As a senior official of the State Department and protégé of the Rockefellers, George Kennan, in a memo in 1948 reminded his colleagues that “…we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.’’
The realisation of the talked-about American Century was eventually handed to Henry Kissinger, a life-long practitioner of geopolitics, whose closeness to the Rockefellers made him the symbol of the American raw realpolitik. Serving both as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser in 1974, he was alleged to have penned the controversial plan for America to use oil and food to dominate the world. In his secret memo titled, ‘’Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests,’’ he declared, ‘’Control oil and you control the nations; control food and you control the people.’’ In other words, for Kissinger, besides black gold, the US needed to fully control the daily provision of bread in such a way that it could control the world’s population, particularly population growth in developing countries, since otherwise developing countries’ population growth and economic development would pose a threat to the US access to their strategic raw materials needed for keeping the US growing.
But to control global food security in a way that controls the world’s population, the Rockefellers sought to control biology, the very science of life itself, and ‘’its applications in plant and agriculture.’’ It soon became clear that to bring the world’s very basis of human survival under its sway should require the family to dominate the research and development of Genetically Modified Organisms. That’s why the story of GMO is synonymous with the story of the rigorous pursuit of American ascendency alongside the Rockefeller Foundation eugenics (increasing the quality of “superior” human species, while reducing the quantity of “inferior” beings).
That is why the creation of Rockefeller’s multinational agribusiness, which financed the agricultural ‘’Green Revolution,’’ even when it expanded the dependency of the agricultural sector of developing countries on Rockefeller controlled petro-chemical fertilisers and petroleum products, was only laying the foundation to what is now the Rockefeller-led genetically modified crops, seeds, and livestock. Like the earlier Rockefeller oil monopoly built on vertical integration with vengeance, the same vertical integration has since driven the Rockefeller agribusiness with only four giant chemical multinational companies — Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, and Syngenta — the global players controlling patents on the very basic food products that the world depends on for its daily nutrition.
Yes, the green revolution was horrendous for having converted most family farmlands into industrial agricultural production, for emptying the countryside of its valuable natural and human resources, and for devastating local agro-biodiversity thanks to excessive pesticides. But, as horrendous as the green revolution could be described, it was only there setting the stage for the most vicious revolution — genetic engineering of plants and animals entirely from new genes and combination of genes made in the laboratory by bypassing sexual reproduction itself. Jumping the natural species barriers not only makes the process not only dangerously imprecise, uncontrollable, and unreliable as it easily damages and scrambles the host genome, it also makes the process entirely unpredictable. But, what makes gene manipulation so horrifying is the fact that despite the dangers it poses, and the serious warnings from respected research scientists against how recombinant DNA (rDNA) research could result in viruses and toxins unintentionally created in the process of introducing new genes into a plant’s cell, the US government and the Rockefeller Foundation have yet to recognise the urgency to fully subject GMO to rigorous regulation let alone mandating the labeling of GMO foods.
What makes the whole thing excessively dangerous is that with the absence of labelling, GMO plants and animals seem to resemble conventional ones, and in effort to keep it that way, the US government and the Rockefeller Foundation can’t stop insisting that GMO plants and animals are ‘’substantially equivalent’’ to the ordinary plants and animals of the same variety such as ordinary corn, soybeans, rice, cotton, beef, etc. How could shoppers going to a local supermarket be assured, for example, that the beef or pork they’re buying is not GMO food? The total disregard to the fact that genetically engineered plant and animal breeding differ from traditional methods in very important aspects, could be unbelievable. It is one thing for a government to support long-term laboratory research through science grants. It’s quite another to force the opening of developing countries’ markets for the flooding of untested, potentially cancer-causing and (racially targeted reproductive-killer foods such as spermicidal corn).
First, genes from one organism could be extracted and recombined with those of another using rDNA technology without either organism having to be of the same species. Second, removing the requirement for species reproductive compatibility, new genetic combinations could be produced in a highly accelerated way. That genetic engineering’s introduction of a foreign organism into a plant in an imprecise and unpredictable process could be real, but to be ignored could show an unconcerned government. But how could such a well informed government unbelievably insist so, ignoring the qualitative internal alterations that accompany genetically engineered plant? What could be the reason for not requiring biochemical or toxological tests, and for not requiring regulatory measures in genetically engineered varieties?
But what could have been the reason for allowing giant agribusiness to have their way, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence of potential health damage to the population? In other words, what could have caused the US government and the Rockefeller Foundation that against numerous warnings from leading scientists about the irreparable damage to the health of the entire world, including reproductive risks, particularly targeting Asian and African population control, which some leading scientists increasingly believe to be an impending racial genocide? Should it be as it is being argued by another school of thought that having the powerful Rockefeller Foundation behind it makes it difficult to for the US government to oppose the dangerous GMO-altered food crops and their proliferation worldwide?
It remains difficult to understand why such Washington policy contradiction, especially argument that genetically engineered foods are ‘’substantially equivalent’’ to their traditional varieties, and for that reason they should not be regulated beyond their conventional varieties; and then same Washington turned around to argue that the same ‘’substantially equivalent’’ plants and crops should be granted patent rights for being ‘’substantially transformed.’’ But how could Washington justify the argument that genetically modified products should not be labeled because they are ‘’substantially equivalent,’’ and then contradict the earlier argument that allowed US agribusiness to claim exclusive patent rights on their genetically modified organisms or seeds, on the ground of introducing a foreign DNA into the genome of a plant, uniquely altered the plant? On what moral grounds could the Rockefeller-controlled agribusiness claim patent rights, forgetting that it’s the Rockefeller Foundation that claims that the pursuit of GMO revolution is simply to feed the hungry world? In other words, if the US could argue against regulating and labeling genetically engineered foods for the reason that they are not substantially different, what are justifications for demanding WTO to act as the policeman, enforcing TRIPS?
Little wonder in their desperation to force their GMO seeds down the throats of developing countries around the world, besides persuasion, bribery, coercion, and illegal smuggling into countries, the deployment of the World Trade Oorganisation, the State Department, the CIA, USAID as well as the World Bank and IMF have been there for the Rockefeller-led gene multinationals to go around intimidating governments neither oppose GMO foods, plants, seeds, and livestock nor refuse to allow US multinational gene companies to impose some draconian patent rights and royalties. Isn’t it in the justification of GMO as America’s newest weapon of imperialism, that led Catherine Bertini, a protégé of the Rockefeller and formerly US Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, to arrogantly say, ‘’Food is power! We use it to change behaviour. Some may call that bribery. We do not apologise’’?
Speaking recently at the 53rd Annual General Meeting of the Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mine and Agriculture in Kano, Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, said, ‘’… Syngenta, Monsanto Company and DuPont Company have indicated interest in investing in Nigeria. In fact, in June 2013, Syngenta plans to set up an office in the country.’’
Was Adesina speaking out of ignorance of what these companies historically represented, or as a co-conspirator? Is he not aware that the presence of these GMO agribusiness giants in Nigeria would, as in developing countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia, Poland and Mexico lead to transfer of food production from the hands of millions of independent family farmers to the agribusiness giants; with local farmers becoming feudal serfs working for the GMO multinational agribusiness? What about telling his audience the story of Monsanto GMO ‘’Roundup Ready’’ soybeans, which while temporarily increasing the GMO soybeans’ yields, tend to make it impossible for conventional soybeans to be grown again in the soil since the insertion of Agrobacterium sp strain CP4 into the GMO soybean’s genome coupled with the spraying of non-selective herbicide in the presence of glyphosate has, in locking up the soil for Monsanto Roundup Ready soybeans, also permanently sterilised the soil?
To be concluded next week