PART 4: SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION

 SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION

By William Engdahl

CHAPTER 6 

Fateful War and Peace Studies 

Preparing a Post-War Empire 

Well before the triumphant victory of the United States in World War II, it had become obvious to the heads of the largest American corporations and banks that the US market was far too small for their ambitions. As they saw it, "Manifest Destiny;' the unlimited expansion of American power, was to be a worldwide business. A seemingly easy victory in World War I and the gains of the Versailles Treaty in Europe had only whetted their appetite for more. 

Leading policy-making figures of the American establishment had quietly created a highly influential policy group in late 1939, only weeks after the German invasion of Poland, and two full years before Pearl Harbor would bring the US directly into the war. The task of the secret group was simple: to shape US post-war economic and political goals, based on the assumption a world war would come and that the United States would emerge from the ashes of that war as the dominant global power. 

That elite policy-making circle, the War and Peace Studies Group of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, effectively took over all significant post-war planning for the US State Department. After 1942, most of its members were quietly put directly on the State Department payroll. 

Their work was financed by the ubiquitous Rockefeller Foundation. Between November 1939 and late 1942, the Rockefeller Foundation had contributed no less than $350,000 to finance the drafting of the agenda for post -war American economic hegemony via the War & Peace Studies Group. It was an investment which, like most made by the Foundation, paid back thousands-fold in later years. It defined the post-war American business empire globally.1 

During the interwar years of the 1930's, while most Americans were struggling with the devastation of the Great Depression, a handful of businessmen and their academic associates at private universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins, along with senior partners from the major Wall Street law firms, were preparing the ground for the new "Pax Americana." Their aim was simple: to consolidate an American succession to the failing Pax Britannica of the British Empire. 

These American policymakers were largely concentrated among the select membership of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. Unlike the British Empire, their American vision of global domination was based on economic goals rather than physical possession of a colonial empire. It was a brilliant refinement which allowed the US corporate giants to veil their interests behind the flag of democracy and human rights for "oppressed colonial peoples;' support of "free enterprise" and "open markets!' 

The interests represented in the Council on Foreign Relations task force were anything but democratic. It was that of the elite handful of American corporations and their law firms which had developed global interests, namely in oil, banking and related industries. The businessmen represented in the Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR as it was called, were a breed apart. They were no ordinary small entrepreneurs. 

The CFR had been established in May 1919, in the days of the Versailles Peace conference in an exclusive meeting at the Paris Hotel Majestic, by leading representatives of the J.P. Morgan bank,  including Thomas Lamont, together with representatives of the Rockefeller's Standard Oil group, and other select persons including Woodrow Wilson's adviser, Col. Edward House. They met together with equally select British friends, most members of Cecil Rhodes' secretive Round Table group, to discuss establishing a private network of institutes to "advise" their respective governments on foreign affairs. [And so lobbying began D.C]

The handful of influential US banks and corporations going abroad in the era of World War I were few. Most were headquartered in New York on the East Coast, leading some to refer to it as the East Coast Establishment. Its de facto headquarters after World War I was the newly founded Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The initial financing to establish the CFR came from J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, financiers Otto Kahn, Bernard Baruch, Jacob Schiff and Paul Warburg, the most powerful men of their day in American business.2 

This elite group had been successful in opening the legal doors for their move overseas by lobbying for a series of Congressional acts that exempted them from prohibitions against monopoly and other US Government anti-trust restrictions. 

In 1918, Congress passed the Webb-Pomerene Act, which exempted companies from anti-trust laws, effectively permitting monopolies, "if their activities are directed to export promotion:' Standard Oil was a major beneficiary of this act. In 1919, Congress passed the Edge Act, which exempted US banks from the same antitrust laws for export activity and export of capital. Chase Bank, National City Bank and J.P. Morgan in New York were the main beneficiaries of the Edge Act. Furthermore, in 1920, the US Supreme Court ruled in the US Steel case that mergers creating a near total market control were "not necessarily against the public interest's 3 At the core of these foreign US interests during the 1920's were the leading banks and oil interests of the Rockefeller and Morgan families. 

They were the international corporate industry and banking leaders who had already seen, up close, what lucrative potentials existed in taking over the shards of European colonial empires. Compared with what they saw as the limited market potentials within the bounds of the United States, domination of vast new foreign markets offered untold potential, profits and, above all, power. 

The "American Century" 

The US Lebensraum 

In early 1941, some ten months before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, and a well-connected member of the East Coast elite, wrote an editorial in the February 17 issue of Life entitled, "The American Century" In his essay, Luce described the emerging consensus of the US East Coast establishment around the·CFR. 

"Tyrannies" Luce wrote, "may require a large amount of living space; but Freedom requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny." He made an open call for Americans to embrace a new role as the dominant power in the world, a world in which the United States had not yet entered the war. He wrote, "the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."4 

Luce was reflecting the emerging view of the internationally oriented US business and banking establishment around Morgan and Rockefeller. They needed unfettered access to global resources and markets after the war, and they saw the golden chance to get it while all contending powers had been devastated by war. 

The American banking and industrial giants needed room, or what some called a Grand Area. The Economic & Financial Group of the CFR War & Peace Studies made a survey of world trade in the late 1930's. They proposed linking the Western Hemisphere with the Pacific into a US-dominated bloc, which was premised on what they called «military and economic supremacy for the United States."5 The bloc included what was then, still, the British Empire. Their Grand Area was to encompass most of the planet, outside the sphere of the Soviet Union which, to their irritation, remained closed to American capital penetration. 

Founding CFR member and one of the leaders of the CFR War & Peace Study group, Isaiah Bowman, known as "America's Geopolitician" during the Second World War, had another term for the Grand Area. Bowman called it, in reference to Hitler's geographical term for the economic justification of German expansion, "an American economic Lebensraum."6 The term was later dropped for obvious reasons, and the more neutral-sounding American Century was used instead to describe the emerging vision of post-war US imperialism. 

As Bowman and others of the CFR State Department study group saw it, the champions of the new American economic geography would define themselves as the selfless advocates of freedom for colonial peoples and as the enemy of imperialism. They would champion world peace through multinational control. Since late days of World War I, when Bowman had worked on The Inquiry, a top-secret strategy group of President Woodrow Wilson, Bowman had been occupied with how to clothe American imperial ambitions in liberal and benevolent garb. 

As Bowman and other CFR planers envisioned it, the American domination of the world after 1945 would be accomplished via a new organization, the United Nations, including the new Bretton Woods institutions of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, as well as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). 

Bowman's CFR group had drafted the basic outline for President Roosevelt of what would become the United Nations Organization. Under the banner of "free trade" and the opening of closed markets around the world, US big business would advance their agenda, forcing open new untapped markets for cheap raw materials as well as new outlets for selling American manufactures after the war. 

The group drafted more than 600 policy papers for the State Department and President Roosevelt, covering every conceivable part of the planet, from Continents to the smallest islands. It was all based on a presumed US victory in a war which Washington was not even officially fighting. 

For the CFR and the forward-looking members of the US policy making establishment, after World War II, global power would no longer be measured in terms of military control over colonial territories. The British and European empires proved to be a system far too costly and inefficient. Power would be defined directly in economic terms. It would be based on what one Harvard proponent, Joseph Nye, later was to call "soft power."7 

As the War came to an end in 1945, no group epitomized the global outlook of American big business more than the Rockefeller family, whose fortune had been built on a global empire of oil and banking. The family-above all brothers Nelson, John D. III, Laurance and David-whose foundation had financed the War & Peace Studies of the CFR, viewed the victorious end of the War as a golden opportunity to dominate global policies to their advantage as never before. 

Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was to play a discreet and decisive behind-the scenes role in defining those global interests. They were shrewdly redefined from being Rockefeller private interests, into what was called «American national interests." After all, the family had financed the War & Peace Studies for the State Department. 

Nelson Ventures in Latin America 

Precisely what Isaiah Bowman and his War and Peace Studies colleagues in the US establishment had in mind with their notion of Grand Area and free market development soon became clear. Nelson Rockefeller, one of the primary financial backers of the Council on Foreign Relations War & Peace Studies, wasted no time in taking advantage of the new economic possibilities World War II had opened up for American business. 

After the War, while brother John D. Rockefeller III was busy devising new, ever more efficient methods to promote racial purity and depopulation through his Population Council, Nelson was working the other side of the fence. It was in the role of a forward looking international businessman interested in making world food production, especially in poorer, less-developed countries such as Mexico, more «efficient." Nelson later called his revolution in world agriculture the Green Revolution. It was revolutionary, but not in the way most people had been led to believe. 

During the War itself, Nelson had combined" promotion of the vast Rockefeller family interests throughout Latin America, with a senior US Government intelligence position, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (ClAA), nominally on behalf of the Roosevelt White House. From that strategic position, Nelson could funnel US Government support to Rockefeller family business allies in key countries, from Brazil to Peru, Mexico, Venezuela and even Argentina, under the guise of combating Nazi infiltration of the Americas and of promoting "American democracy:' He was carefully laying the basis for post-war American business expansion.8 

Nelson was named as ClAA head in August 1940, in a clear violation of US official neutrality. To conceal that delicate point, the ClAA was given a cover as art organization promoting "American culture" in Latin America. 

Skeletons in Rockefeller's Dark Closet 

In 1941, Standard Oil of New Jersey, later renamed Exxon, was the largest oil company in the world. It controlled 84% of the US petroleum market. Its bank was Chase Bank, and its main owners were the Rockefeller group. After the Rockefellers, the next largest stockholder in Standard Oil was I.G. Farben, the enormous petrochemicals trust of Germany, which at the time was a vital part of the German war industry. The Rockefeller-I.G. Farben relationship went back to 1927, around the same time the Rockefeller Foundation began heavily funding German eugenics research.9 

While Nelson Rockefeller was ostensibly combating Nazi economic interests in Latin America as head of the ClAA, the Rockefeller family's Standard Oil, through its President, Walter Teagle, was arranging to ship vital tetraethyl lead gasoline to the German Luftwaffe. When Britain protested the shipment of such strategic materials to Nazi Germany, as Britain itself was being bombed by German Luftwaffe planes, Standard Oil changed its policy. The change was purely cosmetic. They merely altered the registration of their entire fleet to Panama to avoid British search or seizure. Their ships continued to carry oil to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco and the Spanish Sahara in Northwest Africa, where they refueled and siphoned oil onto German tankers for shipment to Hamburg. 10 

During the war, US Senator Harry S. Truman charged, in a Senate investigation, that the Rockefeller-I.G. Farben relationship "was approaching treason."11 CBS News war correspondent, Paul Manning, reported that on August 10, 1944, the Rockefeller-I.G. Farben partners moved their "flight capital" through affiliated American, German, French, British and Swiss banks. 

Nelson Rockefeller's role in Latin America during the War was to coordinate US intelligence and covert operations in the days before the creation of the CIA. He was the direct liaison between President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's personal intelligence head for the Americas, Sir William Stephenson, who directed a front company called British Security Coordination or BSC. Notably, Stephenson's clandestine headquarters for his covert activity was in room 3603 in Rockefeller Center, in New York City, not far from Nelson's office. It was no coincidence. Rockefeller and Stephenson coordinated closely on mutual intelligence operations in the Americas. 12 

Rockefeller brought with him to Washington a team he selected from family business connections, including Joseph Rovensky from Chase Bank, and Will Clayton, a Texas cotton magnate from the agricultural commodity firm Anderson Clayton. 13 Nelson's assistant, John McClintock, ran the vast United Fruit plantations across Central America after the war, on whose behalf the CIA later conveniently orchestrated a coup in Guatemala in 1954. 

During the war, Nelson Rockefeller's work laid the basis for the family's vast expansion of interests in the 1950's. He shaped a US/Latin American defense concept which was to tie the military elite of the region to US policies during the Cold War, often through ruthless military dictators who benefited from the backing of the Rockefeller family and insured favorable treatment of Rockefeller business interests. Nelson called the cooperative Latin military dictators he backed, "the New Military:' 14 

Nelson Rockefeller had been a leading figure in US corporate investment in Latin America since the 1930s, a time when he was a director of Standard Oil's Venezuelan subsidiary, Creole Petroleum. In 1938, he had tried, and failed, to negotiate a settlement with Mexico's President Lazaro Cardenas for Standard Oil in Mexico. Cardenas had nationalized Standard Oil, leading to bitter US-Mexico relations. 

In the 1940s, Rockefeller set up the Mexican American Development Corp. and was a personal investor in Mexican industries after the war. He encouraged his brother David to set up Chase Bank's Latin American division. One motive was to regain a foothold in Mexico through the guise of helping to solve the country's food problems.15 

As chairman of the US Government's International Development Advisory Board, Rockefeller became the architect of President Harry S. Truman's foreign-aid program. Typically, Nelson used US guarantees to leverage the massive private lending by Chase, National City Bank (today Citigroup Inc.) and other New York banks throughout the Latin American region. 

During the War, as head of Roosevelt's CIAA, Nelson had organized a network of journalists and of major newspapers owners throughout the region. He did this by threatening neutral Latin American newspaper publishers with a cut-off of newsprint paper from Canada. Soon Rockefeller boasted of controlling 1,200 newspaper publishers by threatening their newsprint, which had to be carried on US ships.16 

Rockefeller's media staff then saturated Latin America with planted news stories friendly to US and especially Rockefeller business interests in the region. Under the guise of fighting Nazi influence in Latin America, Nelson Rockefeller and his brothers were laying the basis of their vast private business empire for the postwar era. 

Among the most far-reaching covert operations carried out by Nelson and his circle in Latin America towards the end of the War, was to secure for the United States the majority votes of participating nations in the founding of the United Nations, and with it, de facto US control of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in 1944-45. It was indicative of how the new US international elite moved governments and others to suit their agenda. The UN was to be their vehicle, as they saw it, wrapped in the clothing of world democracy. 

According to historian John Loftus, Rockefeller used behind the-scenes pressure to get the backing of all Latin American nations in the founding San Francisco conference of the United Nations in 1945. This included the pro-Axis regime of Juan Peron in Argentina. Rockefeller and Washington pressured Peron to officially declare war on Germany and Italy, even though it was two weeks before the war's end. That allowed Argentina to vote with the "winning" side. 

Rockefeller's political strategy was to use his block of Latin American nations to "buy" the majority vote at the UN. The Latin American bloc represented nineteen votes to Europe's nine. As a result, Washington and the powerful international banking business interests shaping its postwar agenda, ended up with decisive control of the IMF, the World Bank and a dominant role in the United Nations.17 The Rockefeller family, generous to a fault, even donated the land for the headquarters of the new United Nations in New York City. It was also good business, and a nice tax write-off to boot. 

On the whole, Nelson Rockefeller was well situated in 1941, more than perhaps anyone else in US business circles, to launch his major Latin American agribusiness initiative. 

The Rockefeller-Wallace Report 

In 1941, some months before Pearl Harbor had brought the United States into the war, Rockefeller and US Vice President Henry A. Wallace, the former Agriculture Secretary of Franklin Roosevelt, sent a team to Mexico to discuss how to increase food production with the Mexican government. Wallace was a well-known agriculturist, who had served as Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture until 1940, and who had founded the seed company that became Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., which decades later would become a DuPont company and one of the Big Four GMO seed giants. 

The Wallace-Rockefeller team's Mexico report emphasized the need to breed crops that had higher yields. At the time, corn was the major crop of Mexico, along with wheat and beans. In 1943, as a result of the project, the Rockefeller Foundation started the Mexican Agricultural Program (MAC), headed by the Rockefeller Foundation's George Harrar. The program included a young plant pathologist from the Rockefeller Foundation named Norman Borlaug. The Rockefeller family was preparing the first steps of what was to become a major transformation of world agricultural markets after the war. 

That same year, as Nelson and Vice President Wallace were surveying Latin America for agricultural opportunities for the United States, Laurance and Nelson Rockefeller both had begun buying up, on the cheap, vast holdings of high-quality Latin American farmland. The family was diversifying their fortune from oil into ·agriculture. 18 

This was not simple family farming, however, but global "agribusiness;' as it began to be called in the 1950's. Oil was the core of the new agribusiness economics. And oil was something the Rockefellers knew cold. The economic model of global monopoly concentration they had built up in oil over decades would be the model for transforming the nature of world agriculture into a global "agribusiness." 

In March 1941, nine months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the US into the war, Laurance took advantage of British financial duress in the Americas and bought 1.5 million acres of prime agricultural land on the Magdalena River in Colombia. Brother Nelson had also just bought a vast ranch in Venezuela, once owned by Simon Bolivar. As a Rockefeller aide at CIAA glibly said at the time, "There are good properties in the British portfolio. We might as well pick them up now."19 

By the time Roosevelt named thirty-two-year-old Nelson Rockefeller to be Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, Rockefeller was fully involved with food and agribusiness. In 1943, Edward O'Neal, President of the American Farm Bureau Federation, joined with Nelson and other top US businessmen at Chapultepec, Mexico, for a conference on Inter-American cooperation organized by the US State Department. 

At Chapultepec, Rockefeller agreed with O'Neal that US agriculture needed new export markets. The markets of Latin America were coming into their view. Nelson said he was looking for new "frontiers:' Rockefeller, in a true spirit of free market, demanded that the Americas be closed to all but US business interests, while demanding that the world, including governments of Latin America, open their doors to US products, including agriculture. 20 

Rockefeller also agreed with US Pentagon generals at Chapultepec, that selling US military surplus weapons to the governments of Latin America would be a good way to lock those countries into dependence on Washington for their military security after the war.21 Dependence on US military security was to work in tandem with Latin American economic dependence on US companies and on US bank capital. No one was more in the forefront of this transition in the.l940's than the Rockefeller family. They also held major stock in the largest military defence industries.22 

As the Cold War escalated in the late 1940's, Truman announced that the US would fight the expansion of Communism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He called for exporting US technical expertise and capital to the developing world, stressing that the American private sector, and not the US Government, should play the leading role in transferring US technology abroad. 

The concept came from Nelson Rockefeller. US domination of global agricultural technology was fast becoming a weapon of the Cold War for Washington, and above all for the powerful Rockefeller interests. 

By the beginning of the 1950's, US export of agricultural products was nearly equal in importance to arms and manufactures export. The US Department of Agriculture food surplus was viewed as a weapon of US foreign policy. As noted earlier, by 1954, p.L. 480 or "Food for Peace:' had formalized the process in a major way. 

The Rockefeller family and the Rockefeller Foundation had little problem getting their view of global food and population issues across to the US State Department. They and their allies from the New York Council on Foreign Relations dominated the senior ranks of the US foreign policy establishment. 

The Rockefeller group wielded tremendous influence on the State Department. Every man who served as Secretary of State in the critical Cold War years ranging from 1952 to the end of Jimmy Carter's Presidency in 1979 had formerly been a leading figure from the Rockefeller Foundation. 

Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, a Wall Street lawyer, was Chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation before he came to Washington in 1952. John Kennedy's and later Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, left his job as President of the Rockefeller Foundation to come to Washington in 1961. Nixon's National Security Adviser and Rusk's successor in 1974 as Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, also came from the inner circle of the Rockefeller Foundation. Moreover, Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, came to Washington from his post as Chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation. But the enormous influence of this private, non-profit foundation on post-war American foreign policy was kept well in the background. 

Dulles, Rusk, Vance and Kissinger all understood the Rockefeller views on the importance of private sector activity over the role of government, and they understood how the Rockefellers viewed agriculture-as a commodity just like oil, which could be traded, controlled, made scarce or plentiful depending on foreign policy goals of the few corporations controlling its trade. 

Remarkably enough, the Dulles-Rusk -Vance-Kissinger-Rockefeller ties were rarely mentioned openly, even though they were essential to understanding key aspects of US foreign policy and food policy. 

Early Agribusiness: Rockefeller 

Teams up with Cargill 

In 1947, after the end of the War, Nelson Rockefeller founded another new company called International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC). IBEe's aim was to show that private capital, organized as a profit-making enterprise, could upgrade the agriculture of developing countries. In reality, IBEC was about the introduction of mass scale agribusiness in countries where US dollars could buy huge influence in the 1950's and 1960's. 

Rockefeller's IBEC invited Cargill, a privately-held US agribusiness giant, to work with it in Brazil. IBEC had lots of plans: hybrid corn production, hog production, crop dusting with helicopters, contract plowing and grain storage. One IBEC company was Sementes Agroceres, which later played a key role in plant and animal genetics in Brazil.23 

IBEC and Cargill began developing hybrid corn seed varieties. They turned Brazil into the world's third largest corn producer after the US and China. In Brazil, the corn was mixed with soymeal for animal feed. That was later to become instrumental in the proliferation of GMO soybeans on the world animal feed market in the late 1990's. 

The agricultural economics of sugarcane also led to Brazil's prominent role in the production of soybeans. Sugarcane plants could typically produce for about five years after which they had to be dug out and new cane planted, a procedure known as "rationing" Brazilian farmers pioneered the planting of soybeans between the digging out of the old and planting of the new cane. Soybeans enriched or "fixed" nitrogen in the soil. Since sugarcane needs nitrogen, this reduced demand for fertilizer, which was the reason soybeans were introduced in Brazil. 

Cargill and the other US grain trading companies later developed soybeans into a major export commodity, initially as animal feed. It became a major weapon in the US food control arsenal. 

Lester Brown, whose own Worldwatch Institute was created with a 1974 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, stated the agenda of the Rockefeller Foundation's Green Revolution: «Fertilizer is in the package of new inputs which farmers need in order to realize the full potential of the new seed. Once it becomes profitable to use modern technology, the demand for all kinds of farm inputs increases rapidly. And so, only agro-business firms can supply these inputs efficiently."24 

Brown further declared that the multinational corporation was "an amazingly efficient way of institutionalizing the transfer of technical knowledge in agriculture." And the agribusiness firms which were then in the best position to provide seeds and fertilizer were, of  course, American agribusiness firms like DuPont, Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. Thus, encouraged by the Rockefeller Green Revolution, beginning in the late 1950's, US agribusiness export was rapidly becoming a strategic core of US economic strategy alongside oil and military hardware. 

In Brazil and Venezuela 

As the Rockefeller Foundation's Green Revolution was making major inroads in Mexico, Nelson Rockefeller set up another organization to pursue similar work in Brazil and Venezuela. He wanted to continue projects he had started at the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Intelligence Affairs (ClAA) during World War II. Joining with several former ClAA colleagues, he created the American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AlA). The declared objective of the AlA was the transfer of technology and education. 

With the AlA, Rockefeller wanted to rapidly modernize basic infrastructure. The AlA argued that if their efforts failed, the region faced the prospect that an exploding population would decrease the standard of living. As a major stockholder in Venezuela's Creole Petroleum, Rockefeller convinced Shell, Mobil, Gulf, and various other private donors to join him in underwriting the AIA's projects after 1946. Nelson and his brothers had sponsored a series of studies, a precursor to NSSM 200, pinpointing which nations in Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa were likely to be "soft on communism." Brazil and Venezuela in Latin America were singled out in the study-Brazil because of its vast untapped wealth and Venezuela because of the Rockefeller family's involvement with its oil.25 

Nelson A. Rockefeller was a master of deploying the rhetoric of Cold War necessity in the name of US "national security" while advancing family interests. It did not hurt his effort that his old friend and former head of the Rockefeller Foundation, John Foster Dulles, now Secretary of State, pursued a policy of nuclear "massive retaliation" and Cold War "brinkmanship:' which made the population ever-aware of the alleged dangers and threat of the Soviet military. That made it quite easy to justify almost anything in the name of "US national security interests." 

What Nelson Rockefeller and other leading US bankers and businessmen were creating with agriculture in Latin America was the early phase of what was to be a revolution in world food production. In the process, they set out to take over the control of basic daily necessities of the majority of the .world's population. Like most revolutions, it wasn't what it advertised itself to be. 

The Rockefeller Foundation, not surprisingly, was at the forefront here too. They even gave the process a new term-agribusiness. Their model of agribusiness, driven by rules set out by the dominant player, US industry and finance, provided the perfect partner for the introduction, by the 1990's, of genetically engineered food crops or GMO plants. How this marriage of strategic interests came about and of what its longer-term goals consisted were to remain hidden under the rubric of free market efficiency, modernization, feeding a malnourished world and other public relations fabrications-thus cleverly obscuring the boldest coup over the destiny of entire nations ever attempted. 

PART III 

Creating Agribusiness 

CHAPTER 7 

Rockefeller and Harvard 

Invent USA "Agribusiness" 

A Green Revolution Opens the Door 

The Rockefellers' Green Revolution began in Mexico and was spread across Latin America during the 1950's and 1960's. Shortly thereafter, backed by John D. Rockefeller's networks across Asia, it was introduced in India and elsewhere in Asia. The "revolution" was a veiled effort to gain control over food production in key target countries of the developing world, promoted in the name of free enterprise market efficiency against alleged "communist inefficiency." 

In the aftermath of World War II, with Germany's LG.Farben a bombed-out heap of rubble, American chemical companies emerged as the world's largest. The most prominent companies-DuPont, Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Hercules Powder and others-faced a glut of nitrogen production capacity which they had built up, at US taxpayer expense, to produce bombs and shells for the war effort. 

An essential chemical for making bombs and explosives, nitrogen was a prime component of TNT and other high explosives. Nitrogen could also form the basis for nitrate fertilizers. The chemical industry developed the idea of creating large new markets for their nitrogen in the form of fertilizers, ammonia nitrate, anhydrous ammonia, for both domestic US agriculture and for export. 

The nitrogen fertilizer industry was part of the powerful lobby of the Rockefeller Standard Oil circles which, by the end of the War, included DuPont, Dow Chemicals and Hercules Powder among others. The global marketing of the new agri-chemicals after the war also solved the problem of finding significant new markets for the American petrochemical industry as well as the grain cartel, a group of four to five companies then including Cargill, Continental Grain, . Bunge and ADM. The largest grain traders were American and their growth was a product of the development of special hybrid seeds through the spread of the Green Revolution in the 1960's and 1970's. Agriculture was in the process of going global and the Rockefeller Foundation was shaping that process of agribusiness globalization. 

With a monopoly on the agricultural chemicals and on the hybrid seeds, American agribusiness giants were intent on dominating the global market in agricultural trade. After all, as Kissinger noted in the 1970's, "If you control the food you control the people:' . Governments from the developing sector to the European Economic Community, the Soviet Union and China, soon depended on the powerful grain cartel companies to provide the needed grains and food products to maintain their political stability in times of bad harvest. 

Truly, there was genuine US Government concern to contain communist and nationalist movements in the developing world during the 1960's by offering food aid in the form of privately sponsored agricultural inputs. However, the combination of US Government aid and the techniques being developed in the name of a Green Revolution would present a golden opportunity for the influential policy-making circles around Rockefeller and their emerging agribusiness groups to turn that concern to their advantage. 

Nelson Rockefeller worked hand-in-glove on agriculture with his brother, John D. III, who had set up his own Agriculture Development Council in 1953, one year after he had founded the Population Council. The focus of the Agriculture Development Council was Asia, while Nelson concentrated on his familiar turf in Latin America. They shared the common goal of long-term cartelization of world agriculture and food supplies under their corporate hegemony. 

When the Rockefeller Foundation's Norman Borlaug came into Mexico in the 1950's, he worked on hybrid forms of rust-resistant wheat and hybrid corn types, not yet the genetically engineered projects to come several decades later. Behind the fa'fade of agricultural and biological science, however, the Rockefeller group was pursuing a calculated strategy through its Green Revolution during the 1950's and 1960's. 

The heart of its strategy was to introduce "modern" agriculture methods to increase crop yields and, so went the argument, thereby to reduce hunger and lessen the threat of potential communist subversion of hungry, unruly nations. It was the same seducing argument used years later to sell its Gene Revolution. 

The Green Revolution was the beginning of global control over food production, a process made complete with the Gene Revolution several decades later. The same companies, not surprisingly, were involved in both, as were the Rockefeller and other powerful US foundations. 

In 1966, the Rockefeller Foundation was joined by the considerable financial resources of the Ford Foundation, another US private tax-exempt foundation which enjoyed intimate ties to the US . Government, intelligence and foreign policy establishment. Together with the Ford resources, the Rockefeller Foundation's Green Revolution went into high gear. 

That year of 1966, the Government of Mexico along with the Rockefeller Foundation set up the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). The center focused its work on a wheat program, which originated from breeding studies begun in Mexico in the 1940s by the Rockefeller Foundation. 1 

Their efforts in food and agriculture received a boost that same year when US President Lyndon Johnson announced a drastic shift in US food aid to developing countries under P.L. 480, namely that  no food aid would be sent unless a recipient country had agreed to preconditions which included agreeing to the Rockefeller agenda for agriculture development, stepping up their population control programs and opening their doors to interested American investors.2 

In 1970, the Rockefeller's Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Prize. Interestingly enough, it was not for biology but for peace, the same prize Henry Kissinger was to receive several years later. Both men were also proteges of the influential Rockefeller circles. In reality, the Green Revolution introduced US agribusiness into key developing countries under the cover of promoting crop science and modern techniques. The new wheat hybrids in Mexico required modern chemical fertilizers, mechanized tractors and other farm equipment, and above all, they required irrigation, which meant pumps driven by oil or gas energy. 

The Green Revolution methods were suitable only in the richest crop areas, and it was deliberately aimed at the richest farmers, reinforcing old semi-feudal Latifundist divisions between wealthy landowners and poor peasant farmers. In Mexico, the new wheat hybrids were'all planted in the rich, newly-irrigated farm areas of the Northeast. All inputs, from fertilizers to tractors and irrigation, required petroleum and other inputs from advanced industrial suppliers in the United States. Oil and agriculture joined forces under the Rockefeller aegis. 

In India, the Green Revolution was limited to 20 percent of land in the irrigated North and Northwest. It ignored the huge disparity of wealth between large feudal landowners in such areas and the majority of poor, landless peasants. Instead, it created pockets of modern agribusiness tied to large export giants such as Cargill. The regions where the vast majority of poorer peasants worked remained poor. The introduction of the Green Revolution did nothing to change the gap between rich feudal landowners and poor peasants, but overall statistics showed significant rises in Indian wheat production. 

Training Cadre for the Bio-Revolution 

In 1960, the Rockefeller Foundation, John D. Rockefeller Ill's Agriculture Development Council and the Ford Foundation joined forces to create the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Banos,the Philippines. By 1971, the Rockefeller Foundation's IRRl, along with their Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and two other Rockefeller and Ford Foundation-created international research centers, the UTA for tropical agriculture, Nigeria, and IRRI for rice, Philippines, combined to form a global Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR).3 

CGIAR was shaped at a series of private conferences held at the Rockefeller Foundation's conference center in Bellagio, Italy. Key participants at the Bellagio talks were the Rockefeller Foundation's George Harrar, Ford Foundation's Forrest Hill, Robert McNamara of the World Bank and Maurice Strong, the Rockefeller family's international environmental organizer, who, as a Rockefeller Foundation Trustee, organized the UN Earth Summit in Stockholm in 1972. 

To ensure maximum impact, CGIAR drew in the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the World Bank. Thus, through a carefully-planned leverage of its initial funds, Rockefeller by the beginning of the 1970's was in a position to shape global agriculture policy.4 

Financed by generous Rockefeller and Ford Foundation study grants, CGIAR saw to it that leading Third World agriculture scientists and agronomists were brought to the US to "master" the concepts of modern agribusiness production, in order to carry it back to their homeland. In the process, they created an invaluable network of influence for US agribusiness promotion in those countries, all in the, name of science and efficient free market agriculture. 

This Rockefeller Foundation network of institutes and research centers had gradually laid the basis for control over agricultural research and policy for much of the developing world by the time Kissinger was commissioned to draft NSSM 200. 

John D. Rockefeller III's Agricultural Development Council also deployed US university professors to select Asian universities to train a new generation of scientists. The best scientists would then be selected to be sent to the United States to get their doctorate in agriculture sciences, and coming out of the American universities, would follow the precepts close to the Rockefeller outlook on agriculture. This carefully-constructed network was later to prove crucial in the Rockefeller Foundation's subsequent strategy to spread the use of genetically-engineered crops around the world. 

In a widely read handbook, Arthur Mosher, Executive Director of the Rockefeller Agriculture Development Council, insisted on teaching peasants to "want more for themselves:' They were to be urged to abandon "collective habits" and get on with the "business of farming:' Rockefeller's Mosher called for extending educational programs for women and building youth clubs, to create more demand for store-bought goods. He argued that, the "affection of husbands and fathers for their families" would make them responsive to these desires and drive them to work harder. Of course they would have to take out loans to invest in all this new technology, tying them even more to the new market economy.5 

Through the Green Revolution, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations worked hand-in-hand with the foreign policy goals of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and of the CIA. 

One major effect of the Green Revolution was to depopulate the countryside of peasants who were forced to flee into shantytown slums around the cities in desperate search for work. That was no accident; it was part of the plan to create cheap labor pools for forthcoming US multinational manufactures. 

When the self-promotion around the Green Revolution died down, the true results were quite different from what had been promised. Problems had arisen from indiscriminate use of the new chemical pesticides, often with serious health consequences. The mono-culture cultivation of new hybrid seed varieties decreased soil fertility and yields over time. The first results were impressive:  double or even triple yields for some crops such as wheat and later corn in Mexico. That soon faded. 6 

The Green Revolution was typically accompanied by large irrigation projects which often included World Bank loans to construct huge new dams, and flood previously settled areas and fertile farmland in the process. Also, super-wheat produced greater yields by saturating the soil with huge amounts of fertilizer per acre, the fertilizer being the product of nitrates and petroleum, commodities controlled by the Rockefeller-dominated Seven Sisters major oil companies. 

Huge quantities of herbicides and pesticides were also used, creating additional markets for the oil and chemical giants. As one analyst put it, in effect, the Green Revolution was merely a chemical revolution. At no point could developing nations pay for the huge amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. They would get the credit courtesy of the World Bank and special loans by Chase Bank and other large New York banks, backed by US Government guarantees. 

Applied in a large number of developing countries, those loans went mostly to the large landowners. For the smaller peasants the situation worked differently. Small peasant farmers could not afford the chemical and other modern inputs and had to borrow money. Initially various government programs tried to provide some loans to farmers so that they could purchase seeds and fertilizers. 

Farmers who could not participate in this kind of program had to borrow from the private sector. Because of the exorbitant interest rates for informal loans, many small farmers did not even get the benefits of the initial higher yields. After harvest, they had to sell most if not all of their produce to payoff loans and interest. They became dependent on money-lenders and traders and often lost their land. Even with soft loans from government agencies, growing subsistence crops gave way to the production of cash crops.7 

The Green Revolution also introduced new machines for land preparation. Most notable was the so-called power tiller or turtle tiller. This machine, which puddled the rice paddy soil, also destroyed much of the natural soil structure. But, it was very efficient in doing that. 

Another crucial aspect driving the interest of US agribusiness companies was the fact that the Green Revolution was based on proliferation of new hybrid seeds in developing markets. One vital aspect of hybrid seeds was their lack of reproductive capacity. Hybrids had a built in protection against multiplication. Unlike normal open pollinated species whose seed gave yields similar to its parents, the yield of the seed borne by hybrid plants was significantly lower than that of the first generation. 

That declining yield characteristic of hybrids meant farmers must normally buy seed every year in order to obtain high yields. Moreover, the lower yield of the second generation eliminated the trade in seed that was often done by seed producers without the breeder's authorization. It prevented the redistribution of the commercial crop seed by middlemen. If the large multinational seed companies were able to control the parental seed lines in house, no competitor or farmer would be able to produce the hybrid. The global concentration of hybrid seed patents into a handful of giant seed companies, led by Pioneer Hi Bred and Monsanto's Dekalb . laid the ground for the later GMO seed revolution.8 

In effect, the introduction of modern American agricultural technology, chemical fertilizers and commercial hybrid seeds all made local farmers in developing countries, particularly the larger more established ones, dependent on foreign inputs. It was a first step in what was to be a decades-long, carefully planned process. Agribusiness was making major inroads into markets which were previously of limited access to US exporters. The trend was later dubbed "market-oriented agriculture:' In reality it was agribusiness~ controlled agriculture. 

The Green Revolution and its hybrid seeds promised a major new controlled market for US agribusiness. Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, had built the first major hybrid seed company, Pioneer Hi-Bred, largely by encouraging selective USDA government research on the positive yield gains of hybrids and down playing their negative features. It enabled the growth of huge commercial seed companies. This laid the basis for the later development of genetic patented seeds by a handful of Western agribusiness giants. 

The chemical industry also claimed that the increased crop yields were only possible with the help of their products. The US Government, through US AID and other government aid programs, backed this view, and convinced the host developing sector governments to support them. This led to a situation where farmers disregarded other more traditional means of yield improvement, which were labeled primitive and inefficient by the Rockefeller and Ford country advisers.9 

Use of High Yield Varieties (HYV) of hybrid wheat, corn or rice, and major chemical inputs soon became the dominant practice. Local government officials no longer considered the option of possible yield improvement based on traditional practices. Often, the international chemical industry intervened to suppress or hinder research programs that would challenge their high input approach. This was a worldwide trend. 10 

In 1959, a team led by the US Department of Agriculture published the Ford Foundation's Report on India's Food Crisis and Steps to Meet It. In place of fundamental changes such as redistribution of land and other rural assets from the large quasi-feudal landowners as the foundation for a more effective Indian agricultural development, the Ford report stressed technological change including improved seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides in small, already irrigated pockets of the country. It was the "Green Revolution" strategy. 

Ford even funded India's Intensive Agricultural Development Program (IADP) as a test case of the strategy, providing rich farmers in irrigated areas with subsidized inputs, generous credit and price incentives. The World Bank backed the strategy with generous loans. 

Soon, the Rockefeller-Ford Green Revolution was adopted by the Indian government, with far-reaching effects. Agricultural production of rice and wheat in the selected pockets grew immediately with the new hybrids and chemical inputs. Talk of land reform, tenancy reform, abolition of usury, was dropped from the official Indian Government agenda, never to return.11 

The initial spectacular growth rates eventually slowed, though this aspect was not widely publicized, leaving the one-sided impression of success. On average, overall agricultural production in India grew more slowly after the Green Revolution than before, and in much of the country, per capita agricultural output stagnated or fell. 12 But the Green Revolution had one success: it created a large new market for US and foreign agribusiness multinational firms to sell their chemicals, petroleum, machinery and other inputs to developing countries. It was the beginning of what was called agribusiness. 

Rockefeller Finances the 

Creation of Agribusiness 

While the Rockefeller brothers were expanding their global business reach from oil to agriculture in the developing world through their Green Revolution scheme, they were financing a little-noticed project at Harvard University, which would form the infrastructure to globalize world food production under the central control of a handful of private corporations. Its creators gave it the name "agribusiness;' in order to differentiate it from traditional farmer based agriculture-that is, the cultivation of crops for human sustenance and nutrition. 

Agribusiness and the Green Revolution went hand-in-hand. They were part of a grand strategy which included Rockefeller Foundation financing of research for the development of genetic alteration of plants a few years later. 

John H. Davis had been Assistant Agriculture Secretary under President Dwight Eisenhower in the early 1950's. He left Washington in 1955 and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business, an unusual place for an agriculture expert in those days. He had a clear strategy. In 1956, Davis wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review in which he declared that "the only way to solve the so-called farm problem once and for all, and avoid cumbersome government programs, is to progress from agriculture to agribusiness:' He knew precisely what he had in mind, though few others had a clue back then.13 

Davis, together with another Harvard Business School professor, Ray Goldberg, formed a Harvard team with the Russian-born economist, Wassily Leontief, who was then mapping the entire US economy, in a project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. During the war, the US Government had hired Leontief to develop a method of inter-sectoral analysis of the total economy which he referred to as input-output analysis. Leontief worked for the US Labor Department as well as for the Office of Strategic Services . (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA.14 

In 1948, Leontief got a major four-year $100,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up the Harvard "Economic Research Project on the Structure of the American Economy." A year later, the US Air Force joined the Harvard project, a curious engagement for one of the prime US military branches. The transistor and electronic computers had just been developed along with methods of linear programming that would allow vast amounts of statistical data on the economy to be processed. Soon the Ford Foundation joined in the Harvard funding. 

The Harvard project and its agribusiness component were part of a major attempt to plan a revolution in US food production. It was to take four decades before it dominated the food industry. Goldberg later referred to the agribusiness revolution and the development of gene-modified agribusiness as "changing our global economy and society more dramatically than any other single event in the history of mankind." 

Monopoly and Vertical Integration 

Return with a Vengeance 

As Ray Goldberg boasted years later, the core idea driving the agribusiness project was the re-introduction of "vertical integration" into US food production. By the 1970's, few Americans realized that bitter battles had been fought to get Congress to outlaw vertical integration by giant conglomerates or trusts such as Standard Oil, in order to prevent them from monopolizing whole sectors of vital industries. 

It wasn't until the David Rockefeller-backed Presidency of Jimmy Carter in the late 1970's that the US multinational business  establishment Was able to begin the rollback of decades of carefully constructed US Government regulations of health, food safety and consumer protection laws, and open the doors to a new wave of vertical integration. The vertical integration process was sold to . unaware citizens under the banner of "economic efficiency" and "economy of scale." 

A return to vertical integration and the accompanying agribusiness were introduced amid a public campaign in prominent media claiming that government had encroached far too much into the daily lives of its citizens and had to be cut back to give ordinary Americans "freedom." The war cry of the campaigners was "deregulation." What they carefully left out of their propaganda was that deregulation by government merely opened the door to de facto private regulation by the largest and most powerful corporate groups in a given industry. 

The person who first called openly for deregulation of government controls and privatization, well before Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, was John D. Rockefeller III. In 1973, he published The Second American Revolution. In the book and in numerous public addresses, Rockefeller called for a "deliberate, consistent, long-term policy to decentralize and privatize many government functions ... to diffuse power throughout the society."15 

Well before that, however, Davis and Goldberg had begun to industrialize specific sectors of American agriculture into agribusiness through vertical integration, ignoring anti-trust laws, and using Leontief's input-output approach to identify the entire production and distribution chain. 

The first result of the collaboration between Davis, Goldberg and Leontief was a project to industrialize the Florida citrus industry. The control of small citrus farmers soon gave way to large national orange juice processors such as Sunkist, who dominated prices paid to the farmer through control of distribution and processing. 16

Their next target was to develop a strategy for the industrialization of the US wheat -to-consumer chain as well as the soybean market for animal feed. As the Government, step-by-step, removed  regulatory controls on agriculture or on monopoly, the vertical integration of the food industry accelerated. 

Significantly, the first American industry to be completely vertically integrated had been oil, under the Rockefeller Standard Oil Trust in 1882. Despite repeated attempts by numerous states to outlaw Rockefeller's monopolistic control of oil and freight prices, even a Supreme Court decision in 1911 failed to break up the cartel in oil, which wenton to dominate the global oil trade for the following century. The Standard Oil model, not surprisingly, was the model for the Harvard Rockefeller Foundation project to create agribusiness from agriculture. 

In the 1920's, a series of laws had been passed by the US Congress to control food monopolies, especially in the meat sector, following the revelation of shocking practices in the US meatpacking and processing industry, by writers such as Upton Sinclair whose book The Jungle described the fetid, unsanitary and often inhuman conditions of the meatpacking industry. 

Five major companies-Armour, Swift, Morris, Wilson and Cudahy-were then in a position, as the US Government's newly founded Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused them, of trying "to monopolize all the nation's food supply" by the 1920's. The five had systematically and illegally acquired a near monopoly in meatpacking.17 

The Big Five then controlled who had access to public stockyards for the cattle. They interfered with the livestock marketing process through monopoly control, controlled wholesale distribution channels, and restricted what retailers could buy. With the invention of the refrigerated railcar and assembly-line continuous meat processing plants, the meat companies vertically integrated. They integrated forward into marketing the beef, and backward into monopolizing supply of raw material-beef cattle and hogs. 

An FTC investigation in the early 1920's found that the five companies had dominated the purchase of livestock by controlling major stockyards, terminal railroads, livestock credit, market news media, and sites for potential rival packing plants. Furthermore, they had used their domination to force out new competitors and had cartelized the remaining market among themselves illegally. They controlled the retail level by owning refrigerator transport cars, cold storage warehouses and severely reduced competitor market access. Not content with all that, according to the Government investigation, the Big Five meat packers also controlled the market for substitute foods by buying or controlling them. 18  

By the 1970's, the US food supply was once more going into the hands of a tiny, monopoly of agribusiness producers. ThIs time, aided by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation funding of the Harvard Economic Research Project on the Structure of the American Economy under Leontief, Goldberg and Davis were spearheading a new corporate rush into vertical integration and monopoly control of not only American but global food supply. The scale was without precedent. 

Goldberg and Davis and their colleagues at Harvard were at the forefront of educating a new generation of corporate managers who would be infected with the prospect of staggering profits in the effort to totally restructure the way Americans grew food to feed themselves and the world. 

As US Government regulatory barriers fell under the drumbeat of deregulation, especially during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, agribusiness rushed in to fill the regulation vacuum with its own private industry rules and standards. The standards were not set by all players, but typically rather by the top four or five monopoly players. 

The process led to a concentration and transformation of American agriculture. Independent family farmers were driven off the land to make way for "more efficient" giant corporate industrial farm businesses, known as Factory Farms or corporate agriculture. Those who stayed on the land were mostly forced to work for the hig agribusiness firms as "contract farmers." 

"Where Have all the Farmers Gone?" 

As Government regulations, food safety standards and monopoly laws were systematically loosened, especially during the 1980's Reagan-Bush era, agribusiness began to transform the face of traditional American farming in ways so drastic as to be incomprehensible to ordinary consumers. Most people simply went to their local supermarket, took a nicely packed cut of beef or pork from the meat counter and thought they were still buying the product of the family farm. 

What began to take place instead was the wholesale merger and consolidation, one-by-one, of American food production, out of the hands of family farmers and into giant corporate global concentrations. The farmer gradually became a contract employee responsible only for feeding and maintaining concentrations of thousands of animals in giant pens. He no longer owned the animals or the farm. He was effectively becoming like a feudal serf, indentured through huge debts, not to a Lord of the manor, but to a global multinational corporation such as Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Smithfield Foods or ConAgra. 

For the new corporate agribusiness giants, the transformation was quite profitable. Family farmers' income for the vast majority of farm families plunged as they lost control of their market entirely to the agribusiness giants by the end of the 1990's. Their returns on equity had fallen from an average of 10% in the mid-1970's to only 2% a year, according to a study by the Senate Agriculture Committee. At the same time, the average annual return on stockholder equity for the industrialized food processing sector rose to 23% by 1999 from 13% in 1993.19 

Hundreds of thousands of independent family farmers were forced out of business with the spread of agribusiness and its large operations. They simply couldn't compete. Traditional farming was by its nature labor intensive, while factory farming was capital intensive. Farmers who did manage to raise the money for animal confinement systems quickly discovered that the small savings in labor costs were not enough to cover the increasing costs of facilities, energy, caging, and drugs. 

The increase in factory farms led to a decrease in the price independent farmers got for their animals, forcing thousands out of business. The number of US farmers dropped by 300,000 between 1979 and 1998.20 

The number of hog farms in the US decreased from 600,000 to 157,000, while the number of hogs sold increased. Consolidation resulted in just 3 percent of US hog farms producing more than 50 percent of the hogs. A report to the US Secretary of Agriculture in the late 1990's described the enormous social costs of the destruction of the American family farm by agribusiness, as the economic basis of entire rural communities collapsed and rural towns became ghost towns. The USDA report was buried.21 

Another minority report led by Senator Tom Harkin, released just before the November 2004 US Presidential elections, and also buried; revealed that by then the degree of concentration and near monopoly in the food and agriculture economy of the United States was impressive to say the least. The report found that the four largest beef packers controlled 84% of steer and heifer slaughter and 64% of hog slaughter. Four companies controlled 89% of the breakfast cereal market.22 

When Cargill acquired the grain handling operations of Continental Grain in 1998, that one company, Cargill controlled 40% of national grain elevator capacity. The US Justice Department approved the merger. Four large agro-chemical seed companies Monsanto, Novartis, Dow Chemical, and DuPont-control more than 75 percent of the nation's seed corn sales and 60 percent of soybean seed sales, at the same time that these companies control large shares of the agricultural chemical market. 23 

As traditional farmers abandoned their family land in droves during the 1980's and 1990's, agribusiness moved in to fill the void. The extent of the dramatic shift was largely hidden by clever government statistical accounting methods to make it appear that family farmers were simply getting larger, not that American farming had become giant corporate agribusiness.24 

Municipalities, often desperate to attract jobs in regions of rural depression, offered the new agribusiness giants attractive concessions, tax benefits and others, to locate their industrial farms in ,the region, hoping to create new jobs and economic growth. The main growth created by the huge animal concentrations was fecal matter-animal waste in unimagined volumes. 

What was termed a revolution in animal factory production began in the early 1980's. It was unpublicized for obvious reasons. Techniques of mass production and factory efficiency were introduced by the large corporations much as had been done in the auto industry assembly line production. Hogs, cattle and chickens were no longer produced on open fields or small farms where animals received individual attention from the farmer in event of illness or disease. The new production involved what was called "confinement feeding" or what came to be called CAFOs-Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. Their goal was maximum corporate profit at minimum cost-Shareholder Value was the Wall Street term. Gone was a system in which direct attention and care to the individual pig or cow or pasture land or crop soil mattered. Profit was the bottom line of the corporate agribusiness giant driving the transformation. 

The CAFOs brought impressive concentrations of animal flesh into the smallest possible confinement space. From birth to slaughter,a factory pig, often weighing 500 to 600 pounds, would never leave a typical gestation cage of concrete and bars, a cell only as large as the animal. The animal would never be able to lie down, and as a result developed severe foot problems. The unnatural confinement created madness in the sows, including "bar biting" and senseless chewing. Never in their entire life did they see daylight. 

The US Department of Agriculture estimated that 10% of all animals confined in CAFOs died annually due to stress, disease and injury, and up to 28% for some types of chickens.The factory managers had no incentive to spend time or invest in individual animals, arguing that it was more "cost effective" to take some "loss on inventory" rather than invest in proper veterinary care. Factory farming, as a result of generous campaign contributions to Congressmen, enjoyed an exempt status from normal laws against cruelty to animals.25 

Cattle were packed into similar cages by the thousands. The London Economist magazine, in a May 2000 report, described the  transformation of Iowa into the largest pig production center in America under factory farming. "Take take a trip to hog heaven;' they wrote. "This ten-mile stretch of countryside north of Ames, Iowa, produces almost a tenth of America's pork. But there is not an animal in sight. In massive metal sheds, up to 4,000 sows at a time are reared for slaughter, their diets carefully monitored, their waste regularly siphoned away, their keepers showered and begowned, like surgeons, to avoid infecting the herd."26 

OMB Watch, an organization monitoring the role of US Government regulators in the area, reported the effects of the drastic reduction in Government rules on pollution and animal waste contamination from giant factory farm installations beginning during the Carter Presidency in the seventies. 

Under the George W. Bush Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, at the request of agribusiness, repealed a rule that held corporate livestock owners liable for damage caused by animal waste pollution. They noted that the factory farm owners often evaded responsibility by hiring contractors to raise their animals. The EPA also dropped a requirement that would have forced facilities to monitor groundwater for potential contamination by animal waste, which often seeped into the earth, leaving communities vulnerable to potentially dangerous drinking water supplies. The EPA had refused to change the allowed levels of which livestock operations met their definition of CAFO with attendant pollution limits despite repeated lawsuits.27 

Because of the huge scale of the CAPOs or Factory Farms, animal waste and pollution of ground water was no minor affair. The huge animal farms housed tens of thousands of cattle, pigs or chickens in small concentrations, hence the name, CAFO. It was estimated that the factory farms produced more than 130 times the waste that humans did, or some 2.7 trillion pounds of animal waste a year.28 That waste would then be channelled into enormous "lagoons" that often leaked, ruptured or overflowed-killing fish and other marine life, spreading disease and contaminating community drinking water supplies. The CAFO farms also routinely over-applied liquid waste to land areas, known as "sprayfields;' causing it to run into waterways.  "Water contaminated by animal manure contributes to human diseases such as acute gastroenteritis, fever, kidney failure, and even death:' according to a 2005 study by NRDC.29 

Among the findings documented by the NRDC study were some alarming consequences to the cartelization of US agribusiness. They documented that in 1996 the US Government's Centers for Disease Control established a link between spontaneous abortions and high nitrate levels in Indiana drinking water wells located close to animal feedlots. As well, the high levels of nitrates in drinking water also increase the risk of methemoglobinemia, or "blue-baby syndrome:' which can kill infants. Further, animal waste contains disease-causing pathogens, such as Salmonella, E. coli, Cryptosporidium, and fecal coliform, which can be 10 to 100 times more concentrated than in human waste. More than 40 diseases can be transferred to humans through manure.30 

Typically, the corporations running the CAFOs would hire illegal immigrants at dirt low wages to deal with the huge waste concentrations, channelling them into vast "lagoons" which often ruptured or overflowed, killing fish and contaminating drinking water supplies.31 

By the end of the 1990's, factory farming had made agriculture . into the United States' largest general source of water pollution. One study showed that a growing hog produced two to four times as much waste asa human and a milk cow the waste of 24 people. Spread over large fields in a traditional family farm, such waste had never been a serious ecological problem. Concentrated into industrial centers of maximum animal density per square foot, it created staggering new environmental and health hazards. Because of the financial muscle of the giant corporate agribusiness farms, the Government catered to their needs to maximize profits, ignoring their legislative mandate to guard public health. 

To deal with the large manure problem, the CAPOs typically would build earth pits to hold tens of millions of gallons of festering manure with an estimated "pollution strength" 130 times greater than human sewage. Putrid manure and urine waste contaminated countless streams and ground water sources across the United States.32 

In California's Central Valley, giant mega-dairy CAFOs, with a total of 900,000 dairy cows, leaked fecal matter into the ground water, pushing nitrate levels of drinking water up 400%. The waste produced by the animals was equivalent to that of 21 million people.33 

Not only waste, but consumption of drugs, especially antibiotics to keep diseases under control in the concentrated breeding spaces, became staggering. By the end of the 1990's the largest users of antibiotics and similar drugs from the large pharmaceutical firms were not humans, but animals, who consumed 70% of all pharmaceutical antibiotics.34 The big pharmaceutical industry was becoming an integral part of the agribusiness chain. 

In 1954, just as Harvard's Goldberg and Davis were developing their ideas on agribusiness, American farmers used about 500,000 pounds of antibiotics a year raising food animals. By the year 2005, it had increased to 40 million pounds, an eighty-fold rise. And some 80% of the antibiotics were poured directly into the animal feed to make the animals grow faster. Penicillin. and tetracycline were the most commonly used antibiotics on the factory farms. 

One result was the evolution of new strains of virulent bacteria appearing in humans and resistant to antibiotics. The Center for Disease Control and the USDA reported that the spread of food  related disease in humans resulting from eating meat pumped with antibiotics and other substances was "epidemic." Most of the food related diseases were caused by contamination of the food, milk or water from animal fecal matter.35 

The ability for corporations to merge and vertically integrate created a corporate concentration never before seen in agriculture. By the end of the 1990's, four large corporations-Tyson, Cargill, Swift and National Beef Packing-controlled 84% of all beef packing in the United States. Four corporations-Smithfield Foods, Tyson, Swift and Hormel-controlled 64% of all pig packing. Cargill, ADM and Bunge controlled 71 % of all soybean crushing, and Cargill, ADM and ConAgra controlled 63% of all flour milling. Two GMO giants, Monsanto and Pioneer-Hi Bred of Dupont controlled 60% of the US corn and soybean seed market, which consisted entirely of patented Genetically Modified seeds. The ten  largest food retailing corporations, led by Wal-Mart, controlled a total global market of $649 billion by 2002.36 

By the beginning of the new millennium, corporate agribusiness had vertically integrated into a concentration of market power never before experienced even in the trust heyday of the early 1920's. Agribusiness as a sector had become the second most profitable industry in America next to pharmaceuticals, with annual domestic sales of well over $400 billion 37 And the next phase was clearly mergers between the pharmaceutical giants and the agribusiness giants. 

It was not surprising that the Pentagon's National Defense University, on the eve of the 2003 Iraq war, issued a paper declaring: "Agribusiness is to the United States what oil is to the Middle East 38 Agribusiness had become a strategic weapon in the arsenal of the world's only Superpower. 

The giant factory farms also destroyed the viability of traditional farming, killing an estimated three traditional farm jobs for every new, often low-paid, job it created. Shareholder Value had come to American agriculture with a vengeance. 

The United States Department of Agriculture had been established in 1862 by President Abraham Lincoln who called it "the peoples" department. Its original mandate had been to serve farmers and their families, about half the population of the country at the time. By the end of the 20th Century, the number of family farmers had been decimated. The traditional farmer had become a near extinct species under the driving pressures of agribusiness and its power to control entire sectors through vertical integration. 

The US Department of Agriculture or USDA had been transformed into a lobby for agribusiness. Between 1995 and 2003 American taxpayers paid over $100 billion for USDA crop subsidies. The subsidies went not to struggling family farmers, however. They went overwhelmingly to the giant new agribusiness operators, corporate farms, including millions to David Rockefeller, the ardent advocate of less government subsidies.39 Some ten percent of the largest farm groups received 72% of USDA crop subsidies. 

More worrisome was the fact that the US Government itself admitted in published reports that its statutory oversight in the  health and safety of the nation's meatpacking and processing industry was worse than inadequate. In January 2006, the USDA issued the following report, apparently only in required response to a lone Senator who asked: The Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration has not established an adequate control structure and environment that allows the agency to oversee and manage its investigative activities for the Packers and Stockyards Programs (P&SP) .... P&SP's tracking system could not be relied upon, competition and complex investigations were not being performed, and timely action was not being taken on issues that impact day-to-day activities. These material weaknesses should be reported in the agency's next FMFIA report because they represent essential activities for administering and enforcing the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 (Act). The Act prohibits unfair, unjustly discriminatory, and deceptive acts and practices, including certain anti~competitive practices. We also found that the agency has not taken sufficient actions to strengthen operations in response to findings previously reported by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) in February 1997 and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in September 2000. Our current work was initiated in response to concerns raised by a US Senator in April 2005.40 

The last statement implied they would not have undertaken such an inquiry on their own. 

It was no accident. The powerful Washington lobbyists of agribusiness drafted the Farm Bills that dispersed the funds, and influenced which policies got enforced, as well as the appointment of agribusiness-friendly bureaucrats and officials to enforce them. The 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act had become an empty construct, honored in its breach. 

The now powerful forces of the agribusiness lobby scored a major victory in 1996 with passage of the new Farm Bill by the US Congress. US farm policy from 1933, as explicitly stated in the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, during the Great Depression, granted authority to the Secretary of Agriculture to attempt to balance demand and supply, by idling land,implementing commodity storage programs, establishing marketing quotas for some crops and to encouraging exports of commodities including food relief programs and sales of farm commodities for soft currencies. However, after 1996, the Secretary's authorities were suspended, if not repealed, in the 1996 and 2002 farm bills. 

Before 1996, sharp price swings were moderated through the use of storage programs and land idling. The costs for the stabilization were relatively modest compared with the costs incurred after 1997. The 1996 farm bill, enacted during a brief period of economic euphoria in 1996, temporarily stripped the Secretary of Agriculture of all authority to manage inventories and set the stage for all-out production of the major program crops. That authority to idle resources, which every other CEO has authority to do when inventories become excessive, was swept away despite overwhelming evidence that agriculture's capacity to produce has consistently exceeded the capacity of markets to absorb the production without resorting to unacceptably low prices. With the transition away from government programs, it was expected that market forces would appropriately throttle resource use in agriculture. The results were a huge boon for agribusiness in their pursuit of ever-larger land at a cheap price. For the family farmer, the price was staggering. 

As a report done by Iowa State University concluded: 

Prices declined because the 1996 farm bill no longer authorized the government to idle land to balance demand and supply. Production decisions were left to the market .... When no land is idled, production increases, crop prices fall, and land values come under pressure until there is less profitability for crop production on the least productive land. The market squeezes out the thinner soils and steeper slopes, the higher per-unit cost of production areas. This land then transitions ... to another crop or to grazing land.41 

Few Americans had the slightest idea of what was going on. By the mid-decade of the new century, however, the general level of  public health, the epidemic-scale incidence of obesity, allergies, diseases once rare in the general population such as salmonella poisoning, e-coli, all were becoming everyday events. 

The stage was set by the end of the 1990's for what Ray Goldberg termed a transformation that he described as "changing our global economy and society more dramatically than any other single event in the history of mankind."42 

By 1998, Goldberg was 77 years old and extremely active, sitting on the boards of numerous large agribusiness companies such as ADM and Smithfield Foods and advising the World Bank on agribusiness for the developing world. That year, he organized a new university-wide research group at Harvard to examine how the genetic revolution would affect the global food system. 

The creator of agribusiness was integrating the gene revolution into the agribusiness revolution as the next phase. He mapped out the transformation of world food consolidation thirty years into the future. 

His study calculated that "the traditional agribusiness system, without the pharmaceutical, health and life science segments will be an $8 trillion global industry by 2028. The farming sector value added;' he went on, "will have shrunk from 32% in 1950 to 10% .... Whereas food processing and distribution accounted for half of 1950's value added, it will account for over 80% in 2028."43 For Goldberg, the farmer would become a tiny player in the giant global chain. 

Goldberg calculated the addition of entire new sectors created by the latest developments in genetic engineering, including GMO creation of pharmaceutical drugs from genetically-engineered plants, which he called "the agri-ceutical system." He declared, "The addition of life science (biotechnology-ed.) participants in the new agri-ceutical system will increase total value added in 2028 to over $15 trillion and the farmers' share will shrink even further to 7%:' He proclaimed, enthusiastically, "the genetic revolution is leading to an industrial convergence of food, health, medicine, fiber and energy businesses."44 

He might have added that all this was virtually without government regulation or scientific supervision by neutral scientific research organizations. How the gene revolution evolved, would again find the Rockefeller Foundation in a central role. From Green Revolution to Gene Revolution, the foundation was in the center of developing the strategy and means for transforming how the planet fed itself, or didn't feed itself. 

next
Food is Power ...161s 

Notes 

1. Peter Grose, Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996, New York, Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1996. pp. 23-26. This official account by the CFR of the War and Peace Studies project states: "More than two years before the Japanese attack on P~arl Harbor, the research staff of the Council on Foreign Relations had started to envision a venture that would dominate the life of the institution for the demanding years ahead. With the memory of the Inquiry in focus, they conceived a role for the Council in the formulation of national policy. On September 12, 1939, as Nazi Germany invaded Poland, (CFR's Hamilton Fish) Armstrong and Mallory entrained to Washington to meet with Assistant Secretary of State George S. Messersmith. At that time the Department of State could command few resources for study, research, policy planning, and initiative; on such matters, the career diplomats on the eve of World War II were scarcely better off than had been their predecessors when America entered World War I. The men from the Council proposed a discreet venture reminiscent of the Inquiry: a program of independent analysis and study that would guide American foreign policy in the coming years of war and the challenging new world that would emerge after. The project became known as the War and Peace Studies. "The matter is strictly confidential," wrote (Isaiah) Bowman, "because the whole plan would be 'ditched' if it became generally known that the State Department is working in collaboration with any outside group.~' The Rockefeller Foundation agreed to fund the project, reluctantly at first, but, once convinced of its relevance, with nearly $350,000. Over the coming five years, almost 100 men participated in the War and Peace Studies, divided into four functional topic groups: economic and financial, security and armaments, territorial, and political. These groups met more than 250 times, usually in New York, over dinner and late into the night. They produced 682 memoranda for the State Department, which marked them classified and circulated them among the appropriate government departments." . 

2. Ibid., pp. 10,15. 

3. U.S. Supreme Court, US v. US Steel Corporation, U.S. 417,1920, p. 25I. 

4. Henry Luce, "The American Century:' Life, 17 February 1941. 

5. Handbook, The New York Council on Foreign Relations, Studies of American Interests in the War and the Peace, New York, 1939-1942, cited in Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003, pp. 325-328.: 

6. Neil Smith, op. cit., p. 287. 

7. Joseph S. Nye Jr, "Propaganda Isn't the Way: Soft Power", The International Herald Tribune, 10 January 2003. Nye defines what he coined as "soft power": 

"Soft power is the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will. Both hard and soft powers are important ... but attraction is much cheaper than coercion, and an asset that needs to be nourished." 

8. Kramer, Paul, "Nelson Rockefeller and British Security Coordination", Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 16, 1981, pp. 77-81. 

9. Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1947, Delacorte, New York, 1983, pp.53-54. 

10. Ibid., p. 56. 

11. Ibid., pp. 67-69. 

12. William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid, Ballantine Books, New York, 1976, pp.308-311. 

13. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon-Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, HarperCollins, New York, 1995,pp. 115-116. 

14. Thomas O'Brien, Making the Americas: U.S. Business People and Latin Americans from the Age of Revolutions to the Era of Globalization, History Compass 2, LA 067,2004, pp. 14-15. 

15. Los Angeles Times, Mexico 75 Years Later, Today's Zapatistas Still Fight the Rockefeller Legacy, 14 May 1995. 

16. William Stevenson, op. cit., p. 309. 

17. John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People, St. Martin's, New York, 1994, pp. 165-171. 

18. Margaret Carroll Boardman, Sowing the Seeds of the Green Revolution: The Pivotal Role Mexico and International Non-Profit Organizations Play in Making. Biotechnology an Important Foreign Policy Issue for the 21st Century, http://www.isop.ucla.edu/profmexivolume4/3summer99/Green_Finalm.htm. 

19. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, op. cit., pp. 116, 168. 

20. Ibid., p. 166. 

21. Ibid., p. 169. 

22. Committee on Rules and Administration, U.S. Senate, 9yd Congress, 2nd Session, Hearings, The Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York to be Vice President of the United States, Washington D.C., Government Printing Office, 1974, cited in Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, op. cit., p. 373. In addition to the known holdings in the Standard Oil companies, Rockefeller's investments included such prime defense contractors as McDonnell Aircraft, Chrysler Corp.,  Boeing, Monsanto, Dow Chemical, Hercules, Bendix, Motorola and numerous other defense contractors. 

23. John Freivalds, Brazil Agriculture: Winning the Great Farms Race, 3 March 2005, http://www.brazilmax.com/news.cfm/tborigem/fe_business/id/5. 

24. Lester Brown, Seeds of Change, Praeger, New York, 1969, Chapter 1: New Seeds and Mechanization. 

25. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, op. cit., pp. 212-214. 

Notes
1. UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Mobilizing Science for Global Food Security, Fourth External Review of CIMMYT, (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research-CGIAR, Rome )-SDR/TAC:IAR/97 /9. Also CGIAR, The Origins of the CGJAR, http://www.cgiar.orglwho/history/origins.htrnI. details the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in creation of both CIMMYT and later CGIAR as the larger global agriculture research body to advance the Rockefeller Foundation's growing agribusiness agenda. See also Robert Anderson, American Foundations, the Green Revolution and the CGIAR: Intentions, Implementation and Contingencies, Simon Fraser University, November 2003, http://les.man.ac.uk!governmentlpublications/working...papers_docs/GlobalisationlFoundations%20papers %20Anderson.pdf. One of the most detailed critiques of Rockefeller's Green Revolution is made in Harry Cleaver, The Contradictions of the Green Revolution, http://www.eco. utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/ cleavercontradictions. pdf. 
2. Harry Cleaver, op. cit., p. 3. 
3. CGIAR, The Origins of the CGIAR, in http://www.cgiar.org/who/history/ origins.html. 
4. Ibid. For background on the very influential Rockefeller friend, Maurice Strong, see Elaine Dewar, Cloak of Green, Lorimar & Co., Toronto, 1995, p. 254, and Henry Lamb, Maurice Strong: The New Guy in Your Future!, January 1997, http://www.sovereignty.netlp/ sd/ strong.html#3. 
5. Harry Cleaver, op. cit., p. 5. A. T. Mosher, Getting Agriculture Moving, ADC, New York, 1966, p. 34. 
6. Ibid., P. 11. Also, "Who's for DDT?", Time, 22 November 1971. 
7. A. Parsons, "Philippines: Rebellious Litde Brother", Pacific Research and World Empire Telegram, January 1971. 
8. Jeroen van Wijk, "Hybrids Bred for Superior Yields or for Control?", Biotechnology and Development Monitor, 1994, No. 19, pp. 3-5. 
9. Harry Cleaver, op.cit:, p. 9. 
10. Ibid., p. 9. 
11. Research Unit for Political Economy (R.U.P.E.), "Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum, Appendix I: Ford Foundation-A Case Study of the Aims of Foreign Funding", Aspects of India's Economy September 2003. For background on the postwar close ties between the Ford Foundation and the CIA during the 1950's and 1960's see James Petras, "The Ford Foundation and the CIA: A Documented Case of Philanthropic Collaboration with the Secret Police", Rebelion; 15 December 2001, http://www.rebelion.orglpetras/english/ford010102.htm. 
12. Debashis Mandai and S. K. Ghosh, "Precision Farming-the Emerging Concept of Agriculture for Today and Tomorrow", Current Science, 25 December 2000. The authors, authorities on Indian agriculture summarize the impact of the Green Revolution in India: "The green revolution has not only increased productivity, but it has also several negative ecological consequences such as depletion of lands, decline in soil fertility, soil salinization, soil erosion, deterioration of environment, health hazards, poor sustainability of agricultural lands and degradation of biodiversity. Indiscriminate use of pesticides, irrigation and imbalanced fertilization has threatened sustainability." 
13. John H. Davis, Harvard Business Review, 1956, cited in Geoffrey Lawrence, "Agribusiness", Capitalism and the Countryside, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1987. See also Harvard Business School, The Evolution of an Industry and a Seminar: Agribusiness Seminar, http://www.exed.hbs.edu/programs/agb/seminar.html. 
14. Martin Kohli, "Leontief and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1941-54: Developing a Framework for Measurement;' History of Political Economy, Vol. 33, Annual Supplement, 2001, pp. 190-19l. 
15. John D. Rockefeller III, The Second American Revolution, Harper & Row, New York, 1973, p. 108. 
16. Current Biography, 1967, W. Leontief and Ray Goldberg, "The Evolution of Agribusiness", Harvard Business School Executive Education Faculty Interviews, http://www.exed.hbs.edu/faculty/rgoldberg.html. W. Leontief, Studies in the Structure of the American Economy, International Science Press Inc., White Plains, New York, 1953. In its 1956 Annual Report, the Ford Foundation noted the following grant: "Harvard Economic Research Project': In addition to these overall programs, a grant of $240,000 was made to support the activities of the Harvard Economic Research Project over a six-year period. This center, under the direction of Professor Wassily Leontief, was engaged in a series of quantitative studies of the structure of the American economy, focusing mainly on inter-industry relationships and the interconnections between industry and other sectors of the economy. Equal support was contributed by the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Annual Report, New York, 1956. A fascinating and controversial report of the implementation of the Leontief Harvard Economic Research Project on the Structure of the American Economy is a document titled, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. Its authorship is disputed, with attribution to Hartford Van Dyke and to William Cooper, and much speculation exists as to whether it is fact or fiction. The discussion in the report of aspects of the Leontief research, its Rockefeller funding and how it was linked actively with the work of Ray Goldberg and John H. Davis in creating the model of corporate agribusiness is too incisive to dismiss the full report completely. The document for this reason alone is worth reading. http://www. universalway.orglForeign/ silentweapons.html.
17. Roert M Aduddell, and Louis P. Cain, "Public Policy Toward The Greatest Trust in the World", Business History Review, Summer 1981, Harvard College, Cambridge, p. 217. 
18. Ibid., p. 218. 
19. James MacDonald et aI., Growing Farm Size and the Distribution of Farm Payments, United States Departent of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Economic Brief No.6, Washington, D.C. March, 2006, p. 2. 
20. The Humane Farming Association, Factory Farming: The True Costs, San Rafael California, 31 July 2005,http://www.hfa.org. 
21. Ibid. 
22. Tom Harkin, Economic Concentration and Structural Change in the Food and Agriculture Sector, Prepared by the Democratic Staff of the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry United States Senate, 29 October 2004, p.6. 
23. Ibid., pp. 5-6. Also Mark Spitzer, "Industrial Agriculture and Corporate Power", Global Pesticide Campaigner, August 2003, http://www.panna.orgliacp. 
24. James MacDonald, et al., op.cit., pp.I-4. 
25. The Humane Farming Association, op. cit. 
26. The Economist, "Growing Pains:' The Economist, US Edition, 25 March 2000. 
27.0MB Watch, OMB Waters Down Standards on Factory-Farm Runoff, 
28 May 2003, http://www.ombwatch.org/article/articleviewI1540. See also Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Facts about Pollution from Livestock Farms, Washington, D.C., 15 July 2005. 28.0MB Watch, op. cit. 
29. NRDC, op. cit. 30. NRDC, op. cit. 
31. Ibid. 
32.0MB Watch, op. cit. 
33. The Humane Farming Association, op. cit. 
34. NRDC, op. cit. 
35. The Humane Farming Association, op. cit. See also, Brian DeVore, "Greasing the Way for Factory Bacon, Corporate hog operations-and their lagoonsThreaten the Financial and Physical health of Family Farms': Sustainable Farming Connection, http://www.ibiblio.orglfarming-connection. 
36. Tom Harkin, op. cit., pp. 6-7. 
37. Ray Goldberg, The Genetic Revolution: Transforming our Industry, Its Institutions, and Its Functions, address to The International Food and Agribusiness Management Association (lAMA), Chicago, 26 June 2000, pp. 1-2. Goldberg founded and headed the lAMA as well as holding seats on the boards of agribusiness giants Archer Daniels Midland, Smithfield Foods and DuPont Pioneer HiBred. He practiced what he preached. 
38. Col. Eddie Coleman, US Army, Agribusiness Group Paper National Defense University, 2003, in http://www.ndu.edu/icaf/industry/IS2003/papersl 20030/020Agribusiness.htm#. 
39. Tom Harkin, op. cit. 
40. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Inspector General, Northeast Region, Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration's Management and Oversight of the Packers and Stockyards Programs, Report No. 30601-01-Hy, Washington D.C., January 2006, p. 3. 
41. Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture Iowa State University, Toward a Global Food and Agriculture Policy, January 2005, http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/ pubslstaff/policy/globalag.pdf. 
42. Ray Goldberg, The Genetic Revolution, op.cit., p. 1. 
43. Ibid. p. 2. Also see PR Newswire, Agriceuticals: The Most Important Economic Event in our Lifetime, Says Harvard Professor Dr. Ray Goldberg, 8 December 1999. 
44. Ibid. p. 2.

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