SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION
By William EngdahlCHAPTER 8
Food is Power ...
"Food is power! We use it to change behavior. Some
may call that bribery. We do not apologize."
Catherine Bertini, Executive Director, United Nations World Food Program,
former us Assistant Secretary of Agriculture 1
Capturing the Golden Rice Bowl
In 1985, the Rockefeller Foundation initiated the first large-scale
research into the possibility of genetically engineering plants for
commercial use. At the time they termed it a "major, long-term
commitment to plant genetic engineering."2
Rockefeller Foundation funds provided the essential catalyst for
the worldwide scientific research and development which would
lead to the creation of genetically modified plants, the Gene
Revolution. Over the following two decades, the Rockefellers would
spend well over $100 million of foundation monies directly, and
several hundred million indirectly, to catalyze and propagate
research on the development of genetic engineering and its application
to transform world food production.3 Clearly, it was a very
big issue in their strategic plans.
In 1982, a group of hand-picked advisers from the Foundation
urged its management to devote future resources to the application
of molecular biology for plant breeding. In December 1984, the
Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation approved what was seen at
the time as a 10-15 year program to apply new molecular-biological techniques to the breeding of rice, the dietary staple of a majority
of the planet's population.
1984 was the year Ronald Reagan was re-elected to a second
term with what he saw as a strong popular mandate to press ahead
with his New Right economic agenda of privatization and deregulation,
along the lines that had been spelled out by John D.
Rockefeller and others more than a decade earlier. American
agribusiness had reached a major threshold in terms of its ability
to influence USDA agricultural policy and, by extension, the world
food market. The time was propitious to initiate a dramatic shift
in the future control of the world food supply.
The "New Eugenics":
Reductio ad Absurdum ...
The genetic engineering initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation
was no spur of the moment decision. It was the culmination of the
research it had funded since the 1930's. During the late 1930's, as
the foundation was still deeply involved in funding eugenics in the
Third Reich, it began to recruit chemists and physicists to foster
the invention of a new science discipline, which it named molecular
biology to differentiate it from classical biology. The foundation
developed molecular biology as a discipline partly to deflect and
blunt growing social criticism of its racist eugenics. Nazi Germany
had given eugenics a "bad name:'
The Rockefeller Foundation's President during the 1930's,
Warren Weaver, was a physicist. He and Max Mason headed the
foundation's new biology program. Their largesse in giving funds
to scientific research projects gained the foundation enormous
influence over the direction of science during the Great Depression
by the mere fact they had funds to dispense to leading scientific
researchers at a time of acute scarcity. From 1932 to 1957, the
Rockefeller Foundation had handed out an impressive $90 million
in grants to support the creation of the newfield of molecular
biology.4 Molecular biology and the attendant work with genes
was a Rockefeller Foundation creation in every sense of the word.
Borrowing generously from their work in race eugenics, the
foundation scientists developed the idea of molecular biology from the fundamental assumption that almost all human problems could
be "solved" by genetic and chemical manipulations. In the 1938
Annual Report of the Rockefeller Foundation, Weaver first coined
the term, "molecular biology" to describe their support for research
to apply techniques of symbolic logic and other scientific disciplines
to make biology "more scientific." The idea had been promoted
during the 1920's by Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research
biologist Jacques Loeb, who concluded from his experiments, that
echinoderm larvae could be chemically stimulated to develop in
the absence of fertilization, and that science would eventually come
to control the fundamental processes of biology. The people in and
around the Rockefeller institutions saw it as the ultimate means of
social control and social engineering, eugenics.5
It seemed clear in 1932, when the Rockefeller Foundation
launched its quarter-century program in that area, that the biological
and medical sciences were ready "for a friendly invasion by
the physical sciences". According to Warren Weaver:
The tools are now available for discovering, on the most disciplined
and precise level of molecular actions, how man's central nervous
system really operates, how he thinks, learns, remembers, and forgets
... . Apart from the fascination of gaining some knowledge of the
nature of the mind-brain-body relationship, the practical values in
such studies are potentially enormous. Only thus may we gain information
about our behavior of the sort that can lead to wise and beneficial
control. 6
During World War II, Weaver and the Rockefeller Foundation
were in the center of all international research in molecular biology.
Three Rockefeller Institute (today Rockefeller University-w.e.)
scientists Avery, MacLeod and McCarty identified what appeared
to be the transmission of a gene from one bacterial cell to another.
Their colleague, later prominent researcher at the Rockefeller
University, geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, noted at the time with
great excitement, "we are dealing with authentic cases of inductions
of specific mutations by specific treatments-a feat which geneticists
have vainly tried to accomplish in higher organisms" Already
in 1941, Rockefeller scientists were laying the foundations for their later development of genetically modified organisms and the Gene
Revolution. 7
Notably, the Rockefeller-funded genetic scientists in the new
field of molecular biology congregated at the same Cold Spring
Harbor site of the Eugenics Records Office, financed by Carnegie
and Rockefeller foundations, to hold major scientific symposiums
on the "genetics of micro-organisms" beginning in 1946 just after
the war's end.8
Reducing Life
Risks entailed weren't interesting to the Rockefeller group. Their
methodology went back to what was termed "reductionism" by
Rene Descartes, and to the method of Charles Darwin, namely that
living creatures were machines whose only goal was genetic replication-a
matter of chemistry and statistics. The Rockefeller
methodology was an extension of the belief that a complex life
form cold be reduced to a basic building bloc or "elementary seed;'
from which all traits of the life form could be deduced. It was of
little interest to Weaver and others at the Rockefeller Foundation
that scientific reductionism had been thoroughly refuted. "Who
pays the Piper picks the tune." They had a social agenda and their
reductionist genetics supported that agenda.
One scientist critical of the risks of GMO research, Prof. Philip
Regal, who organized the first meeting between leading university
ecologists and molecular biologists, genetic engineers in industry,
and representatives from government agencies, at the Cold Spring
Harbor Banbury Center in August 1984, defined the flaw of the
molecular biologists' reductionism:
In the case of DNA, this molecule is stable in a test tube. But it is not
stable in populations of reproducing organisms. One cannot reduce
the behavior of DNA in living organisms to its chemical properties in
a test tube! In living systems, DNA is modified, or "destabilized" if
one prefers, at a minimum by mutation, gene flow, recombination, and
natural selection. This would make it extremely difficult or even
impossible to have a true genetic engineering, in the sense of which
it had been spoken. Many molecular biologists certainly "knew" facts about mutation and natural selection as abstract facts, but they were
not a working part of their professional consciousness.9
Once they had made the idea popular in US science that organisms
were reduced to genes, they could conclude that organisms
had no inherent nature. Anything was "fair game." But nature was
far more complex than a digital computer. In one example pointed
to by biologists, whereas a given DNA molecule would be stable
in a test tube, it became highly unstable in living organisms, interacting
in extremely non-linear and complex ways. Life was not a
binary computer program. It was marvellously non-linear and
complex as traditional biologists had attested for centuries.10
The Rockefeller Foundation's molecular biology and their genetics work was consciously based on that fundamental scientific error, reductionism. Their scientists used the term "genetic programming" as a metaphor for what happens in a computer, but no scientist was able to generate an organism from a genetic program. As one British biologist, Professor Brian Goodwin, pointed out, "You need to know more than gene products in order to explain the emergence of shape and form in organisms."11
Such details were of no interest to the Rockefeller eugenicists, who were masquerading in the 1980's as geneticists. More likely than not, many of the younger generation of biologists and scientists receiving Rockefeller research grants were blissfully unaware that eugenics and genetics were in any way related. They simply scrambled for scarce research dollars, and the dollars all too often had the name and strings of the Rockefeller Foundation attached.
The foundation's research goal was to find ways to reduce the infinite complexities of life to simple, deterministic and predictive models. Warren Weaver was intent on using science, bad science if need be, to shape the world into the Rockefeller model. The promoters of the new molecular biology at the foundation were determined to map the structure of the gene, and to use that information, as Philip Regal described it, "to correct social and moral problems including crime, poverty, hunger and political instability."12 Just how they would correct such social problems would be kept under wraps for decades. Regal described the Rockefeller vision:
From the perspective of a theory reductionist, it was logical that social problems would reduce to simple biological problems that could be corrected through chemical manipulations of soils, brains, and genes. Thus the Rockefeller Foundation made a major commitment to using its connections and resources to promote a philosophy of eugenics.
The Rockefeller Foundation used its funds and considerable social, political, and economic connections to promote the idea that society should wait for scientific inventions to solve its problems, and that tampering with the economic and political systems would not be necessary. Patience, and more investment in reductionist research would bring trouble-free solutions to social and economic problems.
Mason and Weaver helped create a network of what would one day be called molecular biologists, that had little traditional knowledge of living organisms and of communities of organisms. It shared a faith in theory reductionism and in determinism. It shared utopian ideals. It learned to use optimistic terms of discourse that brought grants and status. The project was in the general spirit of Bacon's New Atlantis and Enlightenment visions of a trouble-free society based on mastery of nature's laws and scientific/technological progress.13
During the 1970's, molecular biologists in the United States intensely debated the issue of whether recombinant DNA research, later referred to as genetic engineering, should at all proceed, or whether, owing to the incalculability of the possible dangers to life on the planet and the risk of an ecological accident, research should be voluntarily ceased in the interest of mankind. By 1973, the essential techniques of genetic engineering had been developed in the laboratory. 14
One biologist, Dr. Robert Mann, a retired Senior Lecturer of the University of Auckland, emphasised that there was indeed a problem with how Rockefeller reductionist simplification ignored possible social risks: "Attempts at risk analysis for Genetic Engineering are, obviously, doomed to be even more misleading" Mann noted:
The system of a living cell, even if no viruses or foreign plasmids (let alone prions) are tossed in, is incomparably more complex than a nuclear reactor. There is no prospect of imagining most of the ways it can go badly wrong ... . Many gene-splicings come to naught; some others may yield only the desired outcome; but the few major mishaps, as with nuclear power, dominate the assessment so as to rule out this approach to science and life. 15
Mann sounded the alarm: one of the countless scientific warnings buried by the powerful agribusiness propaganda machine that stood with the Rockefeller Foundation behind genetically engineered organisms. 16
"Among the biological materials used for GE," Prof. Abigail Salyers warned in the prestigious Microbiological Review:
Are small pieces of DNA called plasmids, depicted ... as simple predictable carriers of engineered genes. According to conventional wisdom, a plasmid used to introduce a gene into a genetically engineered micro-organism can be rendered non-transmissible ... [on the contrary] there is no such thing as a "safe" plasmid ... a riddle we may have to answer in order to survive: what can be done to slow or stop the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. But the gene jockeys claim they can, Godlike, foresee the evolutionary results of their artificial transposings of human genes into sheep, bovine genes into tomatoes, etc. 17
The heart of genetic engineering of plants, unlike the longstanding methods of creating plant hybrids by cross-breeding two varieties of the same plant to produce a new variety with specific traits, involved introducing foreign DNA into a given plant. The . combining of genes from different organisms was termed recombinant DNA or rONA. An example was the creation of GE sweet corn or Bt sweet corn. It was made by inserting a gene from a soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, into the genome of a corn variety to protect it from the European Corn Borer pest. In 1961,Bt had been registered as a pesticide. Its ability to combat specific insects was questionable however. One 1999 scientific report warned:
Evolution of resistance by pests is the most serious threat to the continued efficacy of Bt toxins .... With millions of hectares of Bt toxin producing transgenic plants grown yearly, other pests are likely to evolve resistance quickly unless effective countermeasures are designed and implemented soon. 18
Gene transformation usually required a tissue culture or regeneration of an intact plant from a single cell that had been treated with hormones or antibiotics and forced to undergo abnormal development. In order to implant a foreign gene into a plant cell, in addition to a genetically engineered bacteria (Agrobacterium tumefaciens), a "Taxi" or "Gene cannon;' a method known also as biolistics, short for bio-ballistics. The gene cannon had been developed in 1987 at Cornell University by John Sanford. Unlike the creation of plant or animal hybrids, genetic engineering of plants bypassed sexual reproduction entirely, and hence was not limited by their species barriers, so that the natural species barriers could be "jumped."19
Biologist Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, head of the London Institute of Science in Society, stressed that "entirely new genes and combinations of genes are made in the laboratory and inserted into the genomes of organisms to make genetically modified organisms. Contrary to what you are told by pro-GMO scientists" she went on to say that "the process is not at all precise. It is uncontrollable and unreliable, and typically ends up damaging and scrambling the host genome, with entirely unpredictable consequences."20
Neither the Rockefeller Foundation nor the scientists it funded, nor the GMO agribusiness they worked with, had any apparent interest in examining such risks. It was self evident they would have the world believe that risks were minimal.21
The first genes had been spliced in 1973 and the recombinant gene technique spread widely among research labs, amid heated debate about the potential risks of misuse of the new technology. There was intense scientific concern about the risk of a so-called "Andromeda Strain" scenario of an escaping mutating species. The term was drawn from science-fiction writer Michael Crichton's 1968 novel, The Andromeda Strain, about a deadly disease which causes rapid, fatal clotting of the blood, and threatens all life on Earth.
In 1984, no serious scientific consensus existed within America's research laboratories on the dangers of releasing genetically modified plants into a natural environment. Yet, despite the fact that very significant doubts persisted, the Rockefeller Foundation made the decision to devote major global funding to the genetic modification process.
One very important effect of the Reagan deregulation revolution on the field of molecular biology in the 1980's was that decisions on safety or risks made until then by relatively independent Government agencies were increasingly put in the hands of private companies who saw major gains in advancing the emerging potentials of biotechnology. Rockefeller's planners had little trouble interesting major companies to join in with them in the new experiments in genetic engineering.
Publicly, they announced that their huge research effort was an attempt to deal with world hunger in coming decades, as projected world population growth should add billions of new hungry mouths to be fed. The research monies were channelled through a new entity they created, the International Program on Rice Biotechnology (IPRB), into some of the world's leading research labs. Over the next 17 years, the foundation spent an impressive $105 millions of its own money in developing and spreading genetically modified rice around the world. Furthermore, by 1989 it was spending an additional $54 million a year-amounting to more than $540 million over the following decade-on "training and capacity building" to disseminate the new developments in rice genetic modification. The seeds of the Gene Revolution were being planted very carefully.
Initially, the Foundation funded 46 science labs across the industrialized world. By 1987, they were spending more than $5 million a year on the rice gene project, mapping the rice genome. Among the recipients of Rockefeller largesse were the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the Center for Applied Biosciences at Freiburg University in Germany.
The grants also went to train a network of international scientists in mastering the worldview of the Rockefeller Foundation's worldview, regarding the role of genetic engineering of plants and the future of humankind. The foundation financed the training of hundreds of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows around the world to create the scientific infrastructure for the later commercial proliferation of genetically modified organisms.
They developed an elite fraternity and cultivated, according to some participants, a strong sense of belonging. The top five scientific researchers at the important Rockefeller-funded Philippine International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) were all Rockefeller funded doctors. "Without the support of the Rockefeller Foundation it would have been almost impossible for us to build this capability" remarked the IRRI's Deputy Director for Research.22
Soon after the program started, the Rockefeller's International Program on Rice Biotechnology (IPRB) decided to concentrate efforts· on the creation of a variety of rice which allegedly would address Vitamin A deficiency in undernourished children in the developing world. It was a brilliant propaganda ploy. It helped to create a public perception that genetic scientists were diligently working to solve problems of world hunger and malnourishment. The only problem was that it was a deliberate deception.
The choice of rice to begin the Rockefeller's gene revolution was a careful one. As one researcher pointed out, rice is the staple food for more than 2.4 billion people. It had been domesticated and developed by local farmers over a period of at least 12,000 years, and has grown in a wide variety of different environments.23
Rice was synonymous with food security for most of Asia, where over 90% of the global rice harvest was produced, primarily by China and India, and where it made up 80% of people's daily calories. Rice was also a staple in West Africa, the Caribbean and tropical regions of Latin America. Rice farmers had developed varieties of rice to withstand droughts, resist pests, and grow in every climate imaginable, all without the help of biotechnology. They had created an incredible biological diversity with over 140,000 varieties.24
The Rockefeller Foundation had its eyes on Asia's rice bowl well before the 1984 IPRB project on rice. A prime target of the foundation's Green Revolution had been Asian rice production. The Green Revolution process had significantly destroyed the rich rice diversity over a period of thirty years, with the so-called High Yielding Varieties. This drew Asia's peasantry into the vortex of the world trade system and the global market for fertilizer, high-yielding seeds, pesticides, mechanisation, irrigation, credit and marketing schemes packaged for them by Western agribusiness.
The core driver of that earlier rice revolution had been the Philippines-based Rockefeller Foundation-created International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). It was not surprising then, that the IRRI, with a gene bank containing more than one-fifth of the world's rice varieties, became the prime vehicle to proliferate the Rockefeller Foundation's new gene revolution in rice; They banked every significant rice variety known.
IRRI had been used by the backers of the Green Revolution to gather control of the irreplaceable seed treasure of Asia's rice varieties, under the ruse that they would thereby be "protected."
The IRRI was put under the umbrella of the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research, CGIAR, after its creation in 1960 by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations during the Green Revolution in Asia. CGIAR was the same agency which also controlled the pre-war Iraqi seed bank. CGIAR operated out of the World Bank headquarters in Washington, also with Rockefeller Foundation funding. 25
In this manner, the World Bank, whose political agenda was defined by Washington policy, held the key to Asia's rice seed bank. Over three-quarters of the American rice genetic makeup or germplasm came originally from the IRRI seed bank. That rice was then pressed on Asian countries by the US Government demanding that Asian countries remove "unfair trade barriers" to US rice imports.
IRRI then became the mechanism for allowing major international agribusiness giants like Syngenta or Monsanto to illegally take the seeds from the IRRI seed bank, initially held in trust for the native farmers of the region.
The seeds, once in the labs of Monsanto or the other biotech giants, would be modified genetically, and patented as exclusive intellectual property of the biotech company. The World Trade Organization, created in 1994 out of the GATT Uruguay Round, introduced a radical new Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) permitting multinationals to patent plant and other life forms for the first time.
In 1993, a Convention on Biological Diversity under the UN was agreed upon to control the theft of such seed resources of the developing world. Washington, however, made a tiny alteration in the original text. It demanded that all the genetic resources held by the CGIAR system (of which IRRI is part) remain outside the rules. That affected half a million seed accessions, or 40% of the world's unique food crop germplasm held in gene banks. It meant that agribusiness companies were still free to take and patent them.26
Using the IRRI resources as its center, Rockefeller financing for Vitamin-A-enhanced rice became the prime focus of the IPRB research by the beginning of the 1990's. Their grants financed major work in the area by, among others, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
The Foundation's propagandists argued that lack of Vitamin A was a major cause of blindness and death in newborn infants in developing countries. UN statistics indicated that perhaps 100 to 140 million children worldwide had some form of Vitamin A deficiency, and among them 250,000 to 500,000 went blind. It was a human interest story of prime emotional attraction to promote acceptance of the controversial new genetically modified plants and crops. Golden Rice became the symbol, the rallying flag, and the demonstration of the promise of genetic engineering, even though the promise was based on black lies and deliberate deception.
The introduction of genetically modified rice would open the prospect of directly controlling the rice seeds, the basic food staple of 2.4 billion people. Prior to the gene revolution, rice had been ignored by the multinational agribusiness seed companies. That in part owed to the low income of rice regions and their peasants, and in part to the fact that rice had proven extremely difficult to hybridize. Farmer-saved seed accounted for more than 80% of Asian rice seed.
In their effort to take over this huge rice market with genetically
modified seeds, the foundation and its agribusiness collaborators
left nothing to chance or to the vagaries of the free markets. In
1991, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers
Fund created a new organization, the International Service for the
Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), headed by the
Rockefeller Foundation's Mexican Green Revolutionary and head
of the CIMMYT or International Center for Wheat and Maize
Improvement, Dr. Clive James.27
The purpose of ISAAA was, in their own words, to "contribute to poverty alleviation in developing countries by increasing crop productivity and incomes, particularly among resource-poor farmers, and to bring about more sustainable agricultural development in a safer global environment."28 The only hitch in the deal was that this formidable task, according to their framework, could only be done by the use of biotechnology.
The ISAAA was merely a platform to proliferate genetically engineered plants in target developing sector countries. It had been created and put into motion almost a full decade before it was clear that the Rockefeller Foundation's Golden Rice development was even feasible. It was from its outset, intent on proliferating gene plants in developing countries.
But the Foundation was not alone in backing ISAAA. The ISAAA was also backed financially by biotech agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto, Novartis (Syngenta), AgrEvo (Aventis Crop Science) and the US State Department's USAID. Their goal was to "create global partnerships" between the agribusiness biotech giants of the industrialized countries (notably, the USA) and the developing countries. To create those partnerships, ISAAA set up technology transfer projects covering the topics of tissue culture, diagnostics or genetic engineering.29
Interestingly enough, just as Henry Kissinger compiled a list of 13 "priority" developing countries for US Government depopulation policies in his NSSM 200 strategy document of 1974, the ISAAA also developed a priority target list for the introduction of genetically engineered plants and crops. The list of 12 countries included Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam in Asia; Kenya, Egypt, and Zimbabwe in Africa; and Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Mexico in Latin America. Significantly, half of the ISAAA priority countries overlapped with Kissinger's geopolitical targets of seventeen years prior. Indeed, geopolitics presented certain constants.30
By 2000, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology announced that they had successfully taken two genes from a daffodil, together with a gene of a bacterium, and built it into the rice DNA in order to produce what they called pro-Vitamin A or beta-carotene rice.
Because the beta-carotene (or pro-Vitamin A) which produced Vitamin A inside the body colored the rice grain orange, it was dubbed "Golden Rice" -another brilliant marketing stroke as everyone covets gold in whatever form. Now people could ostensibly get their daily bowl of rice and prevent blindness and other manifestations of Vitamin A deficiency in their children at the same time.
Children in Asia and the rest of the world had been receiving Vitamin A from other sources for centuries. The problem was not lack of natural foods containing Vitamin A, but rather not enough access to those other natural sources of Vitamin A.
Indian biodiversity campaigner, Dr. Vandana Shiva, pointed out in a stinging critique of the Rockefeller Foundation Golden Rice promotion that, "the first deficiency of genetic engineering rice to produce Vitamin A is the eclipsing of alternative sources of vitamin A" Per Pinstripe Anderson, head of the International Rice Research Institute, has said that Vitamin A rice is necessary for the poor in Asia because "we cannot reach very many of the malnourished in the world with pillS."31
Shiva pointed out, "there are many alternatives to pills for Vitamin A supply. Vitamin A is provided by liver, egg yolk, chicken, meat, milk, butter. Beta-carotene, the Vitamin A precursor is provided by dark green leafy vegetables, spinach, carrot, pumpkin, mango .... "32
Not mentioned in Rockefeller Foundation press releases, doctors and scientists knew that large quantities of Vitamin A could in fact lead to "hypervitaminosis" or Vitamin A toxicity which, in infants, could lead to permanent brain damage and other harmful effects.33
Moreover, the quantity of rice which a person would have to consume daily to meet the full quota of Vitamin A was staggering, and not humanly possible. One estimate was that an average Asian would have to eat 9 kilograms of cooked rice daily, just to get the required minimum intake of Vitamin A. A typical daily ration in Asia of 300 grams rice would provide only 8% of his daily requirement.34
The Rockefeller Foundation's President Gordon Conway sheepishly responded to these criticisms in a press release: "First it should be stated that we do not consider golden rice to be the solution to the vitamin A deficiency problem. Rather it provides an excellent complement to fruits, vegetables and animal products in diets, and to various fortified foods and vitamin supplements." He added: "I agree with Dr. Shiva that the public relations uses of golden rice have gone too far."35
Maybe the "public relations uses" had gone too far, but the campaign to proliferate genetically-modified Golden Rice had obviously not gone far enough for those behind the Rockefeller Foundation's gene revolution.
The Rockefeller Foundation announced in 2000 that it was turning the results of its years of rice research over to the public. In fact, they shrewdly turned it over to the agribusiness biotechnology giants. The UK firm, AstraZeneca, later part of the Swiss Syngenta Company, announced in May 2000 that it had acquired exclusive rights to commercialize Golden Rice.
Golden Rice gave the genetic engineering biotech industry a huge propaganda tool. In 1999, then-President Bill Clinton declared, "If we could get more of this golden rice, which is a genetically modified strain of rice especially rich in vitamin A, out to the developing world, it could save 4,000 lives a day, people that are malnourished and dying."36 Syngenta and also Monsanto licensed patents on Golden Rice claiming that they would allow the technology to "be made available free of charge for humanitarian uses in any developing nation"37
The criticism and skepticism about the wisdom of turning our basic food staples over to the gene doctors and agribusiness giants grew weaker as the propaganda machine of the Rockefeller Foundation and the agribusiness lobby went into high gear. One very prominent medical expert, Dr. Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, said, "Seeking a technological food fix for world hunger may be ... the most commercially malevolent wild goose chase of the new century."38 Few listened.
An insider in the world of biotechnology, Steven Smith, who worked on genetic engineering of seeds for the Swiss Syngenta Seeds, the main holder of the Golden Rice patents, declared shortly before his death in June 2003, "If anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world, tell them that it is not .... To feed the world takes political and financial will-it's not about production and distribution"39 The Rockefeller Foundation claim about feeding the world with genetically modified organisms was just a myth. But it was a myth in the hands of a powerful mythmaker. The revolution proceeded.
With an elaborate international structure for proliferating the seeds of the gene revolution through ISAAA, CGIAR, IRRI and the direct funding of the Rockefeller Foundation, agribusiness and the backers of the gene revolution were ready for the next giant step: the consolidation of global control over humankind's food supply. For that, a new organization became indispensable. It was called the World Trade Organization.
By the end of the 1980's, a global network of genetically-trained
molecular biologists had developed. A mammoth Rockefeller
GMO project was launched. Its chosen location was Argentina,
where David Rockefeller and Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank
had cultivated close ties to the newly-named President, Carlos
Menem. The agricultural land and the population of Argentina
were slated to become the first mass testing ground, the first guinea
pigs for GMO crops.
Its backers hailed the introduction of GMO agriculture as nothing less than a "Second Green Revolution" a reference to the introduction of modern agriculture production techniques after World War II. In particular, special wheat hybrids and chemical fertilizers were promoted under the rubric that they would increase per hectare crop yields in Mexico, India and other developing lands.
In a short space of just eight years, worldwide acreage planted with GMO crops grew to 167 million acres by 2004, an increase of some 40-fold. That acreage represented an impressive 25% of total land under agricultural cultivation in the world, suggesting GMO crops were well on the way to fully dominating world crop production, at least in basic crops, within a decade or even less. [So here we are 14 years later and the serious reader knows we are already there.This is so wrong on so many levels.To me the people perpetuating this against their fellow man and women, are glutenous pigs unworthy of the oxygen they waste. DC]
Over two-thirds of that acreage, or 106 million acres, was planted by the world's leading GMO advocate, the United States. That fact, its proponents argued, proved there was a high degree of confidence on the part of the US Government and consumers, as well as farmers, that GMO crops offered substantial benefits over conventional crops.
By 2004, Argentina was second after the United States in size of acreage planted with GMO crops, with 34 million acres of planting. Far smaller but fast-expanding GMO countries included Brazil, which in early 2005 repealed a law banning planting GMO crops. They argued the crops had already proliferated so widely it was not possible to control the spread. Canada, South Africa and China all had significant GMO crop programs in place by then.
Close behind them and moving fast to catch up were Romania, Bulgaria and Poland, former Soviet Union satellites, rich in agricultural land and loose in regulations. Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Columbia, Honduras and Spain also reported significant GMO plantings. According to data compiled by the Pew Foundation of the United States, many other poorer countries were reported to have been targeted by companies promoting their GMO crops and special herbicide and pesticide chemicals. 1
According to the Pew study, 85% of farmers planting GMO crops in 2004 were "resource poor': Most were in developing countries, the same countries struggling with IMF reforms and high foreign debts.
No country saw such a radical transformation, and at such an early stage of its fundamental structure of agriculture holdings, as did Argentina. The history of GMO agriculture and the Argentine Soybean revolution was a case study for a nation's systematic loss of food self-sufficiency in the name of "progress."
Up to the beginning of the 1980's, Argentina had been remarkable for the standard of living it provided its population. The agricultural system, partly as a result of the Juan Peron era, was diverse, productive and dominated by small family farms. A typical Argentine farmer in the 1970's would raise a small amount of crops such as vegetables or wheat, husband small poultry, a dairy herd and occasionally beef cattle on a small plot of land, which was held over decades by right of possession. Argentine beef quality was so high in the 1970's that it rivaled that of Texas beef as the world's highest standard of quality. Up to the 1980's, the rich land and farm culture typically produced large surpluses beyond domestic food needs. Significantly, government farm subsidies were non-existent and farmer debts were minimal.
In October 1979, in order to prevent the dollar from collapsing, the US Federal Reserve suddenly raised its major interest rate by some 300%, impacting worldwide interest rates, and above all the floating rate of interest on Argentina's foreign debt.
By 1982, Argentina was caught in a debt trap not unlike that which the British had used in the 1880's to take control of the Suez Canal from Egypt. New York bankers, led by David Rockefeller had learned the lessons of British debt imperialism.2
The Peron era came to a bloody end in 1976 with a military coup and regime change backed by Washington. The coup was justified on the argument that it was to counter growing terrorism and communist insurgency in the country. Later investigations revealed that the guerrilla danger from the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) and the Montoneros had been fabricated by the Argentine military, most of whose leaders had been trained in domestic counter-insurgency techniques by the US Pentagon in the notorious US Army School of the Americas.
The military dictatorship of President Jorge Videla, however,
would turn out to be too liberal in its definition of human rights and
due process of law. In October 1976, Argentine Foreign Minister,
Admiral Cesar Guzzetti met with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in Washington. The meeting
was to discuss the military junta's proposal for massive repression
of opposition in the country. According to declassified US State
Department documents released only years later, Kissinger and Rockefeller not only indicated their approval, but Rockefeller even
suggested specific key individuals in Argentina to be targeted for
elimination.3 At least 15,000 intellectuals, labor leaders and opposition
figures disappeared in the so-called "dirty war."
The Rockefeller family played more than an incidental role in
the Argentine regime change. A key actor in the junta regime,
Economics'Minister Martinez de Hoz, had close connections to
David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank and was a personal
friend of his. Martinez de Hoz was head of the wealthiest landowning
family in Argentina. He introduced radical economic policies
designed to favor foreign investment in Argentina. In fact, this economic
maneuvering was the very reason behind Rockefeller's secret
backing of the Junta in the first place. Large infusions of cash from
Rockefeller's bank had privately financed the military's seizure of
power.
The Rockefeller brothers regarded Latin America as a de facto private family sphere of influence at least since the 1940's, when David's brother Nelson was running US intelligence in the Americas as President Roosevelt's Coordinator of Inter-American Intelligence Affairs (CIAA). Rockefeller family interests had spread from Venezuelan oil to Brazilian agriculture. Now they had decided that the 1970's debt problems of Argentina offered a unique opportunity to advance family interests there.
While freezing wages, Martinez de Hoz freed domestic wages and prices on the necessities which had been under government price control, including food and fuel, leading to a substantial drop in consumer purchasing power. Import tariffs were slashed, allowing imports to flood the market. The peso-dollar exchange rate was the main nominal anchor of the scheme. Indeed, the budget deficit was reduced from 10.3% of GDP in 1975 to 2.7% in 1979 through expenditure cuts, public-sector price increases, and tax increases, and the inflation rate fell from 335% in 1975, to 87.6% in 1980. However, the real appreciation of the peso, and the resulting capital flight and balance of payments crisis, led to the collapse of the program.4 Foreign speculative capital was also ushered into the country, and Chase Manhattan and Citibank were the first foreign banks to make their entrance.
Inevitably, there was protest from the strong Peronist union
movement against the attack on living standards, which protest the
military regime brutally suppressed, along with all other forms of
opposition. Clearly satisfied with the new Argentine government,
David Rockefeller declared, "I have the impression that finally
Argentina has a regime which understands the private enterprise
system"5
By 1989, following more than a decade of repressive military rule, a new phase in the erosion of Argentine national sovereignty was introduced with the accession of President Carlos Menem, a wealthy playboy later accused of rampant corruption and illegal arms dealing. George Herbert Walker Bush was then in the White House, and received Menem as personal White House guest no less than eight times. His son, Neil Bush, was a guest at Menem's residence in Buenos Aires. Menem, in short, enjoyed the best connections in the North.
With the Argentine military ridden with scandal and with popular discontent growing, New York bankers and Washington power brokers decided it was time to play a new card to continue their economic plunder and corporate takeover of Argentina. Menem was a Peronist only in party name. In fact; he imposed on Argentina an economic shock therapy even more drastic than Margaret Thatcher's British free market revolution of the 1980's. But his Peronist membership allowed him to disarm internal resistance within the party and the unions.
For powerful New York bankers, the key post in the Menem
government was the Economics Minister. The new minister was
Domingo Cavallo, a disciple of Martinez de Hoz, and a man well known
in New York financial circles. Cavallo got his PhD at David
Rockefeller's Harvard University, had briefly served as head of the
National Bank, and was openly praised by Rockefeller.6
Cavallo was also a close friend and business associate of David Mulford, President George H.W. Bush's key Treasury Official responsible for the restructuring of the Latin American debt under the Brady Plan, and later a member of Credit Suisse First Boston bank. Cavallo was indeed trusted by the "Yankee bankers."7
Menem's economic program was written by David Rockefeller's friends in Washington and New York. It gave priority to radical economic liberalization and privatization of the state, and dismantled carefully enacted state regulations in every area from health, to education, to industry. It opened protected markets to foreign imports even further than had been possible under the military junta. The privatization agenda had been demanded by Washington and the IMF-which was acting on Washington's behalf,as a condition for emergency loans to "stabilize" the Peso. At the time, Argentina was suffering from a Weimar-style hyperinflation rate of 200% a month. The Junta had left behind them a wrecked economic and fiscal economy, deeply in debt to foreign banks.
Menem was able to take advantage of the hyperinflation which was engineered during the final years of the Junta, and imposed on the country economic change far more radical than even the military dictatorship had dared. Cavallo dutifully imposed the demanded shocks, and got an immediate $2.4 billion credit, and high praise, from the IMF. A wave of privatizations followed, from the state telecommunications company to the state oil monopoly, and even to Social Security state pensions. Corruption was rampant. Menem's cronies became billionaires at the taxpayer's expense.
In place of state monopolies on industry, giant foreign-owned private monopolies emerged, financed largely by loans from Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan or Citibank. These same banks made huge windfall profits when, some years later, they organized wealthy Argentines' flight of capital out of the peso into offshore Chase or Citibank "private banking" accounts.
The impact on the general population was anything but positive. With foreign takeovers came massive layoffs of-until then-public workers. Not surprisingly, Argentina's Menem regime, and its economic czar, Domingo Cavallo, were hailed for creating what was labeled in the financial media as the ''Argentine Miracle."
Inflation was ended in 1991 by imposing an absolute surrender of monetary control to a Currency Board, a form of central bank whose control was held by the IMF. The Peso, severely devalued from the 1970's level, was rigidly fixed by the Currency Board at 1:1 to the US dollar. No money could be printed nationally to stimulate the economy without an equal increase in dollar reserves in the Currency Board account. The fixed peso opened the floodgates for foreign investors to speculate and reap huge gains on the privatization of the state economy during the 1990's.
When, in April 2001, Cavallo was recalled amid a major economic crisis, to run the national economy once again, he secretly engineered a coup on behalf of the New York banks and his local banking friends. Cavallo simply froze deposits on personal bank accounts of private savers in Argentina to save the assets of his banker friends in New York and elsewhere abroad.
At this point, Argentina defaulted on $132 billion in state debt. Cavallo's first act as Economics Minister in April 2001 was to meet secretly with Rockefeller's JP Morgan-Chase Bank, CSFB's David Mulford, London's HSBC and a select few other foreign bankers. They swapped $29 billion of old Argentine state bonds for new bonds, a secret deal which made the banks huge profits and which secured their loan exposures to the country. Argentina was the loser as the swap made its total debt burden even larger. A year later Cavallo and the seven foreign banks were subject to judicial investigations that alleged the swaps were illegal and designed to benefit the foreign bankers. According to US financial investors, it actually speeded the default on the state debt. By 2003, total foreign debt had risen to $198 billion, equivalent to three times the level of when Menem took office in 1989.8
Menem argued that the transformation of food production into industrial cultivation of GM soybean was necessary for the country to pay its ballooning foreign debt. It was a lie, but it succeeded in transforming Argentine agriculture into a pawn for North American investors like David Rockefeller, Monsanto and Cargill Inc.
Following almost two decades of economic battering through mounting foreign debts, forced privatization and the dismantling of national protective barriers, the highly-valued Argentine agricultural economy would now be the target of the most radical transformation of them all.
In 1991, several years before field trials were implemented in the United States, Argentina became a secret experimental laboratory for developing genetically engineered crops. The population was to become the human guinea pigs of the project. Menem's government created a pseudo-scientific Advisory Commission on Biotechnology to oversee the granting of licenses for more than 569 field trials for GM corn, sunflowers, cotton, wheat and especially soybeans.9 There was no public debate on the initiative of either the Menem government or the Commission on the controversial issue of whether or not GMO crops were safe.
The Commission met in secret, and never made its findings public. It merely acted as a publicity agent for foreign GMO seed multinationals. This was not surprising as the Commission members themselves came from Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences and other GMO giants. In 1996, Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis Missouri was the world's largest producer of genetically-manipulated patented soybean seeds: Roundup Ready soybeans.
In 1995, Monsanto introduced Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans that had a copy of a gene from the bacterium, Agrobacterium sp. strain CP4, inserted, by means of a gene gun, into its genome. That allowed the transgenic or GMO plant to survive being sprayed by the non-selective herbicide, glyphosate. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, killed conventional soybeans. Any conventional soybean crops adjacent to Monsanto Roundup Ready crops would inevitably be affected due to wind-borne contamination. 10 Conveniently, that greatly aided the spread of Monsanto crops once introduced.
The genetic modification in Monsanto Roundup Ready soybeans involved incorporating a bacterial version of the enzyme into the soybean plant that gave the GMO soybean protection from Monsanto's herbicide Roundup. Roundup was the same herbicide used by the US Government to eradicate drug crops in Colombia.
Thereby protected, both the soybeans and any weeds could be sprayed with Roundup, killing the weeds and leaving the soybeans. Typically, rather than less herbicide chemicals, GMO soybeans required significantly more chemicals per hectare to control weed growth.11
Since the 1970's, soybeans had been promoted by large agribusiness seed companies to become a major source of animal feed worldwide. Monsanto was granted an exclusive license in 1996 by President Menem to distribute its GMO soybean seeds throughout Argentina.
Simultaneous to this wholesale introduction of Monsanto GMO soybean seeds and, necessarily, the required Monsanto Roundup herbicide to Argentine agriculture, now ultra-cheap (in dollar terms), Argentine farmland was bought up by large foreign companies such as Cargill-the world's largest grain and commodity trading company-by international investment funds such as George Soros's Quantum Fund, by foreign insurance companies, and corporate interests such as Seaboard Corporation. This was a hugely profitable operation for foreign investors, for which GMO Monsanto seeds were ultimately the basis for a giant new soy agribusiness industrial farming. Argentina's land was to be converted into a vast industrial seed production unit. For the foreign investors, the beauty of the scheme was that compared with traditional agriculture, GMO soybean needed little human labor.
In effect, as a consequence of the economic crisis, millions of acres of prime farmland were put up for auction by the banks. Typically, the only buyers with dollars to invest were foreign corporations or private persons. Small peasant farmers were offered pennies for their lands. Sometimes, when they refused to sell, they were forced off their properties by terrorist militia or by the state police. Tens of thousands more farmers had to give up their lands when they were driven to bankruptcy by market flooding of cheap food imports brought in under the free market reforms imposed by the IMF.
Additionally, fields planted with the GMO "Roundup Ready" soybean seeds and their special Roundup herbicide required no ordinary turning over of the soil through plowing. In order to maximize profitability, the sponsors of the GMO soybean revolution created huge Kansas-style expanses of land where large mechanized equipment could operate around the clock, often remote-controlled by GPS satellite navigation, without even a farmer needed for driving the tractor.
Monsanto's GMO soybean was sold to Argentine farmers as an ecological plus, utilizing "no-till" farming. In reality they were anything but environmentally friendly. The GMO soybean and Roundup herbicide were planted with a technique called "direct drilling," pioneered in the USA and with the purpose of saving time and money. 12
Only affordable to larger wealthy fanners, "direct drilling" required a mammoth special machine which automatically inserts the GM soybean seed into a hole drilled several centimeters deep, and then presses dirt down on top of it. With this direct drilling machine, thousands of acres could be planted by one man. By contrast, a traditional three hectare peach or lemon grove required 70 to 80 farm laborers to cultivate. Previous crop residues were simply left in the field to rot, producing a wide variety of pests and weeds alongside the Monsanto GMO soybean sprouts. That in turn led to greater markets for Monsanto to sell its special patented glyphosate or Roundup herbicide, along with the required Roundup Ready patented soybean seeds. After several years of such planting, the weeds began to show a special tolerance to glyphosate, requiring ever stronger doses of that or other herbicides. 13
With the decision to license Monsanto genetically engineered Roundup Ready soybeans in 1996, Argentina was to undergo a revolution which its proponents hailed as a "second green revolution." In reality it was the devolution of a once-productive national family farm-based agriculture system into a neo-feudal state system dominated by a handful of powerful, wealthy Latifundista landowners.
The Menem government insured that the door was opened wide to the introduction of GMO soybean seeds. Argentine farmers were in dire economic straits following years of hyperinflation. Monsanto jumped in and extended "credit" to loan-starved farmers to buy Monsanto GMO seeds and Monsanto Roundup herbicide, the only herbicide effective on its Roundup Ready soybean. Monsanto also made the initial transition to GMO soybean more alluring to farmers by offering to provide them with the necessary "direct drilling" machines and training.
In the 1970's, before the debt crisis, soybean was not even a factor in the national agriculture economy, with only 9,500 hectares of soybean plantations. In those years, a typical family farm produced a variety of vegetable crops, grains, raised chickens and perhaps a few cows for milk, cheese and meat.
By 2000, after four years of adopting Monsanto soybeans and mass production techniques, over 10 million GMO soy hectares had been planted. By 2004, the area had expanded to more than 14 million hectares. Large agribusiness combines had managed to clear forests, as well as traditional lands occupied by the indigenous people to create more land for soy cultivation.
Argentine agricultural diversity, with its fields of corn, wheat, and cattle, was rapidly being turned into monoculture, just as Egyptian farming was taken over and ruined by cotton in the 1880's.
For more than a century, Argentine farm land, especially the legendary pampas, had been filled with wide fields of corn and wheat amid green pastures grazed by herds of cattle. Farmers rotated between crops and cattle to preserve soil quality. With the introduction of soybean monoculture, the soil, leeched of its vital nutrients, required even more chemical fertilizers,not less, as Monsanto had promised. The large beef and dairy herds which had roamed freely for decades on the grasslands of Argentina were now forced into cramped US-style mass cattle feedlots to make way for the more lucrative soybean. Fields of traditional cereals, lentils, peas and green beans had already almost vanished.
A leading Argentine agro-ecologist, Walter Pengue, a specialist in the impact of GMO soybeans, predicted that, "If we continue in this path, perhaps within 50 years the land will not produce anything at all."14
By 2004, 48% of all agricultural land in the country was dedicated to soybean crops, and between 90% and 97% of these were Monsanto GMO Roundup Ready soybeans. Argentina had become the world's largest uncontrolled experimental laboratory for GMO,15
Between 1988 and 2003, Argentine dairy farms had been reduced by half. For the first time, milk had to be imported from Uruguay at costs far higher than domesticprices. As mechanized soybean monoculture forced hundreds of thousands of workers off the land, poverty and malnutrition soared.
In the more tranquil era of the 1970's, before the New York banks stepped in, Argentina enjoyed one of the highest living standards in Latin America. The percentage of its population officially below the poverty line was 5% in 1970. By 1998, that figure had escalated to 30% of the total population. And by 2002, to 51%. By 2003, malnutrition rose to levels estimated at between 11 % and 17% of the total population of 37 million. 16
Amid the drastic national economic crisis arising from the state's defaulting on its debt, Argentines found they were no longer able to rely on small plots of land for their survival. The land had been overrun by mass GMO soybean acreages and blocked to even ordinary survival crops.
Under the support of foreign investors and agribusiness giants like Monsanto and Cargill, large Argentine landowners moved systematically to seize land from helpless peasants, most often with backing from the state. By law, peasants had rights over lands of which they had the uncontested use for 20 years or more. That traditional right was trampled by the powerful new interests behind agribusiness. In the vast region of Santiago del Estero in the north, large feudal landowners began an operation of mass deforestation to make way for wholesale GMO soybean crops.
Peasant communities were suddenly told that their land belonged to someone else. Typically, if they refused to leave willingly, armed groups would steal their cattle, burn their crops and threaten them with more violence. The lure of huge profits from GMO soybean exports was the driving force behind the violent upheaval surrounding traditional farming across the country.
As farming families were made destitute and pushed off their lands, they fled to new shanty towns on the edges of the larger cities, turning to social disorder, crime and suicide, while disease became rampant amid the impossible overcrowding. Within several years, more than 200,000 peasants and small farmers were driven off their lands to make way for the large agribusiness soybean planters. 17
Collection of such a royalty or "technology license fee" was at the heart of the Monsanto marketing scheme. Farmers in the USA and elsewhere had to sign a binding contract with Monsanto agreeing to not re-use saved seeds and to pay new royalties to Monsanto each year-a system which can be seen as a new form of serfdom.
To get around the refusal by the nationalist Argentine Congress to pass a new law granting Monsanto the right to impose royalty payments against severe court-imposed fines, Monsanto adopted another ploy. Farmers were sold the initial seeds needed to expand the soybean revolution in Argentina. In this early stage, Monsanto deliberately waived its "technology license fee:' favoring the widest possible proliferation of its GM seeds across the land, and in particular, of the patented glyphosate Roundup herbicide that went along with it. The insidious marketing strategy behind selling glyphosate-resistant seeds was that farmers were forced to purchase the specially matched Monsanto herbicides.
GMO soybean planted land increased 14-fold, while the smuggling of Monsanto Roundup soybean seeds spread across the Pampas and into Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay. Monsanto did nothing to stop what it saw as the illegal spread of its seeds. 18 Monsanto partner Cargill was itself accused of illegally smuggling GMO soybean seeds secretly mixed with non-GMO seeds, into Brazil from Argentina. Amusingly, in Brazil, the smuggled Argentine GMO soybean seeds were called "Maradona" seeds in reference to the famous Argentine football player later treated for cocaine addiction.
Finally, in 1999, three years after its introduction of GMO soybeans, Monsanto formally demanded farmers to pay up the "extended royalties" on the seeds, despite the fact that Argentine law made it illegal to do so. The Menem government made no protest against Monsanto's brazen orders, while farmers ignored it altogether. But the stage was being set for the next legal act. Monsanto claimed the royalties were necessary for it to recover its investments on the "research and development" of the GMO seeds. It began a careful public relations campaign designed to paint itself as the victim of farmers' abuse and "theft".
In early 2004, Monsanto escalated its pressure on the Argentine government. Monsanto announced that if Argentina refused to recognize the "technology license fee;' it would enforce its collection at points of import such as the USA or the EU, where Monsanto patents were recognized, a measure which would spell a devastating blow to the market for Argentine agribusiness exports. Moreover, after Monsanto's well-publicized threat to stop selling all GMO soybeans in Argentina, and the claim that more than 85% were illegally replanted by farmers in what was branded a "black market:' the Agriculture Secretary, Miguel Campos, announced that the government and Monsanto had come to an agreement.
A Technology Compensation Fund was to be created and managed by the Ministry of Agriculture. Farmers would have to pay a royalty or tax fee of up to almost one percent on the sale of GMO soybeans to grain elevators or exporters such as Cargill. The tax was to be collected at the processing site, leaving farmers with no choice but to pay up if they were to process their harvest. The tax would then be paid back to Monsanto and other GMO seed suppliers by the government. 19
Despite fierce farmer protest, the Technology Compensation Fund was implemented at the end of 2004.
By early 2005, the Brazilian government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had also thrown in the towel, and passed a law making planting of GMO seeds in Brazil legal for the first time, claiming that the use of GMO seeds had spread so widely as to be uncontrollable anyway. The barriers to GMO proliferation across Latin America were melting. By 2006, together with the United States, where GMO Monsanto soybeans dominated, Argentina and Brazil accounted for more than 81 % of world soybean production, thereby ensuring that practically every animal in the world fed soymeal was eating genetically engineered soybeans. Similarly, this would imply that every McDonald's hamburger mixed with soymeal would be genetically engineered, and most processed foods, whether they realized or not.20
As a result, hunger spread across the land, just as the economic crisis worsened. Fearing food riots, the national government, aided by Monsanto and the giant international soybean users such as Cargill, Nestle, and Kraft Foods, responded by giving out free food to the hungry. Meals made from soybeans were thus distributed with the secondary motive of fostering wider domestic consumption of the crop.
A national campaign was put in motion urging Argentines to replace a healthy diet of fresh vegetables, meat, milk, eggs and other products with ... soybeans. DuPont Agri-Sciences created a new organization with the healthy-sounding name, "Protein for Life:' in order to propagate soybean consumption by humans, even though the soybeans were meant to be grown as animal feed. As part of the campaign, DuPont gave out food fortified with soybeans to thousands of Buenos Aires poor. It was the first time ever in any country that a population had directly consumed soybeans in such large quantities. The Argentines had now become guinea pigs in more ways than one.21
Government and private propaganda touted the great health benefits of a soybean diet, as a replacement for dairy or meat protein. But the campaign was based on lies. It conveniently omitted the fact that a diet based on soybean is unfit for long-term human consumption, and that studies have established that babies fed soymilk have dramatically higher levels of allergies than those fed breast milk or cow milk. They did not tell Argentines that raw and processed soybeans contain a series of toxic substances which, when soy is consumed as a staple element of one's diet, damage health and have been related to cancer. They refused to say that soybeans contain an inhibitor, Trypsin, which Swedish studies have linked to stomach cancer. 22
In the countryside, the impact of mass soybean mono culture was horrendous. Traditional farming communities close to the huge soybean plantations were seriously affected by the aerial spraying of Monsanto Roundup herbicides. In Lorna Senes, peasants growing mixed vegetables for their own consumption found all their crops destroyed by spraying, as Roundup kills all plants other than specially gene-modified "herbicide-resistant" Monsanto beans.
A study conducted in 2003 showed that the spraying had not only destroyed the nearby peasants' crops: their chickens had died and other animals, especially horses, were adversely affected. Humans contracted violent nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and skin lesions from the herbicide. There were reports of animals born near GMO soybean fields with severe organ deformities, of deformed bananas and sweet potatoes, of lakes suddenly filled with dead fish. Rural families reported that their children developed grotesque blotches on their bodies after the spraying of nearby soybean fields.
Added damage occurred to valuable forest land, which was bulldozed to make way for mass-cultivation of soybean, especially in the Chaco region near Paraguay and the Yungas region. The loss of forests created an explosion of cases of medical problems among indigenous inhabitants, including leishmaniasis, a parasite transmitted by sand flies, which is expensive to treat and leaves severe scars and other deformities. In Entre Rios, more than 1.2 million acres of forest were removed by 2003, at which point the government finally issued an order forbidding further deforestation.
To convince wary Argentine farmers to use Monsanto Roundup Ready soybean seeds in 1996, the company had made grand claims of a miracle crop, arguing that its GMO soybean was genetically modified to be resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide.
The company assured farmers that they would therefore require dramatically less herbicide and chemical treatment for their soybean crops than with regular soybean. As Roundup kills virtually everything that grows aside from Monsanto GMO soybeans, only one, rather than several, herbicides would be necessary-or so went Monsanto's PR campaign. Grand promises were also made about higher yields and lower costs, feeding the desperate farmers with dreams of a better economic situation. Not surprisingly, the response was hugely positive.
On average, the Roundup soybean crops gave between 5% to 15% lower yields than traditional soybean crops. Also, far from needing less herbicide, farmers found vicious new weeds which needed up to three times as much spraying as before. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics from 1997 showed that expanded plantings of Roundup Ready soybeans resulted in a 72% increase in the use of glyphosate.23
According to the Pesticides Action Network, scientists estimated that plants genetically engineered to be herbicide resistant will actually triple the amount of herbicides used. Farmers, knowing that their crop can tolerate or resist being killed off by the herbicides, will tend to use them more liberally. Monsanto never conducted rigorous independently verifiable tests of the negative health effects of feeding cattle, let alone humans, with the raw Monsanto soybeans saturated with Roundup herbicides. The increased use of chemicals led to larger costs than with non-GMO seeds.24
But by the time the farmers realized this, it was too late. By 2004, GMO soybean had spread across the entire country, and the seeds all depended on Monsanto Roundup pesticide. A more perfect scheme of human bondage would be hard to imagine.
Yet Argentina was not the only target land for the project of gene-manipulated agriculture crops. The Argentine case was but the first stage in a global plan that was decades in the making and absolutely shocking and awesome in its scope.
next 205 notes
1. Catherine Bertini, U.N. 4th World Conference on Women, Beijng, China, September 1995, cited in Famous Quotes and Quotations about UN, http://www.quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_aboutlun. The much-honored civil servant and winner of World Food Prize in 2003, Bertini, is a former Confidential Assistant to New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller and a member of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission. The World Food Prize, interestingly, was created by former Rockefeller Foundation agronomist, Norman Borlaug, creator of the first Green Revolution, in 1986.
2. Gary H. Toenniessen, Vitamin A Deficiency and Golden Rice: The Role of the Rockefeller Foundation, 14 November 2000, http://www.rockfound.orgllibrary/ 111400ght.pdf, p. 3. Toenniessen, the director of Food Security at the Rockefeller Foundation described his work as follows: "In the early 1980s, advances in plant molecular biology offered the promise of achieving genetic improvements in crops that could not be accomplished with conventional plant breeding. For the most part, however, such advances in crop biotechnology were not being applied to rice or other food crops of primary importance in developing countries. To help make sure the benefits of this powerful new technology would be available to poor farmers and consumers, the Rockefeller Foundation, beginning in 1985, committed roughly half of its agricultural funding to an international program on rice biotechnology. The primary objective of this program was to build rice biotechnology capacity in Asia, and an important part of it was funding the training of Asian scientists at advanced Western laboratories, where they invented techniques and worked on traits important for genetic improvement of rice-skills and knowledge which they then brought back home."
3. J.e. O'Toole, G.H. Toenniessen et aI., The Rockefeller Foundation's International Program on Rice Biotechnology, Rockefeller Foundation archives, http://www.rockfound.orgllibrary/O 1 rice_bio. pdf.
4. Philip J. Regal, A Brief History of Biotechnology Risk: The Engineering Ideal in Biology, Edmonds Institute, 18 July 1999, http://www.cbs. umn.edu/ -pregal! GEhistory.htm.
5. Pnina Abir-Am, The Biotheoretical Gathering, Transdisciplinary Authority and the Incipient Legitimation of Molecular Biology in the 1930s: New Perspectives on the Historical Sociology of Science. Hist. Sci. 25:1-70,1987, pp. 18-22,33.
6. Cited in Robert Bruce Baird, We Can Change the World, http://www.government.articlesarchive.net/we-can -change-the-world.html.
7. Joshua Lederberg, "The Impact of Basic Research in Genetic RecombinationA Personal Account", Part I, Annual Review of Genetics, Vol. 21, 1987, p. 186.
8. Joshua Lederberg, ibid., Part II, p. 196.
9. Philip J. Regal, op. cit., The Engineering Ideal in Biology. See also, Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, http://www.alternativescience.com/ shattering-the-myths-of-darwinism.htm.
10. Richard Milton, op. cit.
11. David King, "An Interview with Professor Brian Goodwin", GenEthics News, March/April 1996, pp. 6-8. Goodwin explains his concerns about genetic or biological reductionism in the interview: "We currently experience crises of health, of the environment, of the community. I think they are all related ... Biology contributes to these crises by failing to give us adequate conceptual understanding of life and wholes, of ecosystems, of the biosphere, and it's all because of genetic reductionism ... Let me just describe some of the consequences of genetic reductionism. Once you've got organisms reduced to genes, then organisms have no inherent natures. Now, in our theory of evolution, species are natural kinds, they are really like the elements, if you like. I don't mean literally, but they have the same conceptual status, gold has a certain nature. We are arguing that, say, a sea urchin of a particular species has a nature. Human beings have a nature. Now, in Darwinism, they don't have a nature, because they're historical individuals, which arise as a result of accidents. All they have done is pass the survival test. The Darwinian theory makes it legitimate to shunt genes around from anyone species to any other species: since species don't have 'natures', we can manipulate them in any way and create new organisms that survive in our culture. So this is why you get people saying that there is really no difference between the creation of transgenic organisms, that is moving genes across species boundaries, and creating new combinations of genes by sexual recombination within species. They say that is no different to what is happening in evolution ... Once you scale something up to a particular level you are into a totally different scene. Now, I think that there are the same problems that arise with respect to creation of transgenics, and the reason is because of the utter unpredictability of the consequences of transferring a gene from one species to another. Genes are defined by context. Genes are not stable bits of information that can be shunted around and express themselves independently of context. Every gene depends upon its context. If you change the context, you change the activity of the gene ... I'm by no means against biotechnology. I just think that it is something that we have to use with enormous caution in its application. We need stringent safety protocols."
12. Philip J.Regal, op. cit.
13. Philip Regal, Metaphysics in Genetic Engineering: 2.2 Utopianism, paper prepared for International Center for Human and Public Affairs, Buenos Aires, 1996, http://www.psrast.org/pjrbiosafety.htm. Regal adds, "from the perspective of a theory reductionist, it was logical that social problems would reduce to simple biological problems that could be corrected through chemical manipulations of soils, brains, and genes. Thus the Rockefeller Foundation made a major commitment to using its connections and resources to promote a philosophy of eugenics. The Rockefeller Foundation used its funds and considerable social, political, and economic connections to promote the idea that society should wait for scientific inventions to solve its problems, and that tampering with the economic and political systems would not be necessary. Patience, and more investment in reductionist research would bring trouble-free solutions to social and economic problems. Mason and Weaver helped create a network of what would one day be called molecular biologists, that had little traditional knowledge of living organisms and of communities of organisms. It shared a faith in theory reductionism and in determinism. It shared utopian ideals. It learned to use optimistic terms of discourse that brought grants and status. The project was in the general spirit of Bacon's New Atlantis and Enlightenment visions of a trouble-free society based on mastery of nature's laws and scientific/technological progress (e.g. Eamon 1994, Mcknight 1992):'
14. Philip J. Regal, A Brief History of Biotechnology Risk Debates and Policies in the United States, 18 July 1999, http://www.cbs.umn.edu/-pregaIlGEhistory.htm.
15. Dr. Robert Mann, "The Selfish Commercial Gene", Prast. http:// www.psrast.orglselfshgen.htm. Mann adds the clear warning: "The hazards of GE rival even nuclear war. Biology is so much more complex than technology that we should not pretend we can imagine all the horror scenarios, but it is suspected that some artificial genetic manipulations create the potential to derange the biosphere for longer than any civilisation could survive. If only enthusiasts are consulted in appraisal of GE proposals, such scenarios will not be thought of."
16. Philip J. Regal, op. cit.
17. Abigail Salyers, cited in Dr. Robert Mann, op. cit.
18. David G. Heckel, et aI., "Genetic Mapping of Resistance to Bacillus Thuringiensis Toxins in Diamondback Moth Using Biphasic Linkage Analysis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA", Agricultural Sciences, July 1999.
19. Mae-Wan Ho, FAQ on Genetic Engineering, Institute of Science in Society, in http://www.i -sis.org. uklFAQ. php.
20. Mae-Wan Ho, Puncturing the GM Myths, http://www.unobeserver.com. 4 August 2004.
21. Philip J. Regal, op.cit.
22. Dennis Normile, "Rockefeller to End Network After 15 Years of Success", Science, 19 November 1999, pp. 1468-1469, reprinted in ww.gene.ch/genet/2000/ Feb/msg00005.html.
23. Gary H. Toenniessen, "Vitamin A Deficiency and Golden Rice: The Role of the Rockefeller Foundation", The Rockefeller Foundation, 14 November 2000, in http://www.rockfound.orgllibrary/111400ght.pdf.
24. M. T. Jackson, "Protecting the Heritage of Rice Biodiversity': GeoJournal March 1995, pp 267-274. Quoted in K.S. Fisher (editor), "Caring for the Biodiversity of Tropical Rice Ecosystems", IRRI, 1996. See also Anna-Rosa Martinez I. Prat, "Genentech Preys on the Paddy Field", Grain, June 1998.
25. In its 1998 report, Shaping CGIAR's Future, October 26-30, 1998, http://www. worldbank.org/h tml/ cgiar/publications/ icw98/ icw98sop. pdf, the World Bank authors stated, "World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn formally opened ICW98 .. . Wolfensohn praised the CGIAR's "extraordinary achievements" and recalled that one of his first lessons in development economics was at the hands of his colleagues in the CGIAR. As a board member of the Rockefeller Foundation thirty years ago, he visited CIMMYT in Mexico, where he walked through the fields with local farmers. Evoking this fond memory, Mr. Wolfensohn expressed his "very, very strong and very deep feeling" for the CGIAR. Maurice Strong had worked with David Rockefeller and the family since 1947, and became a Trustee of ·the Rockefeller Foundation which provided funds for the UN Stockholm Earth Summit in 1972; the latter catalyzed an international movement around the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" scarce resources report. See Henry Lamb, Maurice Strong: The New Guy in Your Future!, http://www.sovereignty.netlp/sd/strong.html, January 1997.
26. The Crucible II Group, Seeding Solutions: Volume 1: Policy Options for Genetic Resources, Policy primer Major changes in the policy environment, in http://www.idrc.ca/en/ ev-64406-201-1-DO _ TOPI C.html.
27. Devlin Kuyek, "ISAAA in Asia: Promoting Corporate Profits in the Name of the Poor", GRAIN, October 2000, http://www.grain.org/publications/ reports/isaaa.htm.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Dr.Vandana Shiva, Genetically Engineered Vitamin 'If' Rice: A Blind Approach to Blindness Prevention, http://www.biotech-info.net/blind_rice.html. 14 February 2000.
32. Ibid.
33. Razak Lajis, "Vitamin A Toxicity", http://www.prn2.usm.my/mainsite/ bulletin/sun/1996/sun43.html. Original report cited is from Australian Adverse Drug Reactions Bulletin, Vol. 15, No.4, November 1996, which notes, "ADRAC recently reviewed a report of a child born with microcephaly and dystonia whose mother has inadvertently ingested large quantities of vitamin A during the first four or five weeks of pregnancy. The child subsequently died. While it was not possible to implicate the ingestion of vitamin A as a definite cause of the birth defects in this case, excess amounts of vitamin A are suspected causes of birth defects and its therapeutically used congeners are established causes of birth defects': See also, Marion Nestle, "Genetically Engineered Golden Rice is Unlikely to Overcome Vitamin A Deficiency", Letter to the Editor, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, March 2001, pp. 289-290.
34. Benedikt Haerlin, Opinion Piece about Golden Rice, archive.greenpeace.orgl genenglhighlights/food/benny.htm. Also, Assisi Foundation, BIOTHAI et aI., Biopiracy, TRIPS and the Patenting of Asia's Rice Bow/, http://www.poptel.org.uk! panap/archives!larice.htm, May 1998.
35. Gordon Conway quoted in Paul Brown, "GM Rice Promoters Have Gone too Far", The Guardian, 10 February 2001.
36. Bill Clinton, quoted in Paul Brown, op. cit.
37. Paul Brown, op. cit.
38 Richard Horton quoted in Alex Kirby, "'Mirage' of GM's Golden Promise", BBe News Online, 24 September 2003.
39. Alex Kirby, op. cit
Notes
1. Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, Genetically Modified Food Crops in the United States, http://www.pewagbiotech.org, August 2004.
2. F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Books Ltd., London, 2004, Chapters 10-11. John Perkins, The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 2004.
3. U.S. Embassy, Document #1976 Buenos06130, 20 September 1976, part of declassified US State Department documents. Cynthia J. Arnson (editor), ArgentinaUnited States Bilateral Relations, Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Washington D.C., 2003, pp. 39-40. Kissinger's conversation with Guzzetti in Santiago was first reported by Martin Edwin Andersen, "Kissinger and the Dirty War", The Nation, 31 October 1987. Andersen's article was based on a memo by Assistant Secretary for Human Rights Patricia Derian, who was told the story by Hill during a visit to Argentina in March 1977. Hill demarche on human rights: Buenos Aires 3462, May 25,1976, "Request for Instructions", State 129048,25 May 1976, "Proposed Demarche on Human Rights."
4. Francisco J. Ruge-Murcia, Heterodox Inflation Stabilization in Argentina, Brazil and Israel, Centre de recherche et developpement en economique (C.R.D.E.) and Departement de sciences economiques, Universite de Montreal, May 1997.
5. Asad Ismi, "Cry for Argentina", Briarpatch, September 2000.
6. David Rockefeller, "Lo que pienso de Martinez de Hoz", Revista Gente, 6 April 1978.
7. Government of Argentina Ministry of Education, La Dictadura Militar en Argentina:24 de marzo de 1976-10 de diciembre de 1983, http://www.me.gov.ar/ efeme/24demarzo/dictaduni.html, 2001. Cavallo was indicted in 2006 by the Government of Argentina for knowingly conspiring with US banker Mulford in a 2001 debt swap that was declared "fraud" and cost Argentina tens of billions more in debt servicing to Mulford and other creditor banks. That swap led to the Argentine default later in 2001. Details in MercoPress, Former Argentine Leader Indicted for 2001 Bond Swap, http://www.mercopress.com. Details of the debt fraud are also well described in Jules Evans, Bankers Accused of Dirty Tricks in Argentina, http://www.euromoney.com. 28 January 2002.
8. Jules Evans, Bankers Accused of Dirty Tricks in Argentina, 28 January 2002, http://www.euromoney.com/publicl markets/banking! news/30jan02-1.html.
9. Canadian Market Research Centre Market Support Division (TCM) Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Market Brief The Biotechnology Market in Argentina: Government Support for Biotechnology, May 2003, http://www.ats.agr.gc.callatin/3nO_e.htm.
10. American Chemical Society, "Growing Evidence of Widespread GMO Contamination", Environmental Science & Technology: Environmental News, 1 December 1999, Vol. 33, No. 23, pp. 484 A-485 A.
11. Judy Carman, The Problem with the Safety of Roundup Ready Soybeans, Flinders University, Southern Australia, http://www.biotech-info.net. August 1999.
12. UK Soil Management Initiative, Frequently Asked Questions: Advantages and Disadvantages of Minimum Tillage, http://www.smLorg.uk.
13. Ibid.
14. Sue Branford, "Argentina's Bitter Harvest': New Scientist, 17 April 2004, pp. 40- 43. See also Organic Consumers Association, New Study Links Monsanto's Roundup to Cancer, 22 June 1999, Little Marais, MN.
15. Lillian Joensen and Stella Semino, "Argentina's Torrid Love Affair with the Soybean", Seedling, October 2004, p. 3. This is an excellent summary of the interplay between the foreign debt crisis, the IMF policies of privatization, and the transformation of Argentine agriculture by GMO seeds. The authors are with the Rural Reflection Group, in Argentina.
16. Ibid., p. 4.
17. Ibid., p. 3.
18. Lillian Joensen, op. cit., p. 3.
19. GRAIN, Monsanto's Royalty Grab in Argentina, http://www.grain.org, October 2004.
20. Sue Branford, "Why Argentina Can't Feed Itself," The Ecologist, October 2002. H. Paul, R. Steinbrecher, et aI., Argentina and GM Soybean: The Cost of Complying with US Pressure, EcoNexusBriefing, 2003, http://www.econexus.info. David Jones, "Argentina and GM Soy-Success at What Cost?" Saturday Star, South Africa, 19 June 2004.
21. Lillian Joensen, op.cit., p. 5.
22. Lennart Hardell, Miikael Eriksson, "A Case-Control Study of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and Exposure to Pesticides", Cancer, 15 March 1999. A joint USANew Zealand independent research organization, SoyOnlineService, states that contrary to widely promoted claims of health and dietary benefits, "[ s loy foods contain trypsin inhibitors that inhibit protein digestion and affect pancreatic function. In test animals, diets high in trypsin inhibitors led to stunted growth and pancreatic disorders. Soy foods increase the body's requirement for vitamin D, needed for strong bones and normal growth. Phytic acid in soy foods results in reduced bioavailabilty of iron and zinc which are required for the health and development of the brain and nervous system. Soy also lacks cholesterol, likewise essential for the development of the brain and nervous system. Megadoses of phytoestrogens in soy formula have been implicated in the current trend toward increasingly premature sexual development in girls and delayed or retarded sexual development in boys ... Soy isoflavones are phyto-endocrine disrupters. At dietary levels, they can prevent ovulation and stimulate the growth of cancer cells. Eating as little as 30 grams (about 4 tablespoons) of soy per day can result in hypothyroidism with symptoms of lethargy, constipation, weight gain and fatigue." in Myths & Truths About Soy Foods printed in SoyOnlineService.co.nz.
23. Cited in Royal Society of New Zealand, Genetic Engineering-an Overview, 4. Environmental Aspects of Genetic Engineering, in http://www.rsnz.org/topics/ biollgmover/4.php.
24. Genetic Concern, New Study Links Monsanto's Roundup to Cancer, June 1999, in http://www.biotech-info.net/glyphosate_cancer.html.
The Rockefeller Foundation's molecular biology and their genetics work was consciously based on that fundamental scientific error, reductionism. Their scientists used the term "genetic programming" as a metaphor for what happens in a computer, but no scientist was able to generate an organism from a genetic program. As one British biologist, Professor Brian Goodwin, pointed out, "You need to know more than gene products in order to explain the emergence of shape and form in organisms."11
Such details were of no interest to the Rockefeller eugenicists, who were masquerading in the 1980's as geneticists. More likely than not, many of the younger generation of biologists and scientists receiving Rockefeller research grants were blissfully unaware that eugenics and genetics were in any way related. They simply scrambled for scarce research dollars, and the dollars all too often had the name and strings of the Rockefeller Foundation attached.
The foundation's research goal was to find ways to reduce the infinite complexities of life to simple, deterministic and predictive models. Warren Weaver was intent on using science, bad science if need be, to shape the world into the Rockefeller model. The promoters of the new molecular biology at the foundation were determined to map the structure of the gene, and to use that information, as Philip Regal described it, "to correct social and moral problems including crime, poverty, hunger and political instability."12 Just how they would correct such social problems would be kept under wraps for decades. Regal described the Rockefeller vision:
From the perspective of a theory reductionist, it was logical that social problems would reduce to simple biological problems that could be corrected through chemical manipulations of soils, brains, and genes. Thus the Rockefeller Foundation made a major commitment to using its connections and resources to promote a philosophy of eugenics.
The Rockefeller Foundation used its funds and considerable social, political, and economic connections to promote the idea that society should wait for scientific inventions to solve its problems, and that tampering with the economic and political systems would not be necessary. Patience, and more investment in reductionist research would bring trouble-free solutions to social and economic problems.
Mason and Weaver helped create a network of what would one day be called molecular biologists, that had little traditional knowledge of living organisms and of communities of organisms. It shared a faith in theory reductionism and in determinism. It shared utopian ideals. It learned to use optimistic terms of discourse that brought grants and status. The project was in the general spirit of Bacon's New Atlantis and Enlightenment visions of a trouble-free society based on mastery of nature's laws and scientific/technological progress.13
During the 1970's, molecular biologists in the United States intensely debated the issue of whether recombinant DNA research, later referred to as genetic engineering, should at all proceed, or whether, owing to the incalculability of the possible dangers to life on the planet and the risk of an ecological accident, research should be voluntarily ceased in the interest of mankind. By 1973, the essential techniques of genetic engineering had been developed in the laboratory. 14
One biologist, Dr. Robert Mann, a retired Senior Lecturer of the University of Auckland, emphasised that there was indeed a problem with how Rockefeller reductionist simplification ignored possible social risks: "Attempts at risk analysis for Genetic Engineering are, obviously, doomed to be even more misleading" Mann noted:
The system of a living cell, even if no viruses or foreign plasmids (let alone prions) are tossed in, is incomparably more complex than a nuclear reactor. There is no prospect of imagining most of the ways it can go badly wrong ... . Many gene-splicings come to naught; some others may yield only the desired outcome; but the few major mishaps, as with nuclear power, dominate the assessment so as to rule out this approach to science and life. 15
Mann sounded the alarm: one of the countless scientific warnings buried by the powerful agribusiness propaganda machine that stood with the Rockefeller Foundation behind genetically engineered organisms. 16
"Among the biological materials used for GE," Prof. Abigail Salyers warned in the prestigious Microbiological Review:
Are small pieces of DNA called plasmids, depicted ... as simple predictable carriers of engineered genes. According to conventional wisdom, a plasmid used to introduce a gene into a genetically engineered micro-organism can be rendered non-transmissible ... [on the contrary] there is no such thing as a "safe" plasmid ... a riddle we may have to answer in order to survive: what can be done to slow or stop the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. But the gene jockeys claim they can, Godlike, foresee the evolutionary results of their artificial transposings of human genes into sheep, bovine genes into tomatoes, etc. 17
The heart of genetic engineering of plants, unlike the longstanding methods of creating plant hybrids by cross-breeding two varieties of the same plant to produce a new variety with specific traits, involved introducing foreign DNA into a given plant. The . combining of genes from different organisms was termed recombinant DNA or rONA. An example was the creation of GE sweet corn or Bt sweet corn. It was made by inserting a gene from a soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, into the genome of a corn variety to protect it from the European Corn Borer pest. In 1961,Bt had been registered as a pesticide. Its ability to combat specific insects was questionable however. One 1999 scientific report warned:
Evolution of resistance by pests is the most serious threat to the continued efficacy of Bt toxins .... With millions of hectares of Bt toxin producing transgenic plants grown yearly, other pests are likely to evolve resistance quickly unless effective countermeasures are designed and implemented soon. 18
Gene transformation usually required a tissue culture or regeneration of an intact plant from a single cell that had been treated with hormones or antibiotics and forced to undergo abnormal development. In order to implant a foreign gene into a plant cell, in addition to a genetically engineered bacteria (Agrobacterium tumefaciens), a "Taxi" or "Gene cannon;' a method known also as biolistics, short for bio-ballistics. The gene cannon had been developed in 1987 at Cornell University by John Sanford. Unlike the creation of plant or animal hybrids, genetic engineering of plants bypassed sexual reproduction entirely, and hence was not limited by their species barriers, so that the natural species barriers could be "jumped."19
Biologist Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, head of the London Institute of Science in Society, stressed that "entirely new genes and combinations of genes are made in the laboratory and inserted into the genomes of organisms to make genetically modified organisms. Contrary to what you are told by pro-GMO scientists" she went on to say that "the process is not at all precise. It is uncontrollable and unreliable, and typically ends up damaging and scrambling the host genome, with entirely unpredictable consequences."20
Neither the Rockefeller Foundation nor the scientists it funded, nor the GMO agribusiness they worked with, had any apparent interest in examining such risks. It was self evident they would have the world believe that risks were minimal.21
The first genes had been spliced in 1973 and the recombinant gene technique spread widely among research labs, amid heated debate about the potential risks of misuse of the new technology. There was intense scientific concern about the risk of a so-called "Andromeda Strain" scenario of an escaping mutating species. The term was drawn from science-fiction writer Michael Crichton's 1968 novel, The Andromeda Strain, about a deadly disease which causes rapid, fatal clotting of the blood, and threatens all life on Earth.
In 1984, no serious scientific consensus existed within America's research laboratories on the dangers of releasing genetically modified plants into a natural environment. Yet, despite the fact that very significant doubts persisted, the Rockefeller Foundation made the decision to devote major global funding to the genetic modification process.
One very important effect of the Reagan deregulation revolution on the field of molecular biology in the 1980's was that decisions on safety or risks made until then by relatively independent Government agencies were increasingly put in the hands of private companies who saw major gains in advancing the emerging potentials of biotechnology. Rockefeller's planners had little trouble interesting major companies to join in with them in the new experiments in genetic engineering.
Mapping the Rice Genome
In 1984, the Foundation decided to launch its comprehensive program
to map the rice genome using new molecular-based techniques
and advances in computing power. At the time, there existed
no experimental evidence to justify that decision. Publicly, they announced that their huge research effort was an attempt to deal with world hunger in coming decades, as projected world population growth should add billions of new hungry mouths to be fed. The research monies were channelled through a new entity they created, the International Program on Rice Biotechnology (IPRB), into some of the world's leading research labs. Over the next 17 years, the foundation spent an impressive $105 millions of its own money in developing and spreading genetically modified rice around the world. Furthermore, by 1989 it was spending an additional $54 million a year-amounting to more than $540 million over the following decade-on "training and capacity building" to disseminate the new developments in rice genetic modification. The seeds of the Gene Revolution were being planted very carefully.
"Golden Rice" and Black Lies
The decision to develop a genetically-modified variety of rice was
a master stroke of public relations on the part of the Rockefeller
Foundation and its supporters within the scientific and political
establishment. Initially, the Foundation funded 46 science labs across the industrialized world. By 1987, they were spending more than $5 million a year on the rice gene project, mapping the rice genome. Among the recipients of Rockefeller largesse were the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the Center for Applied Biosciences at Freiburg University in Germany.
The grants also went to train a network of international scientists in mastering the worldview of the Rockefeller Foundation's worldview, regarding the role of genetic engineering of plants and the future of humankind. The foundation financed the training of hundreds of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows around the world to create the scientific infrastructure for the later commercial proliferation of genetically modified organisms.
They developed an elite fraternity and cultivated, according to some participants, a strong sense of belonging. The top five scientific researchers at the important Rockefeller-funded Philippine International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) were all Rockefeller funded doctors. "Without the support of the Rockefeller Foundation it would have been almost impossible for us to build this capability" remarked the IRRI's Deputy Director for Research.22
Soon after the program started, the Rockefeller's International Program on Rice Biotechnology (IPRB) decided to concentrate efforts· on the creation of a variety of rice which allegedly would address Vitamin A deficiency in undernourished children in the developing world. It was a brilliant propaganda ploy. It helped to create a public perception that genetic scientists were diligently working to solve problems of world hunger and malnourishment. The only problem was that it was a deliberate deception.
The choice of rice to begin the Rockefeller's gene revolution was a careful one. As one researcher pointed out, rice is the staple food for more than 2.4 billion people. It had been domesticated and developed by local farmers over a period of at least 12,000 years, and has grown in a wide variety of different environments.23
Rice was synonymous with food security for most of Asia, where over 90% of the global rice harvest was produced, primarily by China and India, and where it made up 80% of people's daily calories. Rice was also a staple in West Africa, the Caribbean and tropical regions of Latin America. Rice farmers had developed varieties of rice to withstand droughts, resist pests, and grow in every climate imaginable, all without the help of biotechnology. They had created an incredible biological diversity with over 140,000 varieties.24
The Rockefeller Foundation had its eyes on Asia's rice bowl well before the 1984 IPRB project on rice. A prime target of the foundation's Green Revolution had been Asian rice production. The Green Revolution process had significantly destroyed the rich rice diversity over a period of thirty years, with the so-called High Yielding Varieties. This drew Asia's peasantry into the vortex of the world trade system and the global market for fertilizer, high-yielding seeds, pesticides, mechanisation, irrigation, credit and marketing schemes packaged for them by Western agribusiness.
The core driver of that earlier rice revolution had been the Philippines-based Rockefeller Foundation-created International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). It was not surprising then, that the IRRI, with a gene bank containing more than one-fifth of the world's rice varieties, became the prime vehicle to proliferate the Rockefeller Foundation's new gene revolution in rice; They banked every significant rice variety known.
IRRI had been used by the backers of the Green Revolution to gather control of the irreplaceable seed treasure of Asia's rice varieties, under the ruse that they would thereby be "protected."
The IRRI was put under the umbrella of the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research, CGIAR, after its creation in 1960 by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations during the Green Revolution in Asia. CGIAR was the same agency which also controlled the pre-war Iraqi seed bank. CGIAR operated out of the World Bank headquarters in Washington, also with Rockefeller Foundation funding. 25
In this manner, the World Bank, whose political agenda was defined by Washington policy, held the key to Asia's rice seed bank. Over three-quarters of the American rice genetic makeup or germplasm came originally from the IRRI seed bank. That rice was then pressed on Asian countries by the US Government demanding that Asian countries remove "unfair trade barriers" to US rice imports.
IRRI then became the mechanism for allowing major international agribusiness giants like Syngenta or Monsanto to illegally take the seeds from the IRRI seed bank, initially held in trust for the native farmers of the region.
The seeds, once in the labs of Monsanto or the other biotech giants, would be modified genetically, and patented as exclusive intellectual property of the biotech company. The World Trade Organization, created in 1994 out of the GATT Uruguay Round, introduced a radical new Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) permitting multinationals to patent plant and other life forms for the first time.
In 1993, a Convention on Biological Diversity under the UN was agreed upon to control the theft of such seed resources of the developing world. Washington, however, made a tiny alteration in the original text. It demanded that all the genetic resources held by the CGIAR system (of which IRRI is part) remain outside the rules. That affected half a million seed accessions, or 40% of the world's unique food crop germplasm held in gene banks. It meant that agribusiness companies were still free to take and patent them.26
Using the IRRI resources as its center, Rockefeller financing for Vitamin-A-enhanced rice became the prime focus of the IPRB research by the beginning of the 1990's. Their grants financed major work in the area by, among others, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
The Foundation's propagandists argued that lack of Vitamin A was a major cause of blindness and death in newborn infants in developing countries. UN statistics indicated that perhaps 100 to 140 million children worldwide had some form of Vitamin A deficiency, and among them 250,000 to 500,000 went blind. It was a human interest story of prime emotional attraction to promote acceptance of the controversial new genetically modified plants and crops. Golden Rice became the symbol, the rallying flag, and the demonstration of the promise of genetic engineering, even though the promise was based on black lies and deliberate deception.
The introduction of genetically modified rice would open the prospect of directly controlling the rice seeds, the basic food staple of 2.4 billion people. Prior to the gene revolution, rice had been ignored by the multinational agribusiness seed companies. That in part owed to the low income of rice regions and their peasants, and in part to the fact that rice had proven extremely difficult to hybridize. Farmer-saved seed accounted for more than 80% of Asian rice seed.
The purpose of ISAAA was, in their own words, to "contribute to poverty alleviation in developing countries by increasing crop productivity and incomes, particularly among resource-poor farmers, and to bring about more sustainable agricultural development in a safer global environment."28 The only hitch in the deal was that this formidable task, according to their framework, could only be done by the use of biotechnology.
The ISAAA was merely a platform to proliferate genetically engineered plants in target developing sector countries. It had been created and put into motion almost a full decade before it was clear that the Rockefeller Foundation's Golden Rice development was even feasible. It was from its outset, intent on proliferating gene plants in developing countries.
But the Foundation was not alone in backing ISAAA. The ISAAA was also backed financially by biotech agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto, Novartis (Syngenta), AgrEvo (Aventis Crop Science) and the US State Department's USAID. Their goal was to "create global partnerships" between the agribusiness biotech giants of the industrialized countries (notably, the USA) and the developing countries. To create those partnerships, ISAAA set up technology transfer projects covering the topics of tissue culture, diagnostics or genetic engineering.29
Interestingly enough, just as Henry Kissinger compiled a list of 13 "priority" developing countries for US Government depopulation policies in his NSSM 200 strategy document of 1974, the ISAAA also developed a priority target list for the introduction of genetically engineered plants and crops. The list of 12 countries included Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam in Asia; Kenya, Egypt, and Zimbabwe in Africa; and Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Mexico in Latin America. Significantly, half of the ISAAA priority countries overlapped with Kissinger's geopolitical targets of seventeen years prior. Indeed, geopolitics presented certain constants.30
By 2000, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology announced that they had successfully taken two genes from a daffodil, together with a gene of a bacterium, and built it into the rice DNA in order to produce what they called pro-Vitamin A or beta-carotene rice.
Because the beta-carotene (or pro-Vitamin A) which produced Vitamin A inside the body colored the rice grain orange, it was dubbed "Golden Rice" -another brilliant marketing stroke as everyone covets gold in whatever form. Now people could ostensibly get their daily bowl of rice and prevent blindness and other manifestations of Vitamin A deficiency in their children at the same time.
Children in Asia and the rest of the world had been receiving Vitamin A from other sources for centuries. The problem was not lack of natural foods containing Vitamin A, but rather not enough access to those other natural sources of Vitamin A.
Indian biodiversity campaigner, Dr. Vandana Shiva, pointed out in a stinging critique of the Rockefeller Foundation Golden Rice promotion that, "the first deficiency of genetic engineering rice to produce Vitamin A is the eclipsing of alternative sources of vitamin A" Per Pinstripe Anderson, head of the International Rice Research Institute, has said that Vitamin A rice is necessary for the poor in Asia because "we cannot reach very many of the malnourished in the world with pillS."31
Shiva pointed out, "there are many alternatives to pills for Vitamin A supply. Vitamin A is provided by liver, egg yolk, chicken, meat, milk, butter. Beta-carotene, the Vitamin A precursor is provided by dark green leafy vegetables, spinach, carrot, pumpkin, mango .... "32
Not mentioned in Rockefeller Foundation press releases, doctors and scientists knew that large quantities of Vitamin A could in fact lead to "hypervitaminosis" or Vitamin A toxicity which, in infants, could lead to permanent brain damage and other harmful effects.33
Moreover, the quantity of rice which a person would have to consume daily to meet the full quota of Vitamin A was staggering, and not humanly possible. One estimate was that an average Asian would have to eat 9 kilograms of cooked rice daily, just to get the required minimum intake of Vitamin A. A typical daily ration in Asia of 300 grams rice would provide only 8% of his daily requirement.34
The Rockefeller Foundation's President Gordon Conway sheepishly responded to these criticisms in a press release: "First it should be stated that we do not consider golden rice to be the solution to the vitamin A deficiency problem. Rather it provides an excellent complement to fruits, vegetables and animal products in diets, and to various fortified foods and vitamin supplements." He added: "I agree with Dr. Shiva that the public relations uses of golden rice have gone too far."35
Maybe the "public relations uses" had gone too far, but the campaign to proliferate genetically-modified Golden Rice had obviously not gone far enough for those behind the Rockefeller Foundation's gene revolution.
The Rockefeller Foundation announced in 2000 that it was turning the results of its years of rice research over to the public. In fact, they shrewdly turned it over to the agribusiness biotechnology giants. The UK firm, AstraZeneca, later part of the Swiss Syngenta Company, announced in May 2000 that it had acquired exclusive rights to commercialize Golden Rice.
Golden Rice gave the genetic engineering biotech industry a huge propaganda tool. In 1999, then-President Bill Clinton declared, "If we could get more of this golden rice, which is a genetically modified strain of rice especially rich in vitamin A, out to the developing world, it could save 4,000 lives a day, people that are malnourished and dying."36 Syngenta and also Monsanto licensed patents on Golden Rice claiming that they would allow the technology to "be made available free of charge for humanitarian uses in any developing nation"37
The criticism and skepticism about the wisdom of turning our basic food staples over to the gene doctors and agribusiness giants grew weaker as the propaganda machine of the Rockefeller Foundation and the agribusiness lobby went into high gear. One very prominent medical expert, Dr. Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, said, "Seeking a technological food fix for world hunger may be ... the most commercially malevolent wild goose chase of the new century."38 Few listened.
An insider in the world of biotechnology, Steven Smith, who worked on genetic engineering of seeds for the Swiss Syngenta Seeds, the main holder of the Golden Rice patents, declared shortly before his death in June 2003, "If anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world, tell them that it is not .... To feed the world takes political and financial will-it's not about production and distribution"39 The Rockefeller Foundation claim about feeding the world with genetically modified organisms was just a myth. But it was a myth in the hands of a powerful mythmaker. The revolution proceeded.
With an elaborate international structure for proliferating the seeds of the gene revolution through ISAAA, CGIAR, IRRI and the direct funding of the Rockefeller Foundation, agribusiness and the backers of the gene revolution were ready for the next giant step: the consolidation of global control over humankind's food supply. For that, a new organization became indispensable. It was called the World Trade Organization.
CHAPTER 9
A Revolution in World
Food
Production Begins
Argentina is the First Guinea Pig
Its backers hailed the introduction of GMO agriculture as nothing less than a "Second Green Revolution" a reference to the introduction of modern agriculture production techniques after World War II. In particular, special wheat hybrids and chemical fertilizers were promoted under the rubric that they would increase per hectare crop yields in Mexico, India and other developing lands.
In a short space of just eight years, worldwide acreage planted with GMO crops grew to 167 million acres by 2004, an increase of some 40-fold. That acreage represented an impressive 25% of total land under agricultural cultivation in the world, suggesting GMO crops were well on the way to fully dominating world crop production, at least in basic crops, within a decade or even less. [So here we are 14 years later and the serious reader knows we are already there.This is so wrong on so many levels.To me the people perpetuating this against their fellow man and women, are glutenous pigs unworthy of the oxygen they waste. DC]
Over two-thirds of that acreage, or 106 million acres, was planted by the world's leading GMO advocate, the United States. That fact, its proponents argued, proved there was a high degree of confidence on the part of the US Government and consumers, as well as farmers, that GMO crops offered substantial benefits over conventional crops.
By 2004, Argentina was second after the United States in size of acreage planted with GMO crops, with 34 million acres of planting. Far smaller but fast-expanding GMO countries included Brazil, which in early 2005 repealed a law banning planting GMO crops. They argued the crops had already proliferated so widely it was not possible to control the spread. Canada, South Africa and China all had significant GMO crop programs in place by then.
Close behind them and moving fast to catch up were Romania, Bulgaria and Poland, former Soviet Union satellites, rich in agricultural land and loose in regulations. Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Columbia, Honduras and Spain also reported significant GMO plantings. According to data compiled by the Pew Foundation of the United States, many other poorer countries were reported to have been targeted by companies promoting their GMO crops and special herbicide and pesticide chemicals. 1
According to the Pew study, 85% of farmers planting GMO crops in 2004 were "resource poor': Most were in developing countries, the same countries struggling with IMF reforms and high foreign debts.
No country saw such a radical transformation, and at such an early stage of its fundamental structure of agriculture holdings, as did Argentina. The history of GMO agriculture and the Argentine Soybean revolution was a case study for a nation's systematic loss of food self-sufficiency in the name of "progress."
Up to the beginning of the 1980's, Argentina had been remarkable for the standard of living it provided its population. The agricultural system, partly as a result of the Juan Peron era, was diverse, productive and dominated by small family farms. A typical Argentine farmer in the 1970's would raise a small amount of crops such as vegetables or wheat, husband small poultry, a dairy herd and occasionally beef cattle on a small plot of land, which was held over decades by right of possession. Argentine beef quality was so high in the 1970's that it rivaled that of Texas beef as the world's highest standard of quality. Up to the 1980's, the rich land and farm culture typically produced large surpluses beyond domestic food needs. Significantly, government farm subsidies were non-existent and farmer debts were minimal.
How a Debt Crisis Makes
Argentina a Soybean Giant
That all changed with the 1980's Argentina debt crisis. Following
the sharp rise in worldwide oil prices during the 1970's, international
banks, led by the Rockefeller family bank, Chase Manhattan,
Citibank, Chemical Bank, Bank of Boston, and Barclays, among
others, sold loans to countries like Argentina on initially very attractive
terms. The loans were to finance the import of much-needed oil,
among other things. As long as London interest rates remained low,
those loans could be serviced from national income. The loans
therefore quickly proved to be enormously alluring, and so, the dollar
debts rose drastically. In October 1979, in order to prevent the dollar from collapsing, the US Federal Reserve suddenly raised its major interest rate by some 300%, impacting worldwide interest rates, and above all the floating rate of interest on Argentina's foreign debt.
By 1982, Argentina was caught in a debt trap not unlike that which the British had used in the 1880's to take control of the Suez Canal from Egypt. New York bankers, led by David Rockefeller had learned the lessons of British debt imperialism.2
Breaking Argentina's National Will
During its earlier era of Peronism, Argentina had combined a strong
and well organized trade union movement, with a central state
heavily involved in the economy. Both of these cooperated with
select private companies under a regulated model. During the
peaceful era of postwar world economic expansion, it had certain features similar to the Scandinavian social democratic model.
Furthermore, Peronism, whatever its shortfalls, had created a strong
national identity among the Argentine population. The Peron era came to a bloody end in 1976 with a military coup and regime change backed by Washington. The coup was justified on the argument that it was to counter growing terrorism and communist insurgency in the country. Later investigations revealed that the guerrilla danger from the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) and the Montoneros had been fabricated by the Argentine military, most of whose leaders had been trained in domestic counter-insurgency techniques by the US Pentagon in the notorious US Army School of the Americas.
The Rockefeller brothers regarded Latin America as a de facto private family sphere of influence at least since the 1940's, when David's brother Nelson was running US intelligence in the Americas as President Roosevelt's Coordinator of Inter-American Intelligence Affairs (CIAA). Rockefeller family interests had spread from Venezuelan oil to Brazilian agriculture. Now they had decided that the 1970's debt problems of Argentina offered a unique opportunity to advance family interests there.
While freezing wages, Martinez de Hoz freed domestic wages and prices on the necessities which had been under government price control, including food and fuel, leading to a substantial drop in consumer purchasing power. Import tariffs were slashed, allowing imports to flood the market. The peso-dollar exchange rate was the main nominal anchor of the scheme. Indeed, the budget deficit was reduced from 10.3% of GDP in 1975 to 2.7% in 1979 through expenditure cuts, public-sector price increases, and tax increases, and the inflation rate fell from 335% in 1975, to 87.6% in 1980. However, the real appreciation of the peso, and the resulting capital flight and balance of payments crisis, led to the collapse of the program.4 Foreign speculative capital was also ushered into the country, and Chase Manhattan and Citibank were the first foreign banks to make their entrance.
By 1989, following more than a decade of repressive military rule, a new phase in the erosion of Argentine national sovereignty was introduced with the accession of President Carlos Menem, a wealthy playboy later accused of rampant corruption and illegal arms dealing. George Herbert Walker Bush was then in the White House, and received Menem as personal White House guest no less than eight times. His son, Neil Bush, was a guest at Menem's residence in Buenos Aires. Menem, in short, enjoyed the best connections in the North.
With the Argentine military ridden with scandal and with popular discontent growing, New York bankers and Washington power brokers decided it was time to play a new card to continue their economic plunder and corporate takeover of Argentina. Menem was a Peronist only in party name. In fact; he imposed on Argentina an economic shock therapy even more drastic than Margaret Thatcher's British free market revolution of the 1980's. But his Peronist membership allowed him to disarm internal resistance within the party and the unions.
Cavallo was also a close friend and business associate of David Mulford, President George H.W. Bush's key Treasury Official responsible for the restructuring of the Latin American debt under the Brady Plan, and later a member of Credit Suisse First Boston bank. Cavallo was indeed trusted by the "Yankee bankers."7
Menem's economic program was written by David Rockefeller's friends in Washington and New York. It gave priority to radical economic liberalization and privatization of the state, and dismantled carefully enacted state regulations in every area from health, to education, to industry. It opened protected markets to foreign imports even further than had been possible under the military junta. The privatization agenda had been demanded by Washington and the IMF-which was acting on Washington's behalf,as a condition for emergency loans to "stabilize" the Peso. At the time, Argentina was suffering from a Weimar-style hyperinflation rate of 200% a month. The Junta had left behind them a wrecked economic and fiscal economy, deeply in debt to foreign banks.
Menem was able to take advantage of the hyperinflation which was engineered during the final years of the Junta, and imposed on the country economic change far more radical than even the military dictatorship had dared. Cavallo dutifully imposed the demanded shocks, and got an immediate $2.4 billion credit, and high praise, from the IMF. A wave of privatizations followed, from the state telecommunications company to the state oil monopoly, and even to Social Security state pensions. Corruption was rampant. Menem's cronies became billionaires at the taxpayer's expense.
In place of state monopolies on industry, giant foreign-owned private monopolies emerged, financed largely by loans from Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan or Citibank. These same banks made huge windfall profits when, some years later, they organized wealthy Argentines' flight of capital out of the peso into offshore Chase or Citibank "private banking" accounts.
The impact on the general population was anything but positive. With foreign takeovers came massive layoffs of-until then-public workers. Not surprisingly, Argentina's Menem regime, and its economic czar, Domingo Cavallo, were hailed for creating what was labeled in the financial media as the ''Argentine Miracle."
Inflation was ended in 1991 by imposing an absolute surrender of monetary control to a Currency Board, a form of central bank whose control was held by the IMF. The Peso, severely devalued from the 1970's level, was rigidly fixed by the Currency Board at 1:1 to the US dollar. No money could be printed nationally to stimulate the economy without an equal increase in dollar reserves in the Currency Board account. The fixed peso opened the floodgates for foreign investors to speculate and reap huge gains on the privatization of the state economy during the 1990's.
When, in April 2001, Cavallo was recalled amid a major economic crisis, to run the national economy once again, he secretly engineered a coup on behalf of the New York banks and his local banking friends. Cavallo simply froze deposits on personal bank accounts of private savers in Argentina to save the assets of his banker friends in New York and elsewhere abroad.
At this point, Argentina defaulted on $132 billion in state debt. Cavallo's first act as Economics Minister in April 2001 was to meet secretly with Rockefeller's JP Morgan-Chase Bank, CSFB's David Mulford, London's HSBC and a select few other foreign bankers. They swapped $29 billion of old Argentine state bonds for new bonds, a secret deal which made the banks huge profits and which secured their loan exposures to the country. Argentina was the loser as the swap made its total debt burden even larger. A year later Cavallo and the seven foreign banks were subject to judicial investigations that alleged the swaps were illegal and designed to benefit the foreign bankers. According to US financial investors, it actually speeded the default on the state debt. By 2003, total foreign debt had risen to $198 billion, equivalent to three times the level of when Menem took office in 1989.8
Rockefeller's Argentina
Land Revolution
By the mid-1990's, the Menem government moved to revolutionize
Argentina's traditional productive agriculture into monoculture
aimed for global export. The script was again written for him in
New York and Washington by foreign interests, constituted above
all by the associates of David Rockefeller. Menem argued that the transformation of food production into industrial cultivation of GM soybean was necessary for the country to pay its ballooning foreign debt. It was a lie, but it succeeded in transforming Argentine agriculture into a pawn for North American investors like David Rockefeller, Monsanto and Cargill Inc.
Following almost two decades of economic battering through mounting foreign debts, forced privatization and the dismantling of national protective barriers, the highly-valued Argentine agricultural economy would now be the target of the most radical transformation of them all.
In 1991, several years before field trials were implemented in the United States, Argentina became a secret experimental laboratory for developing genetically engineered crops. The population was to become the human guinea pigs of the project. Menem's government created a pseudo-scientific Advisory Commission on Biotechnology to oversee the granting of licenses for more than 569 field trials for GM corn, sunflowers, cotton, wheat and especially soybeans.9 There was no public debate on the initiative of either the Menem government or the Commission on the controversial issue of whether or not GMO crops were safe.
The Commission met in secret, and never made its findings public. It merely acted as a publicity agent for foreign GMO seed multinationals. This was not surprising as the Commission members themselves came from Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences and other GMO giants. In 1996, Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis Missouri was the world's largest producer of genetically-manipulated patented soybean seeds: Roundup Ready soybeans.
In 1995, Monsanto introduced Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans that had a copy of a gene from the bacterium, Agrobacterium sp. strain CP4, inserted, by means of a gene gun, into its genome. That allowed the transgenic or GMO plant to survive being sprayed by the non-selective herbicide, glyphosate. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, killed conventional soybeans. Any conventional soybean crops adjacent to Monsanto Roundup Ready crops would inevitably be affected due to wind-borne contamination. 10 Conveniently, that greatly aided the spread of Monsanto crops once introduced.
The genetic modification in Monsanto Roundup Ready soybeans involved incorporating a bacterial version of the enzyme into the soybean plant that gave the GMO soybean protection from Monsanto's herbicide Roundup. Roundup was the same herbicide used by the US Government to eradicate drug crops in Colombia.
Thereby protected, both the soybeans and any weeds could be sprayed with Roundup, killing the weeds and leaving the soybeans. Typically, rather than less herbicide chemicals, GMO soybeans required significantly more chemicals per hectare to control weed growth.11
Since the 1970's, soybeans had been promoted by large agribusiness seed companies to become a major source of animal feed worldwide. Monsanto was granted an exclusive license in 1996 by President Menem to distribute its GMO soybean seeds throughout Argentina.
Simultaneous to this wholesale introduction of Monsanto GMO soybean seeds and, necessarily, the required Monsanto Roundup herbicide to Argentine agriculture, now ultra-cheap (in dollar terms), Argentine farmland was bought up by large foreign companies such as Cargill-the world's largest grain and commodity trading company-by international investment funds such as George Soros's Quantum Fund, by foreign insurance companies, and corporate interests such as Seaboard Corporation. This was a hugely profitable operation for foreign investors, for which GMO Monsanto seeds were ultimately the basis for a giant new soy agribusiness industrial farming. Argentina's land was to be converted into a vast industrial seed production unit. For the foreign investors, the beauty of the scheme was that compared with traditional agriculture, GMO soybean needed little human labor.
In effect, as a consequence of the economic crisis, millions of acres of prime farmland were put up for auction by the banks. Typically, the only buyers with dollars to invest were foreign corporations or private persons. Small peasant farmers were offered pennies for their lands. Sometimes, when they refused to sell, they were forced off their properties by terrorist militia or by the state police. Tens of thousands more farmers had to give up their lands when they were driven to bankruptcy by market flooding of cheap food imports brought in under the free market reforms imposed by the IMF.
Additionally, fields planted with the GMO "Roundup Ready" soybean seeds and their special Roundup herbicide required no ordinary turning over of the soil through plowing. In order to maximize profitability, the sponsors of the GMO soybean revolution created huge Kansas-style expanses of land where large mechanized equipment could operate around the clock, often remote-controlled by GPS satellite navigation, without even a farmer needed for driving the tractor.
Monsanto's GMO soybean was sold to Argentine farmers as an ecological plus, utilizing "no-till" farming. In reality they were anything but environmentally friendly. The GMO soybean and Roundup herbicide were planted with a technique called "direct drilling," pioneered in the USA and with the purpose of saving time and money. 12
Only affordable to larger wealthy fanners, "direct drilling" required a mammoth special machine which automatically inserts the GM soybean seed into a hole drilled several centimeters deep, and then presses dirt down on top of it. With this direct drilling machine, thousands of acres could be planted by one man. By contrast, a traditional three hectare peach or lemon grove required 70 to 80 farm laborers to cultivate. Previous crop residues were simply left in the field to rot, producing a wide variety of pests and weeds alongside the Monsanto GMO soybean sprouts. That in turn led to greater markets for Monsanto to sell its special patented glyphosate or Roundup herbicide, along with the required Roundup Ready patented soybean seeds. After several years of such planting, the weeds began to show a special tolerance to glyphosate, requiring ever stronger doses of that or other herbicides. 13
With the decision to license Monsanto genetically engineered Roundup Ready soybeans in 1996, Argentina was to undergo a revolution which its proponents hailed as a "second green revolution." In reality it was the devolution of a once-productive national family farm-based agriculture system into a neo-feudal state system dominated by a handful of powerful, wealthy Latifundista landowners.
The Menem government insured that the door was opened wide to the introduction of GMO soybean seeds. Argentine farmers were in dire economic straits following years of hyperinflation. Monsanto jumped in and extended "credit" to loan-starved farmers to buy Monsanto GMO seeds and Monsanto Roundup herbicide, the only herbicide effective on its Roundup Ready soybean. Monsanto also made the initial transition to GMO soybean more alluring to farmers by offering to provide them with the necessary "direct drilling" machines and training.
"Soybeans for Me, Argentina ... "
The results of the GMO soybean revolution in Argentina were
impressive in one respect. The nation's agriculture economy was
completely transformed in less than a decade. In the 1970's, before the debt crisis, soybean was not even a factor in the national agriculture economy, with only 9,500 hectares of soybean plantations. In those years, a typical family farm produced a variety of vegetable crops, grains, raised chickens and perhaps a few cows for milk, cheese and meat.
By 2000, after four years of adopting Monsanto soybeans and mass production techniques, over 10 million GMO soy hectares had been planted. By 2004, the area had expanded to more than 14 million hectares. Large agribusiness combines had managed to clear forests, as well as traditional lands occupied by the indigenous people to create more land for soy cultivation.
Argentine agricultural diversity, with its fields of corn, wheat, and cattle, was rapidly being turned into monoculture, just as Egyptian farming was taken over and ruined by cotton in the 1880's.
For more than a century, Argentine farm land, especially the legendary pampas, had been filled with wide fields of corn and wheat amid green pastures grazed by herds of cattle. Farmers rotated between crops and cattle to preserve soil quality. With the introduction of soybean monoculture, the soil, leeched of its vital nutrients, required even more chemical fertilizers,not less, as Monsanto had promised. The large beef and dairy herds which had roamed freely for decades on the grasslands of Argentina were now forced into cramped US-style mass cattle feedlots to make way for the more lucrative soybean. Fields of traditional cereals, lentils, peas and green beans had already almost vanished.
A leading Argentine agro-ecologist, Walter Pengue, a specialist in the impact of GMO soybeans, predicted that, "If we continue in this path, perhaps within 50 years the land will not produce anything at all."14
By 2004, 48% of all agricultural land in the country was dedicated to soybean crops, and between 90% and 97% of these were Monsanto GMO Roundup Ready soybeans. Argentina had become the world's largest uncontrolled experimental laboratory for GMO,15
Between 1988 and 2003, Argentine dairy farms had been reduced by half. For the first time, milk had to be imported from Uruguay at costs far higher than domesticprices. As mechanized soybean monoculture forced hundreds of thousands of workers off the land, poverty and malnutrition soared.
In the more tranquil era of the 1970's, before the New York banks stepped in, Argentina enjoyed one of the highest living standards in Latin America. The percentage of its population officially below the poverty line was 5% in 1970. By 1998, that figure had escalated to 30% of the total population. And by 2002, to 51%. By 2003, malnutrition rose to levels estimated at between 11 % and 17% of the total population of 37 million. 16
Amid the drastic national economic crisis arising from the state's defaulting on its debt, Argentines found they were no longer able to rely on small plots of land for their survival. The land had been overrun by mass GMO soybean acreages and blocked to even ordinary survival crops.
Under the support of foreign investors and agribusiness giants like Monsanto and Cargill, large Argentine landowners moved systematically to seize land from helpless peasants, most often with backing from the state. By law, peasants had rights over lands of which they had the uncontested use for 20 years or more. That traditional right was trampled by the powerful new interests behind agribusiness. In the vast region of Santiago del Estero in the north, large feudal landowners began an operation of mass deforestation to make way for wholesale GMO soybean crops.
Peasant communities were suddenly told that their land belonged to someone else. Typically, if they refused to leave willingly, armed groups would steal their cattle, burn their crops and threaten them with more violence. The lure of huge profits from GMO soybean exports was the driving force behind the violent upheaval surrounding traditional farming across the country.
As farming families were made destitute and pushed off their lands, they fled to new shanty towns on the edges of the larger cities, turning to social disorder, crime and suicide, while disease became rampant amid the impossible overcrowding. Within several years, more than 200,000 peasants and small farmers were driven off their lands to make way for the large agribusiness soybean planters. 17
Monsanto Conquers with Deception
Taking the example of the old 16th Century Spanish Conquistadores,
Monsanto's warriors conquered the land with a campaign
of lies and deception. Because Argentina's national Seed Law did
not protect Monsanto's patent on its glyphosate-resistant genetically
modified soybean seed, the company could not legally
demand a patent royalty when Argentine farmers reused their
soybean seeds in the next harvest season. Indeed, not only was it
traditional, but also legal, for Argentine farmers to re-plant seeds
for their own use. Collection of such a royalty or "technology license fee" was at the heart of the Monsanto marketing scheme. Farmers in the USA and elsewhere had to sign a binding contract with Monsanto agreeing to not re-use saved seeds and to pay new royalties to Monsanto each year-a system which can be seen as a new form of serfdom.
To get around the refusal by the nationalist Argentine Congress to pass a new law granting Monsanto the right to impose royalty payments against severe court-imposed fines, Monsanto adopted another ploy. Farmers were sold the initial seeds needed to expand the soybean revolution in Argentina. In this early stage, Monsanto deliberately waived its "technology license fee:' favoring the widest possible proliferation of its GM seeds across the land, and in particular, of the patented glyphosate Roundup herbicide that went along with it. The insidious marketing strategy behind selling glyphosate-resistant seeds was that farmers were forced to purchase the specially matched Monsanto herbicides.
GMO soybean planted land increased 14-fold, while the smuggling of Monsanto Roundup soybean seeds spread across the Pampas and into Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay. Monsanto did nothing to stop what it saw as the illegal spread of its seeds. 18 Monsanto partner Cargill was itself accused of illegally smuggling GMO soybean seeds secretly mixed with non-GMO seeds, into Brazil from Argentina. Amusingly, in Brazil, the smuggled Argentine GMO soybean seeds were called "Maradona" seeds in reference to the famous Argentine football player later treated for cocaine addiction.
Finally, in 1999, three years after its introduction of GMO soybeans, Monsanto formally demanded farmers to pay up the "extended royalties" on the seeds, despite the fact that Argentine law made it illegal to do so. The Menem government made no protest against Monsanto's brazen orders, while farmers ignored it altogether. But the stage was being set for the next legal act. Monsanto claimed the royalties were necessary for it to recover its investments on the "research and development" of the GMO seeds. It began a careful public relations campaign designed to paint itself as the victim of farmers' abuse and "theft".
In early 2004, Monsanto escalated its pressure on the Argentine government. Monsanto announced that if Argentina refused to recognize the "technology license fee;' it would enforce its collection at points of import such as the USA or the EU, where Monsanto patents were recognized, a measure which would spell a devastating blow to the market for Argentine agribusiness exports. Moreover, after Monsanto's well-publicized threat to stop selling all GMO soybeans in Argentina, and the claim that more than 85% were illegally replanted by farmers in what was branded a "black market:' the Agriculture Secretary, Miguel Campos, announced that the government and Monsanto had come to an agreement.
A Technology Compensation Fund was to be created and managed by the Ministry of Agriculture. Farmers would have to pay a royalty or tax fee of up to almost one percent on the sale of GMO soybeans to grain elevators or exporters such as Cargill. The tax was to be collected at the processing site, leaving farmers with no choice but to pay up if they were to process their harvest. The tax would then be paid back to Monsanto and other GMO seed suppliers by the government. 19
Despite fierce farmer protest, the Technology Compensation Fund was implemented at the end of 2004.
By early 2005, the Brazilian government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had also thrown in the towel, and passed a law making planting of GMO seeds in Brazil legal for the first time, claiming that the use of GMO seeds had spread so widely as to be uncontrollable anyway. The barriers to GMO proliferation across Latin America were melting. By 2006, together with the United States, where GMO Monsanto soybeans dominated, Argentina and Brazil accounted for more than 81 % of world soybean production, thereby ensuring that practically every animal in the world fed soymeal was eating genetically engineered soybeans. Similarly, this would imply that every McDonald's hamburger mixed with soymeal would be genetically engineered, and most processed foods, whether they realized or not.20
Let Them Eat Soybeans!
As the GMO soybean revolution destroyed traditional agricultural
production, Argentines faced a dramatic change in their available
diet. Furthermore, widespread soybean-based monoculture left
the population desperately vulnerable to the national economic
depression which hit Argentina in 2002. Previously in tough times,
farmers and even ordinary city dwellers could grow their own crops
to survive. But that was no longer possible under the transformation
of Argentina's agriculture into industrial agribusiness. As a result, hunger spread across the land, just as the economic crisis worsened. Fearing food riots, the national government, aided by Monsanto and the giant international soybean users such as Cargill, Nestle, and Kraft Foods, responded by giving out free food to the hungry. Meals made from soybeans were thus distributed with the secondary motive of fostering wider domestic consumption of the crop.
A national campaign was put in motion urging Argentines to replace a healthy diet of fresh vegetables, meat, milk, eggs and other products with ... soybeans. DuPont Agri-Sciences created a new organization with the healthy-sounding name, "Protein for Life:' in order to propagate soybean consumption by humans, even though the soybeans were meant to be grown as animal feed. As part of the campaign, DuPont gave out food fortified with soybeans to thousands of Buenos Aires poor. It was the first time ever in any country that a population had directly consumed soybeans in such large quantities. The Argentines had now become guinea pigs in more ways than one.21
Government and private propaganda touted the great health benefits of a soybean diet, as a replacement for dairy or meat protein. But the campaign was based on lies. It conveniently omitted the fact that a diet based on soybean is unfit for long-term human consumption, and that studies have established that babies fed soymilk have dramatically higher levels of allergies than those fed breast milk or cow milk. They did not tell Argentines that raw and processed soybeans contain a series of toxic substances which, when soy is consumed as a staple element of one's diet, damage health and have been related to cancer. They refused to say that soybeans contain an inhibitor, Trypsin, which Swedish studies have linked to stomach cancer. 22
In the countryside, the impact of mass soybean mono culture was horrendous. Traditional farming communities close to the huge soybean plantations were seriously affected by the aerial spraying of Monsanto Roundup herbicides. In Lorna Senes, peasants growing mixed vegetables for their own consumption found all their crops destroyed by spraying, as Roundup kills all plants other than specially gene-modified "herbicide-resistant" Monsanto beans.
A study conducted in 2003 showed that the spraying had not only destroyed the nearby peasants' crops: their chickens had died and other animals, especially horses, were adversely affected. Humans contracted violent nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and skin lesions from the herbicide. There were reports of animals born near GMO soybean fields with severe organ deformities, of deformed bananas and sweet potatoes, of lakes suddenly filled with dead fish. Rural families reported that their children developed grotesque blotches on their bodies after the spraying of nearby soybean fields.
Added damage occurred to valuable forest land, which was bulldozed to make way for mass-cultivation of soybean, especially in the Chaco region near Paraguay and the Yungas region. The loss of forests created an explosion of cases of medical problems among indigenous inhabitants, including leishmaniasis, a parasite transmitted by sand flies, which is expensive to treat and leaves severe scars and other deformities. In Entre Rios, more than 1.2 million acres of forest were removed by 2003, at which point the government finally issued an order forbidding further deforestation.
To convince wary Argentine farmers to use Monsanto Roundup Ready soybean seeds in 1996, the company had made grand claims of a miracle crop, arguing that its GMO soybean was genetically modified to be resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide.
The company assured farmers that they would therefore require dramatically less herbicide and chemical treatment for their soybean crops than with regular soybean. As Roundup kills virtually everything that grows aside from Monsanto GMO soybeans, only one, rather than several, herbicides would be necessary-or so went Monsanto's PR campaign. Grand promises were also made about higher yields and lower costs, feeding the desperate farmers with dreams of a better economic situation. Not surprisingly, the response was hugely positive.
On average, the Roundup soybean crops gave between 5% to 15% lower yields than traditional soybean crops. Also, far from needing less herbicide, farmers found vicious new weeds which needed up to three times as much spraying as before. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics from 1997 showed that expanded plantings of Roundup Ready soybeans resulted in a 72% increase in the use of glyphosate.23
According to the Pesticides Action Network, scientists estimated that plants genetically engineered to be herbicide resistant will actually triple the amount of herbicides used. Farmers, knowing that their crop can tolerate or resist being killed off by the herbicides, will tend to use them more liberally. Monsanto never conducted rigorous independently verifiable tests of the negative health effects of feeding cattle, let alone humans, with the raw Monsanto soybeans saturated with Roundup herbicides. The increased use of chemicals led to larger costs than with non-GMO seeds.24
But by the time the farmers realized this, it was too late. By 2004, GMO soybean had spread across the entire country, and the seeds all depended on Monsanto Roundup pesticide. A more perfect scheme of human bondage would be hard to imagine.
Yet Argentina was not the only target land for the project of gene-manipulated agriculture crops. The Argentine case was but the first stage in a global plan that was decades in the making and absolutely shocking and awesome in its scope.
next 205 notes
1. Catherine Bertini, U.N. 4th World Conference on Women, Beijng, China, September 1995, cited in Famous Quotes and Quotations about UN, http://www.quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_aboutlun. The much-honored civil servant and winner of World Food Prize in 2003, Bertini, is a former Confidential Assistant to New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller and a member of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission. The World Food Prize, interestingly, was created by former Rockefeller Foundation agronomist, Norman Borlaug, creator of the first Green Revolution, in 1986.
2. Gary H. Toenniessen, Vitamin A Deficiency and Golden Rice: The Role of the Rockefeller Foundation, 14 November 2000, http://www.rockfound.orgllibrary/ 111400ght.pdf, p. 3. Toenniessen, the director of Food Security at the Rockefeller Foundation described his work as follows: "In the early 1980s, advances in plant molecular biology offered the promise of achieving genetic improvements in crops that could not be accomplished with conventional plant breeding. For the most part, however, such advances in crop biotechnology were not being applied to rice or other food crops of primary importance in developing countries. To help make sure the benefits of this powerful new technology would be available to poor farmers and consumers, the Rockefeller Foundation, beginning in 1985, committed roughly half of its agricultural funding to an international program on rice biotechnology. The primary objective of this program was to build rice biotechnology capacity in Asia, and an important part of it was funding the training of Asian scientists at advanced Western laboratories, where they invented techniques and worked on traits important for genetic improvement of rice-skills and knowledge which they then brought back home."
3. J.e. O'Toole, G.H. Toenniessen et aI., The Rockefeller Foundation's International Program on Rice Biotechnology, Rockefeller Foundation archives, http://www.rockfound.orgllibrary/O 1 rice_bio. pdf.
4. Philip J. Regal, A Brief History of Biotechnology Risk: The Engineering Ideal in Biology, Edmonds Institute, 18 July 1999, http://www.cbs. umn.edu/ -pregal! GEhistory.htm.
5. Pnina Abir-Am, The Biotheoretical Gathering, Transdisciplinary Authority and the Incipient Legitimation of Molecular Biology in the 1930s: New Perspectives on the Historical Sociology of Science. Hist. Sci. 25:1-70,1987, pp. 18-22,33.
6. Cited in Robert Bruce Baird, We Can Change the World, http://www.government.articlesarchive.net/we-can -change-the-world.html.
7. Joshua Lederberg, "The Impact of Basic Research in Genetic RecombinationA Personal Account", Part I, Annual Review of Genetics, Vol. 21, 1987, p. 186.
8. Joshua Lederberg, ibid., Part II, p. 196.
9. Philip J. Regal, op. cit., The Engineering Ideal in Biology. See also, Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, http://www.alternativescience.com/ shattering-the-myths-of-darwinism.htm.
10. Richard Milton, op. cit.
11. David King, "An Interview with Professor Brian Goodwin", GenEthics News, March/April 1996, pp. 6-8. Goodwin explains his concerns about genetic or biological reductionism in the interview: "We currently experience crises of health, of the environment, of the community. I think they are all related ... Biology contributes to these crises by failing to give us adequate conceptual understanding of life and wholes, of ecosystems, of the biosphere, and it's all because of genetic reductionism ... Let me just describe some of the consequences of genetic reductionism. Once you've got organisms reduced to genes, then organisms have no inherent natures. Now, in our theory of evolution, species are natural kinds, they are really like the elements, if you like. I don't mean literally, but they have the same conceptual status, gold has a certain nature. We are arguing that, say, a sea urchin of a particular species has a nature. Human beings have a nature. Now, in Darwinism, they don't have a nature, because they're historical individuals, which arise as a result of accidents. All they have done is pass the survival test. The Darwinian theory makes it legitimate to shunt genes around from anyone species to any other species: since species don't have 'natures', we can manipulate them in any way and create new organisms that survive in our culture. So this is why you get people saying that there is really no difference between the creation of transgenic organisms, that is moving genes across species boundaries, and creating new combinations of genes by sexual recombination within species. They say that is no different to what is happening in evolution ... Once you scale something up to a particular level you are into a totally different scene. Now, I think that there are the same problems that arise with respect to creation of transgenics, and the reason is because of the utter unpredictability of the consequences of transferring a gene from one species to another. Genes are defined by context. Genes are not stable bits of information that can be shunted around and express themselves independently of context. Every gene depends upon its context. If you change the context, you change the activity of the gene ... I'm by no means against biotechnology. I just think that it is something that we have to use with enormous caution in its application. We need stringent safety protocols."
12. Philip J.Regal, op. cit.
13. Philip Regal, Metaphysics in Genetic Engineering: 2.2 Utopianism, paper prepared for International Center for Human and Public Affairs, Buenos Aires, 1996, http://www.psrast.org/pjrbiosafety.htm. Regal adds, "from the perspective of a theory reductionist, it was logical that social problems would reduce to simple biological problems that could be corrected through chemical manipulations of soils, brains, and genes. Thus the Rockefeller Foundation made a major commitment to using its connections and resources to promote a philosophy of eugenics. The Rockefeller Foundation used its funds and considerable social, political, and economic connections to promote the idea that society should wait for scientific inventions to solve its problems, and that tampering with the economic and political systems would not be necessary. Patience, and more investment in reductionist research would bring trouble-free solutions to social and economic problems. Mason and Weaver helped create a network of what would one day be called molecular biologists, that had little traditional knowledge of living organisms and of communities of organisms. It shared a faith in theory reductionism and in determinism. It shared utopian ideals. It learned to use optimistic terms of discourse that brought grants and status. The project was in the general spirit of Bacon's New Atlantis and Enlightenment visions of a trouble-free society based on mastery of nature's laws and scientific/technological progress (e.g. Eamon 1994, Mcknight 1992):'
14. Philip J. Regal, A Brief History of Biotechnology Risk Debates and Policies in the United States, 18 July 1999, http://www.cbs.umn.edu/-pregaIlGEhistory.htm.
15. Dr. Robert Mann, "The Selfish Commercial Gene", Prast. http:// www.psrast.orglselfshgen.htm. Mann adds the clear warning: "The hazards of GE rival even nuclear war. Biology is so much more complex than technology that we should not pretend we can imagine all the horror scenarios, but it is suspected that some artificial genetic manipulations create the potential to derange the biosphere for longer than any civilisation could survive. If only enthusiasts are consulted in appraisal of GE proposals, such scenarios will not be thought of."
16. Philip J. Regal, op. cit.
17. Abigail Salyers, cited in Dr. Robert Mann, op. cit.
18. David G. Heckel, et aI., "Genetic Mapping of Resistance to Bacillus Thuringiensis Toxins in Diamondback Moth Using Biphasic Linkage Analysis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA", Agricultural Sciences, July 1999.
19. Mae-Wan Ho, FAQ on Genetic Engineering, Institute of Science in Society, in http://www.i -sis.org. uklFAQ. php.
20. Mae-Wan Ho, Puncturing the GM Myths, http://www.unobeserver.com. 4 August 2004.
21. Philip J. Regal, op.cit.
22. Dennis Normile, "Rockefeller to End Network After 15 Years of Success", Science, 19 November 1999, pp. 1468-1469, reprinted in ww.gene.ch/genet/2000/ Feb/msg00005.html.
23. Gary H. Toenniessen, "Vitamin A Deficiency and Golden Rice: The Role of the Rockefeller Foundation", The Rockefeller Foundation, 14 November 2000, in http://www.rockfound.orgllibrary/111400ght.pdf.
24. M. T. Jackson, "Protecting the Heritage of Rice Biodiversity': GeoJournal March 1995, pp 267-274. Quoted in K.S. Fisher (editor), "Caring for the Biodiversity of Tropical Rice Ecosystems", IRRI, 1996. See also Anna-Rosa Martinez I. Prat, "Genentech Preys on the Paddy Field", Grain, June 1998.
25. In its 1998 report, Shaping CGIAR's Future, October 26-30, 1998, http://www. worldbank.org/h tml/ cgiar/publications/ icw98/ icw98sop. pdf, the World Bank authors stated, "World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn formally opened ICW98 .. . Wolfensohn praised the CGIAR's "extraordinary achievements" and recalled that one of his first lessons in development economics was at the hands of his colleagues in the CGIAR. As a board member of the Rockefeller Foundation thirty years ago, he visited CIMMYT in Mexico, where he walked through the fields with local farmers. Evoking this fond memory, Mr. Wolfensohn expressed his "very, very strong and very deep feeling" for the CGIAR. Maurice Strong had worked with David Rockefeller and the family since 1947, and became a Trustee of ·the Rockefeller Foundation which provided funds for the UN Stockholm Earth Summit in 1972; the latter catalyzed an international movement around the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" scarce resources report. See Henry Lamb, Maurice Strong: The New Guy in Your Future!, http://www.sovereignty.netlp/sd/strong.html, January 1997.
26. The Crucible II Group, Seeding Solutions: Volume 1: Policy Options for Genetic Resources, Policy primer Major changes in the policy environment, in http://www.idrc.ca/en/ ev-64406-201-1-DO _ TOPI C.html.
27. Devlin Kuyek, "ISAAA in Asia: Promoting Corporate Profits in the Name of the Poor", GRAIN, October 2000, http://www.grain.org/publications/ reports/isaaa.htm.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Dr.Vandana Shiva, Genetically Engineered Vitamin 'If' Rice: A Blind Approach to Blindness Prevention, http://www.biotech-info.net/blind_rice.html. 14 February 2000.
32. Ibid.
33. Razak Lajis, "Vitamin A Toxicity", http://www.prn2.usm.my/mainsite/ bulletin/sun/1996/sun43.html. Original report cited is from Australian Adverse Drug Reactions Bulletin, Vol. 15, No.4, November 1996, which notes, "ADRAC recently reviewed a report of a child born with microcephaly and dystonia whose mother has inadvertently ingested large quantities of vitamin A during the first four or five weeks of pregnancy. The child subsequently died. While it was not possible to implicate the ingestion of vitamin A as a definite cause of the birth defects in this case, excess amounts of vitamin A are suspected causes of birth defects and its therapeutically used congeners are established causes of birth defects': See also, Marion Nestle, "Genetically Engineered Golden Rice is Unlikely to Overcome Vitamin A Deficiency", Letter to the Editor, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, March 2001, pp. 289-290.
34. Benedikt Haerlin, Opinion Piece about Golden Rice, archive.greenpeace.orgl genenglhighlights/food/benny.htm. Also, Assisi Foundation, BIOTHAI et aI., Biopiracy, TRIPS and the Patenting of Asia's Rice Bow/, http://www.poptel.org.uk! panap/archives!larice.htm, May 1998.
35. Gordon Conway quoted in Paul Brown, "GM Rice Promoters Have Gone too Far", The Guardian, 10 February 2001.
36. Bill Clinton, quoted in Paul Brown, op. cit.
37. Paul Brown, op. cit.
38 Richard Horton quoted in Alex Kirby, "'Mirage' of GM's Golden Promise", BBe News Online, 24 September 2003.
39. Alex Kirby, op. cit
Notes
1. Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, Genetically Modified Food Crops in the United States, http://www.pewagbiotech.org, August 2004.
2. F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Books Ltd., London, 2004, Chapters 10-11. John Perkins, The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 2004.
3. U.S. Embassy, Document #1976 Buenos06130, 20 September 1976, part of declassified US State Department documents. Cynthia J. Arnson (editor), ArgentinaUnited States Bilateral Relations, Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Washington D.C., 2003, pp. 39-40. Kissinger's conversation with Guzzetti in Santiago was first reported by Martin Edwin Andersen, "Kissinger and the Dirty War", The Nation, 31 October 1987. Andersen's article was based on a memo by Assistant Secretary for Human Rights Patricia Derian, who was told the story by Hill during a visit to Argentina in March 1977. Hill demarche on human rights: Buenos Aires 3462, May 25,1976, "Request for Instructions", State 129048,25 May 1976, "Proposed Demarche on Human Rights."
4. Francisco J. Ruge-Murcia, Heterodox Inflation Stabilization in Argentina, Brazil and Israel, Centre de recherche et developpement en economique (C.R.D.E.) and Departement de sciences economiques, Universite de Montreal, May 1997.
5. Asad Ismi, "Cry for Argentina", Briarpatch, September 2000.
6. David Rockefeller, "Lo que pienso de Martinez de Hoz", Revista Gente, 6 April 1978.
7. Government of Argentina Ministry of Education, La Dictadura Militar en Argentina:24 de marzo de 1976-10 de diciembre de 1983, http://www.me.gov.ar/ efeme/24demarzo/dictaduni.html, 2001. Cavallo was indicted in 2006 by the Government of Argentina for knowingly conspiring with US banker Mulford in a 2001 debt swap that was declared "fraud" and cost Argentina tens of billions more in debt servicing to Mulford and other creditor banks. That swap led to the Argentine default later in 2001. Details in MercoPress, Former Argentine Leader Indicted for 2001 Bond Swap, http://www.mercopress.com. Details of the debt fraud are also well described in Jules Evans, Bankers Accused of Dirty Tricks in Argentina, http://www.euromoney.com. 28 January 2002.
8. Jules Evans, Bankers Accused of Dirty Tricks in Argentina, 28 January 2002, http://www.euromoney.com/publicl markets/banking! news/30jan02-1.html.
9. Canadian Market Research Centre Market Support Division (TCM) Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Market Brief The Biotechnology Market in Argentina: Government Support for Biotechnology, May 2003, http://www.ats.agr.gc.callatin/3nO_e.htm.
10. American Chemical Society, "Growing Evidence of Widespread GMO Contamination", Environmental Science & Technology: Environmental News, 1 December 1999, Vol. 33, No. 23, pp. 484 A-485 A.
11. Judy Carman, The Problem with the Safety of Roundup Ready Soybeans, Flinders University, Southern Australia, http://www.biotech-info.net. August 1999.
12. UK Soil Management Initiative, Frequently Asked Questions: Advantages and Disadvantages of Minimum Tillage, http://www.smLorg.uk.
13. Ibid.
14. Sue Branford, "Argentina's Bitter Harvest': New Scientist, 17 April 2004, pp. 40- 43. See also Organic Consumers Association, New Study Links Monsanto's Roundup to Cancer, 22 June 1999, Little Marais, MN.
15. Lillian Joensen and Stella Semino, "Argentina's Torrid Love Affair with the Soybean", Seedling, October 2004, p. 3. This is an excellent summary of the interplay between the foreign debt crisis, the IMF policies of privatization, and the transformation of Argentine agriculture by GMO seeds. The authors are with the Rural Reflection Group, in Argentina.
16. Ibid., p. 4.
17. Ibid., p. 3.
18. Lillian Joensen, op. cit., p. 3.
19. GRAIN, Monsanto's Royalty Grab in Argentina, http://www.grain.org, October 2004.
20. Sue Branford, "Why Argentina Can't Feed Itself," The Ecologist, October 2002. H. Paul, R. Steinbrecher, et aI., Argentina and GM Soybean: The Cost of Complying with US Pressure, EcoNexusBriefing, 2003, http://www.econexus.info. David Jones, "Argentina and GM Soy-Success at What Cost?" Saturday Star, South Africa, 19 June 2004.
21. Lillian Joensen, op.cit., p. 5.
22. Lennart Hardell, Miikael Eriksson, "A Case-Control Study of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and Exposure to Pesticides", Cancer, 15 March 1999. A joint USANew Zealand independent research organization, SoyOnlineService, states that contrary to widely promoted claims of health and dietary benefits, "[ s loy foods contain trypsin inhibitors that inhibit protein digestion and affect pancreatic function. In test animals, diets high in trypsin inhibitors led to stunted growth and pancreatic disorders. Soy foods increase the body's requirement for vitamin D, needed for strong bones and normal growth. Phytic acid in soy foods results in reduced bioavailabilty of iron and zinc which are required for the health and development of the brain and nervous system. Soy also lacks cholesterol, likewise essential for the development of the brain and nervous system. Megadoses of phytoestrogens in soy formula have been implicated in the current trend toward increasingly premature sexual development in girls and delayed or retarded sexual development in boys ... Soy isoflavones are phyto-endocrine disrupters. At dietary levels, they can prevent ovulation and stimulate the growth of cancer cells. Eating as little as 30 grams (about 4 tablespoons) of soy per day can result in hypothyroidism with symptoms of lethargy, constipation, weight gain and fatigue." in Myths & Truths About Soy Foods printed in SoyOnlineService.co.nz.
23. Cited in Royal Society of New Zealand, Genetic Engineering-an Overview, 4. Environmental Aspects of Genetic Engineering, in http://www.rsnz.org/topics/ biollgmover/4.php.
24. Genetic Concern, New Study Links Monsanto's Roundup to Cancer, June 1999, in http://www.biotech-info.net/glyphosate_cancer.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment