study would then offer possible courses of action for the United States in dealing with population matters abroad, particularly ip. developing countries, with special attention to these questions:
- What, if any, new initiatives by the United States are needed to focus international attention on the population problem?
- Can technological innovations or development reduce growth or ameliorate its effects?2
By December 1974, Kissinger had completed his policy document which included precise conclusions pertaining to global population growth:
The most serious consequence for the short and middle term is the possibility of massive famines iri certain parts of the world, especially the poorest regions. World needs for food rise by 2-1/2 percent or more per year ... at a time when readily available fertilizer and well-watered land is already largely being utilized. Therefore, additions to food production must come mainly from higher yields. Countries with large population growth cannot afford constantly growing imports, but for them to raise food output steadily by two to four percent over the next generation or two is a formidable challenge. Capital and foreign exchange requirements for intensive agriculture are heavy, and are aggravated by energy cost increases and fertilizer scarcities and price rises. The institutional, technical, and · economic problems of transforming traditional agriculture are also very difficult to overcome.3
In December 1974, the world was in the early weeks of an oil price shock which saw oil prices explode by a staggering 400% within the coming six months, with profound consequences for world economic growth. Kissinger had personally played the key, ·behind-the-scenes role in manipulating that oil shock. He knew very well the impact that higher petroleum prices would have on world food supply. He was determined to use these higher oil prices to U.S. strategic advantage.
Kissinger wrote in his NSSM report, referring to the poorer developing countries using the term, Least Developing Countries (LDCs):
The world is increasingly dependent on mineral supplies from developing countries, and if rapid population growth frustrates their prospects for economic development and social progress, the resulting instability may undermine the conditions for expanded output and sustained flows of such resources.
There will be serious problems for some of the poorest LDCs with rapid population growth. They will increasingly find it difficult to pay for needed raw materials and energy. Fertilizer, vital for their own agricultural production, will be difficult to obtain for the next few years. Imports for fuel and other materials will cause grave problems which could impinge on the US, both through the need to supply greater financial support and in LDC efforts to obtain better terms of trade through higher prices for exports.
Economic Development and Population Growth
Rapid population growth creates a severe drag on rates of economic development .otherwise attainable, sometimes to the point of preventing any increase in per capita incomes. In addition to the overall impact on per capita incomes, rapid population growth seriously affects a vast range of other aspects of the quality of life important to social and economic progress in the LDC's.4
The Washington blueprint was explicit. The United States should be in the forefront in promoting population reduction programs, both directly through the aid programs of the Government, making acceptance of birth reduction programs a prerequisite for US help. Or it should act indirectly, via the UN or the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF and World Bank).
Bluntly, the new US policy was to be, "if these inferior races get in the way of our securing ample, cheap raw materials, then we must find ways to get rid of them." This was the actual meaning of NSSM 200, in refined bureaucratic language.
Explicitly on population control, the NSSM 200 declared,
The US strategy should support general activities capable of achieving major breakthroughs in key problems which hinder attainment of fertility control objectives. For example, the development of more effective, simpler contraceptive methods through bio-medical research will benefit all countries which face the problem of rapid population growth; improvements in methods for measuring demographic changes will assist a number of LDes in determining current population growth rates and evaluating the impact over time of population/family planning activities.5
Kissinger knew what he referred to when he spoke of "simpler contraceptive methods through bio-medical research." He was in close contact with the Rockefeller family and that wing of the US establishment which promoted bio-medical research as a new form of population control. Auschwitz revelations regarding its use had made the term un savoury. Before World War II, it was known as eugenics. It was renamed by its promoters the more euphemistic "population control" after the war. The content was unchanged: reduce "inferior" races and populations in order to preserve the control by "superior" races.
Food for Cargill & Co.
The NSSM 200 also bore the strong mark of William Pearce and the Cargill agribusiness trade lobby. In a section titled, "Food for Peace and Population," Kissinger wrote, "One of the most fundamental aspects of the impact of population growth on the political and economic well-being of the globe is its relationship to food. Here the problem of the interrelationship of population, national resources, environment, productivity and political and economic stability come together when shortages of this basic human need occur."6
He continued, "The major challenge will be to increase food production in the LDCs themselves, and to liberalize the system in which grain is transferred commercially from producer to consumer countries:"
In effect, he proposed spreading the Rockefeller Foundation's Green Revolution while also demanding removal of protective national trade barriers. The objective was to open the way for a flood of US grain imports in key developing markets. Explicitly, Kissinger proposed, "Expansion of production of the input elements of food production (i.e., fertilizer, availability of water and high yield seed stocks) and increased incentives for expanded agricultural productivity"-the essence of the Green Revolution. It went without saying that US agribusiness companies would supply the needed fertilizer and special high-yield seeds. That was what the so-called Green Revolution had really been about in the 1960's.
NSSM 200 called for, "New international trade arrangements for agricultural products, open enough to permit maximum production by efficient producers ... ," not coincidentally, just the' demand of Cargill, ADM, Continental Grain, Bunge and the giant agribusiness corporations then emerging as major US nationally strategic corporations.
The NSSM document packaged the earlier Kissinger "food as a weapon" policy in new clothes: .
Food is another special concern in any population strategy. Adequate food stocks need to be created to provide for periods of severe shortages and LDC food production efforts must be re-enforced to meet increased demand resulting from population and income growth. US agricultural production goals should take account of the normal import requirements of LDCs (as well as developed countries) and of likely occasional crop failures in major parts of the LDC world. Without improved food security, there will be pressure leading to possible conflict and the desire for large families for insurance purposes, thus undermining ... population control efforts.
To maximize progress toward population stability, primary emphasis would be placed on the largest and fastest growing developing countries where the imbalance between growing numbers and development potential most seriously risks instability, unrest, and international tensions. These countries are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, The Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Colombia .. .. This group of priority countries includes some with virtually no government interest in family planning and others with active government family 'planning programs which require and would welcome enlarged technical and financial assistance. These countries should be given the highest priority within AID's population program in terms of resource allocations and/or leadership efforts to encourage action by other donors and organizations 7
The Unlucky Thirteen ...
Thirteen developing countries, including India, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, and Colombia, encompassed some of the most resource-rich areas on the planet. Over the following three decades they were also to be among the most politically unstable. The NSSM 200 policy argued that only a drastic reduction in their populations would allow US exploitation of their raw materials.
Naturally, Kissinger knew that if it were be revealed that the US Government was actively promoting population reduction in raw materials-rich developing countries, Washington would be accused of imperialist ambitions, genocide and worse. He proposed a slick propaganda campaign to hide this aspect of NSSM 200:
The US can help to minimize charges of an imperialist motivation behind its support of population activities by repeatedly asserting that such support derives from a concern with:
a) the right of the individual couple to determine freely and responsibly their number and spacing of children and to have information, education, and means to do so; and
b) the fundamental social and economic development of poor countries in which rapid population growth is both a contributing cause and a consequence of widespread poverty.
Furthermore, the US should also take steps to convey the message that the control of world population growth is in the mutual interest of the developed and developing countries alike.8
In so many words, population control on a global scale was now to be called, "freedom of choice:' and "sustainable development:' George Orwell could not have done better. The language had been lifted from an earlier Report to President Nixon from John D. Rockefeller III.
NSSM 200 noted that the volume of grain imports needed by developing countries would "grow significantly." It called for trade liberalization in grain imports around the world to address this alleged problem, a "free market" not unlike the one Britain demanded when its manufactured goods dominated world markets after the Corn Laws repeal in 1846.
Like the "population bomb," the food crisis was also a manufactured hype in the 1970's, a hype helped by the sudden oil price shock on developing economies. The image of vast areas of the world, teeming with "overpopulation" and riotings or killings, were run repeatedly on American TV to drive the point home. In reality, the "problems" in developing sector agriculture were mainly that it didn't offer enough opportunities for the major US agribusiness companies. Cargill and the giant US grain trading companies were not far away from Kissinger's door.
The NSSM report added that, "The location of known reserves of higher-grade ores of most minerals favors increasing dependence' of all industrialized regions on imports from less developed countries. The real problems of mineral supplies lie, not in basic physical sufficiency, but in the politico-economic issues of access, terms for exploration ·and exploitation, and division of the benefits among producers, consumers, and host country governments:' Forced population control programs and other measures were to be deployed if necessary, to ensure US access to such strategic raw materials.
The document concluded, "In the longer run, LDCs must both decrease population growth and increase agricultural production significantly:"
While arguing for reducing global population growth by 500 million people by the year 2000, curiously enough, Kissinger noted elsewhere in his report that the population problem was already causing 10 million deaths yearly. In short he advocated doubling the death rate to at least 20 million, in the name of addressing the problem of deaths due to lack of sufficient food. The public would be led to believe that the new policy, at least what would be made public, was a positive one. In the strict definition of the UN Convention of 1948, it was genocide.
Kissinger went on to suggest the kinds of coercive measures the US policy elite now envisioned. He bluntly stated that food aid should be considered, "an instrument of national power:' Then, in a stark comment, he suggested the US would ration its food aid to "help people who can't or won't control their population growth." (emphasis added). Sterilize or starve ... It was little wonder the document was classified "Top Secret."
NSSM 200 was remarkable in many respects. It made depopulation in foreign developing countries an explicit, if secret, strategic national security priority of the United States Government for the first time. It outlined what was to become a strategy to promote fertility control under the rubric "family planning;' and it linked the population growth issue to the availability of strategic minerals. However, one of the most significant aspects of NSSM 200 was that it reflected an emerging consensus with some of America's wealthiest families, its most influential establishment.
Kissinger was, in effect, a hired hand within the Government, but not hired by a mere President of the United States. He was hired to act and negotiate on behalf of the most powerful family within the postwar US establishment at the time,the Rockefellers.
In 1955 Nelson Rockefeller had invited Kissinger to become a study director for the Council on Foreign Relations. One year later, Kissinger became Director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, where he came to know the family on a first-name basis. Kissinger later married a Rockefeller employee, Nancy Maginnes, to round the connection.
By November 1975, Richard Nixon had been forced from office in the mysterious Watergate affair, some suspected on the machinations of a politically ambitious. Nelson Rockefeller, working with Kissinger and Alexander Haig. Nixon's successor, a nondescript Gerald Ford, appointed Nelson Rockefeller to be his Vice President. Nelson was in effect, "a heartbeat away" from his dream of being President. Nelson's old friend Kissinger was Secretary of State.
On November 1975, President Ford signed off on Kissinger's NSSM 200 as official US foreign policy. Kissinger had been replaced by his assistant and later business partner, Brent Scowcroft, as NSC head. Scowcroft dutifully submitted Kissinger's NSSM 200 draft, to the new President for signature. Kissinger remained Secretary of . State and Nelson Rockefeller, Vice President. The US was going into the depopulation business big time, and food control was to playa. central role in that business.
Brazil as NSSM 200 "Model"
The secret Kissinger plan was implemented immediately. The thirteen priority countries for population reduction were to undergo drastic changes in their affairs over the following thirty years. Most would not even be aware of what was happening.
Brazil was one of the most clearly documented examples of NSSM 200. Beginning in the late 1980's, almost 14 years into the implementation of NSSM 200, the Brazilian Ministry of Health began to investigate reports of massive sterilization of Brazilian women. The government investigation was the result of a formal Congressional inquiry, sponsored by more than 165 legislators from every political party represented in the Brazilian legislature.9
The investigation had been initiated after information about the secret US National Security Council memorandum on American population control objectives in developing countries was published in the Jornal de Brasilia, Hova do Povo (Rio de Janeiro), Jornal do Brasil,and other major Brazilian newspapers in May 1991.
The Brazilian government was shocked to find that an estimated 44% of all Brazilian women aged between 14 and 55 had been permanently sterilized. Most of the older women had been sterilized when the program started in the mid-1970's. The Government found that the sterilizations had been carried out by a variety of different organizations and agencies, some Brazilian. They included the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the US Pathfinder Fund, the Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception, Family Health International-all programs under the aegis and guidance of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).10
By 1989, the Brazilian government, which initially had been convinced to cooperate in the int~rest of economic growth and poverty alleviation, protested to USAID that the sterilization programs had become "overwhelming and unnecessary." According to some reports, under the program, as many as 90% of all Brazilian women of African descent had been sterilized, which would eliminate future generations in a nation whose Black population is second only to Nigeria's. Almost half of Brazil's 154 million people in the 1980's were believed to be of African ancestry. 11
Kissinger in NSSM 200 had noted the special role of Brazil. It was on the target list of thirteen countries because "it clearly dominates the Continent [South America] demographically," and its population would be projected to equal that of the United States by the year 2000. Such growth from Brazil, the NSSM memo warned, . implied "a growing power status for Brazil in Latin America and on . the world scene over the next 25 years." 12
Behind Kissinger, Scowcroft and the assorted Washington civil servants who carried out the new NSSM 200 policy, stood a circle of private, enormously influential persons. None were more influential at the time than the Rockefeller brothers. On population policy, no Rockefeller held more clout than John D. Rockefeller III, grandson of the Standard Oil founder.
John D. Rockefeller III was appointed by President Nixon in July 1969 to head the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. Their report prepared the ground for Kissinger's NSSM 200. In 1972, some months before Kissinger's secret project began, Rockefeller presented his report to the President. In the election year, Nixon decided to downplay the report and, as a result, it got little press attention. Its policy recommend~tions, however, received major priority. Rockefeller proposed what were then drastic measures to stem an alleged population explosion in the United States. 13
Among his recommendations were the establishment of sex education programs in all schools, population education so that the public appreciated the supposed crisis, and the repeal of all laws that hindered contraceptive means to minors and adults. It proposed making voluntary sterilization easier and liberalizing state laws against abortion. Abortion had been regarded as a major vehicle for fertility control by the Rockefeller circles for decades, hindered by strong opposition from church and other groups.
What came next under NSSM 200 could only be understood from the vantage point of the background to John D. Rockefeller III's obsession with population growth. Henry Kissinger's National Security Council NSSM 200 paper on population control (1974) expressed the assumptions of a decades old effort to breed human traits, known until the end of the Third Reich as Eugenics
NEXT
The Brotherhood of Death
Chapter 3 Notes
1. For a brief introduction to the extraordinary post-1945 bases of American
global hegemony, useful are the following: Henry Luce, "The American Century':
Life, 17 February 1941. New York Council on Foreign Relations, The War & Peace
Studies summarized in http://www.cfr.org. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's
Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, University of California Press, Berkeley,
2003. Andre Gunder Frank, Crisis: In the World Economy, Heinemann, London,
1980.
2. Francis J. Gavin, Ideas, Power and the Politics of America's International Monetary
Policy during the 1%0'5, http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/faculty/gavin. See also F. William
Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,
Pluto Press Ltd, London, 2004, for a disc,!ssion of the de Gaulle gold issue. Also
Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, French Actions and the
Recent Gold Crisis, Washington, D.C., 20 March 1968.
3. Samuel Huntington, et al., The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability
of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Trilateral Commission, New York
University Press, 1975.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technotronic
Era, Harper Publishing House, New York, 1970.
6. Clifton B. Luttrell, The Russian Wheat Deal-Hindsight vs. Foresight, Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis, October 1972, p. 2.
7. F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New
World Or4er, 2004,London, Pluto Press Ltd., pp.130-138.
8. Time, What to Do: Costly Choices, 11 November, 1974, p.6.
9. US Department of Agriculture, World Grain Consumption and Stocks, 1960-
2003, Washington DC, Production, Supply & Distribution, Electronic Database,
updated 9 April 2004.
10. Sen. George McGovern, cited in Laurence Simon, "The Ethics of Triage: A
Perspective on the World Food Conference", The Christian Century, 1-8 January
1975.
11. Laurence Simon, op. cit
12. Ibid. For a more complete discussion of the role of Kissinger in the 1973 oil
price shock, see F. William Engdahl, op. cit.
13. Walter B. Saunders cited d in A.V. Krebs, editor, The Agribusiness Examiner,
Issue # 31, 26 April 1999.
14. A.V. Krebs, op. cit.
15. J. w. Smith, The World's Wasted Wealth 2, Institute for Economic Democracy,
1994, pp. 63, 64.
16. A. V. Krebs, Cargill & Co.'s "Comparative Advantage in Free Trade", The
Agribusiness Examiner, #31, 26 April 1999.
17. Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origins and Fundamentals of us
World Dominance, London, Pluto Press Ltd., Second Edition, 2003 (originally
published in 1972), pp. 229-235 for an excellent elaboration on the political workings
of PL 480 under Kissinger. In hearings before the US Senate on the PL 480
legislation, Sen. Milton R. Young observed that US agricultural surpluses could be
used as an instrument of foreign policy: "In my opinion, we have been blessed and
not cursed with some surpluses. We are in the position of a nation with agricultural
surpluses, when many other nations are starving. When we have such surpluses,
we have adverse farm prices .. . This bill proposes for the first time, I think,
a very feasible and sound method of trying to make our agricultural surpluses
available to other nations of the world who are needy and in want of these supplies."
(Cited in Congressional Research Service, 1979: 2).
18. Noah Zerbe, Feeding the Famine? American Food Aid and the GMO Debate in
Southern Africa, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, in http://www.geoci-.
ties.com/nzerbe/pubs/famine.pdf., pp. 9-10.
19. NACLA, "US Grain Arsenal" Chapter 2: «The Food Weapon: Mightier than
Missiles.», Latin America and Empire Report, October 1975, http://
www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357Lsum_s4_NACLA_Ch2.htm!.
20. Ibid.
21. George F. Kennan, "PPS/23: Review of Current Trends in U.S. Foreign Policy",
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Volume I, pp. 509-529. Policy Planning
Staff Files, Memorandum by the Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Kennan)2
to the Secretary of State and the Under Secretary of State (Lovett). TOP
SECRET.PPS/23. [Washington,] 24 February 1948. Kennan, one of the most influential
shapers of the US Cold War, was author of a famous 1947 article in Foreign
Affairs, the magazine of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. The article,
"The Sources of Soviet Conduct;' was published in Foreign Affairs in July 1947.
Signed under the pseudonym, "X' the true author was Kennan, who had been
Ambassador Averell Harriman's Deputy in Moscow in 1946. The article set out the
doctrine of containment of the Soviet Union, later known as the Cold War.
Chapter 4
1. Henry Kissinger, National Security Study Memorandum 200, April 24, 1974: . Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests, Initiating Memo. Complete text is contained in Stephen Mumford, The NSSM 200 Directive and The Study Requested, 1996, http://www.populationsecurity.orgl 11-CH3.html.
2. Ibid. According to the magazine Catholic World Reporter, "The key document needed to understand U.S. policy toward world population during the past 20 years ... was declassified in 1980 but not made publicly available until June 1990. Dated December 10, 1974, it is a study by the National Security Council (NSC) entitled «NSSM 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests:' This document views population growth in less developed countries as not only a serious threat to strategic interests of the U.S. but also as the prime cause of political instability in Third World nations, threatening American overseas investments.
3. Ibid., "Adequacy of World Food Supplies", Executive Summary, paragraph 6.
4. Ibid., Executive Summary, paragraphs 9-10.
5. Ibid., Part II: Policy Recommendations, II. Action to Create Conditions for Fertility Decline §3. Mode a,:d Content of u.s. Population Assistance.
6. Ibid., Part II. Policy Recommendations: C Food for Peace Program and Population,Discussion.
7. Ibid., Part II: Policy Recommendations, I. Introduction-A U.S. Global Population Strategy, B. Key Country priorities in U.S. and Multilateral Population Assistance. (Emphasis added).
8. Ibid., Part II: Policy Recommendations,!. Introduction-A U.S. Global Population Strategy, F. Development of World- Wide Political and Popular Commitment to Population Stabilization and Its Associated Improvement of Individual Quality of Life.
9. Andre Caetano, Fertility Transition and the Transition of Female Sterilization in Northeastern Brazil: The Roles of Medicine and Politics, http://www.iussp.org/ BraziI2001/s10/S19_02_Caetona.pdf. p. 19. Details of the Brazilian Congress inquiry are in Baobab Press, Brazil Launches Inquiry into US Population Activities, Vol. 1, no. 12, Washington D.C., http://india.indymedia.orglenl2003/0s/4869.html. Alternate location in http://thepragmaticprogressive.blogspot.com/2003/0s/thisarticle-printed-in-its-entirety.html.
10. United Nations Population Fund Inventory of Population Projects in Developing .Countries Around the World, cited in Baobab Press, op. cit.
11. Baobab Press, op. cit. 68 SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION
12. Henry Kissinger, op. cit., "Part One: Analytical section", Chapter I-Highlight of World Demographic Trends: Latin America.
13. John D.Rockefeller III, Report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Washington, D.C. 27 March 1972.
Chapter 4
1. Henry Kissinger, National Security Study Memorandum 200, April 24, 1974: . Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests, Initiating Memo. Complete text is contained in Stephen Mumford, The NSSM 200 Directive and The Study Requested, 1996, http://www.populationsecurity.orgl 11-CH3.html.
2. Ibid. According to the magazine Catholic World Reporter, "The key document needed to understand U.S. policy toward world population during the past 20 years ... was declassified in 1980 but not made publicly available until June 1990. Dated December 10, 1974, it is a study by the National Security Council (NSC) entitled «NSSM 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests:' This document views population growth in less developed countries as not only a serious threat to strategic interests of the U.S. but also as the prime cause of political instability in Third World nations, threatening American overseas investments.
3. Ibid., "Adequacy of World Food Supplies", Executive Summary, paragraph 6.
4. Ibid., Executive Summary, paragraphs 9-10.
5. Ibid., Part II: Policy Recommendations, II. Action to Create Conditions for Fertility Decline §3. Mode a,:d Content of u.s. Population Assistance.
6. Ibid., Part II. Policy Recommendations: C Food for Peace Program and Population,Discussion.
7. Ibid., Part II: Policy Recommendations, I. Introduction-A U.S. Global Population Strategy, B. Key Country priorities in U.S. and Multilateral Population Assistance. (Emphasis added).
8. Ibid., Part II: Policy Recommendations,!. Introduction-A U.S. Global Population Strategy, F. Development of World- Wide Political and Popular Commitment to Population Stabilization and Its Associated Improvement of Individual Quality of Life.
9. Andre Caetano, Fertility Transition and the Transition of Female Sterilization in Northeastern Brazil: The Roles of Medicine and Politics, http://www.iussp.org/ BraziI2001/s10/S19_02_Caetona.pdf. p. 19. Details of the Brazilian Congress inquiry are in Baobab Press, Brazil Launches Inquiry into US Population Activities, Vol. 1, no. 12, Washington D.C., http://india.indymedia.orglenl2003/0s/4869.html. Alternate location in http://thepragmaticprogressive.blogspot.com/2003/0s/thisarticle-printed-in-its-entirety.html.
10. United Nations Population Fund Inventory of Population Projects in Developing .Countries Around the World, cited in Baobab Press, op. cit.
11. Baobab Press, op. cit. 68 SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION
12. Henry Kissinger, op. cit., "Part One: Analytical section", Chapter I-Highlight of World Demographic Trends: Latin America.
13. John D.Rockefeller III, Report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Washington, D.C. 27 March 1972.
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