Can There Be Peace in a World with Gene Food?

by F. William Engdahl, Germany

F. William Engdahl, journalist and author, presented his latest book “Seeds of Destruction: The Geopolitics of Gene-ocide” at this year’s XIII «Mut zur Ethik» conference in Feldkirch, Austria. The book, which is already top of the best-seller list in Croatia, will soon be published in German and English. Engdahl’s alarming paper on the connection between Gene food and peace was an important contribution to the subject of the conference “What Does it Take to Bring About More Peace in the World?”. His conclusion was that unless international laws are respected there will be no peace.

My chosen title may strike some of you as funny. I can assure you it is anything but funny. Given what’s at stake today with the mass proliferation of genetically modified organisms or GMOs, in the entire human food chain, a state of war is pre-determined unless we act soon to change the situation. In presenting my new book, and it is an honor I can tell you to have it first in Croatian before it appears in even English or German, “Seeds of Destruction: The Geopolitics of Gene-ocide” I would like to make several points briefly.

The proliferation of GMO crops and food across the world today, by the strictures of the Nuremburg process, can and ought to be declared a “crime against humanity.” Until we recognize the actual nature of this, no peace at all will be possible, least of all a just peace for all people.

At the heart of this is the issue of genocide. I cite the United Nations’ 1948 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” The defining article is Article II:
Article II: …genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Article III: The following acts shall be punishable:

(a) Genocide;

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

(e) Complicity in genocide.

Article IV: Persons committing genocide…shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.

I would like to take up three cases dealing with use of Genetically Modified Organisms to illustrate why we must call for the enforcement of the international law against genocide and bring cases against governments, scientists and private corporations complicit in foisting GMO agriculture on our populations: First, GMO crops in Iraq. Then, how Argentina was overrun with GMO crops. Finally, I deal with a small San Diego biotech company.

1. Iraq gets American seeds of democracy

“The reason we are in Iraq is to plant the seeds of democracy so they flourish there and spread to the entire region of authoritarianism.” – George W. Bush

When George W. Bush spoke of planting the “seeds of democracy” few realized he might have had in mind Monsanto seeds. Following the US occupation of Iraq in May 2003, Paul Bremer III, a former Kissinger Associate, was Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority or CPA. Bremer held control over every area, reporting to Donald Rumsfeld.

Bremer issued 100 new binding laws to govern Iraq in April 2004. The US-mandated laws, or Orders as they were called, were to insure that the economy of Iraq would be remade along lines of a US-mandated “free-market” model. “The idea is to make this completely a free market,” said a spokesman for USAID’s Office of Iraq Reconstruction.

Order 81

Among the Bremer decrees was Order 81, “Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law”.

Order 81 gave holders of patents on certain plant varieties, all large foreign multinationals, absolute rights for 20 years over use of their seeds in Iraqi agriculture. The protected plant varieties were Genetically Modified (GMO) plants.

Iraqi seed treasure destroyed

Iraqis have farmed since approximately 8,000 B.C. and developed the seed variety for almost every variety of wheat used in the world today. They did this through a system of saving a share of seeds and replanting, developing new naturally resistant hybrid varieties through the new plantings. That now is de facto illegal under Order 81. For years, the Iraqis held samples of these precious natural seed varieties in a national seed bank, located in Abu Ghraib. Following the US occupation, the invaluable seed bank in Abu Ghraib vanished.

The CPA’s Order 81 turned the food future of Iraq over to global multinational private companies. The details of Order 81 were written for Paul Bremer by Monsanto Corporation, the world’s leading purveyor of GMO seeds and crops.

No seeds to plant

In the aftermath of the Iraq war, Iraqi farmers were forced to turn to their government Agriculture Ministry for new seeds. Order 81’s declared aim was “to ensure good quality seeds in Iraq and to facilitate Iraq’s accession into the World Trade Organization.” “Good quality” was defined by the occupation authority. As soon as Order 81 had been issued, USAID began delivering thousands of tons of US-origin “high-quality, certified wheat seed” for subsidized, initially near cost-free distribution through the Agriculture Ministry, to desperate Iraqi farmers. The USAID refused to allow independent scientists to determine whether the seed was GMO seed or not.

The purpose of Order 81 was to facilitate the establishment of a new seed market in Iraq, where transnational corporations could sell their seeds – genetically modified-- which farmers would have to purchase afresh every season. The old Iraqi constitution had prohibited private ownership of biological resources. The new US-imposed patent law introduced a system of monopoly rights over seeds.

“Let them eat…Pasta?”

Six kinds of wheat seeds were to be developed for Iraq. Three were to be used for farmers to grow wheat that is made into pasta…’ That meant that 50% of the grains being developed by the US in Iraq after 2004 were meant for export as pasta was a food foreign to the Iraqi diet.

In spring 2004 as Order 81 was promulgated by Bremer’s CPA, supporters of the radical young cleric Moqtada al Sadr were protesting the closing of their newspaper, al Hawza, by US military police. The CPA accused al Hawza of publishing “false articles” that could “pose the real threat of violence.” As an example, it cited an article that claimed Bremer was, “pursuing a policy of starving the Iraqi people to make them preoccupied with procuring their daily bread so they do not have the chance to demand their political and individual freedoms.”

2. Don’ Cry for me, Argentina

No country has been so radically transformed in its agriculture as Argentina.

In the 1970’s Argentina had a remarkable living standard. The agriculture system was diverse, productive and dominated by small family farms. Argentine beef quality was so high in the 1970’s that it rivalled that of Texas beef. The rich land and farm culture produced a large surplus beyond domestic food needs. Government farm subsidies were also absent and farmer debts were minimal. That all changed with the 1980’s debt crisis.

By 1989, a new phase in the economic destruction, similar to the process described vividly by John Perkins in his book, The Economic Hit-Man, came with President Carlos Menem, a close family friend of George Bush and David Rockefeller. Menem transformed Argentina’s agriculture into a new monoculture for export, arguing export of GM soybeans was needed to pay the foreign debt.

In 1991, Argentina became a secret experimental laboratory to develop application of Genetically Engineered crops for agriculture production. Menem created an Advisory Commission on Biotechnology, to oversee the granting of licenses for field trials for GMO varieties of corn, sunflowers, cotton, wheat and especially soybeans. There was no public debate from either the government or the Commission on whether GMO crops were safe or not. GM crops were not yet growing widely anywhere else.

The Commission met in secret, and never made public its findings. They acted as agent for foreign GMO seed multinationals. This was not surprising as the Commission members came from Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences. In 1996, Menem granted a license to Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis Missouri, the world’s largest producer of gene-manipulated soybean seeds, a strategically important animal feed for world agriculture.

With the introduction of GM soybean seeds to Argentine agriculture after 1996, large foreign companies such as Cargill, foreign insurance companies, and corporate interests such as Seaboard Corp., began wholesale buying of now ultra-cheap (in dollar terms) Argentine farmland. Argentina’s land was being converted into a vast industrial seed production factory.

As a consequence of the economic crisis, millions of acres of prime farmland were put up for auction by the banks. The only buyers with dollars to invest were foreign corporations or private persons. Small peasant farmers were offered pennies for their lands, or when refusing, were sometimes driven off by terror or police force. By 2001 the largest landowner in Argentina was the New York billionaire hedge fund speculator, George Soros through his Argentine holding company, Adeco Agropecuaria.

To maximize profit, huge Kansas-style expanses of land were built up 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. A once-productive family farm-based agriculture system was thrust backwards into a neo-feudal state dominated by a handful of powerful, reactionary wealthy Latifundista landowners.

The GM soya revolution in Argentina completely transformed the agriculture economy in less than a decade. In the 1970’s soybeans had not been a factor. By 2004, after eight years of Monsanto, more than 14 million GM soybean hectares had been planted. Large combines had cleared forests, including precious rainforest in the Amazon. Agricultural diversity was rapidly being turned into a monoculture.

For more than a century, Argentina farm land, especially the pampas, had been filled with wide fields of corn and wheat amid green pastures grazed with herds of cattle. Farmers rotated between crops and cattle to preserve soil quality. With soybeans, the land became a monoculture, with the soy crops leeching away vital soil nutrients meaning the crops required ever more chemical fertilizers from Monsanto. The large beef and dairy herds which had roamed freely for decades on the grasslands, now were forced into cramped US-style mass cattle feedlots to make way for the more lucrative soybeans. Argentine agro-ecologist, Walter Pengue, a specialist in the impact of GM soybeans, predicted, “If we continue in this path, perhaps within 50 years the land will not produce anything at all.”

By 2004 almost half or some 48% of all agricultural land in the country was dedicated to soybean crops, and 97% of the beans were Monsanto GMO soybeans. Argentine dairy farms had been reduced in half between 1988 and 2003. Milk had to be imported for the first time, from Uruguay at far higher prices. As Soybeans forced hundreds of thousands off the land, poverty and malnutrition soared.

In the 1970’s Argentina enjoyed one of the highest living standards in the world. The percent of its population officially below the poverty line in 1970 was 5%. By 1998 the percent living below the poverty line had gone to 30% and by 2002 to 51%.

Malnutrition, unheard of in earlier Argentina, rose by 2003 to levels estimated at between 11% and 17% of the total population of 37 million. Amid the drastic national economic crisis arising from the state default, Argentines found they were no longer able to rely, as traditionally, on survival on the land from small plots. The land had been overrun by mass GMO soya acreages, and blocked even to ordinary survival crops.

Feudal large landowners began mass deforestation to make way for wholesale GMO soy crops. Peasant farm communities were told suddenly that their land belonged to someone else. If they refused to leave willingly, often armed groups would steal their cattle, burn their crops and threaten more violence. Within several years more than 300,000 peasants and small farmers had been driven off the land.

As the GMO soybean revolution destroyed the traditional agriculture production, Argentinians faced a dramatic change in available diet. The new soybean monoculture agriculture left the population desperately vulnerable when the economic depression hit in 2002. Hunger was spreading across the land. Fearing food riots, the national government responded, aided by Monsanto and the giant international soybean users such as Cargill, Nestle, Kraft Foods. Free food charity meals from soya were given out to the hungry to foster wider consumption of soybeans, even though the soybeans were grown as animal feed.

In the countryside, the impact of soybean monoculture was even more horrendous. Traditional farming communities close to the huge new soybean lands were seriously affected by aerial spraying of the soybean crops with pesticides, Monsanto’s glyphosate, Roundup Ready. In Loma Senes, peasants growing mixed vegetables for their own consumption found all their crops destroyed by the neighboring aerial spraying from Roundup Ready, a pesticide that kills all plants other than specially gene-modified “herbicide-resistant” Monsanto crops.

A study made in 2003 showed that the spraying had not only destroyed their crops. Their chickens had died and other animals, especially horses were adversely affected. Humans contracted violent nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting and skin lesions from the herbicide sprayed. Reports were of animals born near GMO soybean fields with deformities, of deformed bananas and sweet potatoes, of lakes suddenly filled with dead fish. Rural families reported their children developed grotesque blotches on their bodies after airborne crop spraying in nearby soya fields.

3. A greenhouse full of spermicidal corn

In San Diego, a small, privately-owned biotech company, Epicyte, held a press conference in September 2001. Epicyte reported that they had successfully created the ultimate GMO crop-- contraceptive corn. To do it they had taken antibodies from women with a rare condition known as immune infertility, isolated the genes that regulated the manufacture of those infertility antibodies, and, using genetic engineering techniques, had inserted the genes into ordinary corn plants.

“We have a hothouse filled with corn plants that make anti-sperm antibodies,” boasted Epicyte President, Mitch Hein.

Epicyte had just signed a research and licensing agreement with GMO giant Dow Chemical Company, former producer of Agent Orange in Vietnam, one of the three agribusiness genetic seed giants in the US. The purpose of that joint venture, they announced at the time, was to combine Epicyte’s technological breakthrough with Dow AgroSciences” “strength in the genetic engineering of crops.” Epicyte had also signed a collaboration with Syngenta, a Swiss GMO seed giant. CBS News in October 2002 reported that the United States Department of Agriculture had also financed field trials around the country for growing drug and drug compounds in various crops, including support for Epicyte’s spermicidal corn technology.

Epicyte needed only 100 acres of corn land to grow the special GM spermicidal corn producing a vastly greater quantity of antibody for the spermicide at a cost of a mere few million dollars, a cost reduction of some 90%. Epicyte presented their GMO spermidical corn as a contribution to the world “over-population” problem. They estimated the commercial availability in 2006 or 2007.

After the press release, the discussion of Epicyte’s breakthrough vanished. The company itself was taken over in May 2004 by a private Pittsboro, North Carolina biotech company. Biolex acquired Epicyte Pharmaceutical. Nothing more was heard in any media about the development of spermicidal corn. The theme vanished from view.

Informed reports were that the research continued on a secret basis because of the politically explosive impact of corn whose consumption would make human male sperm sterile. Mexican farmers were already in an uproar over the unauthorized spread of genetically engineered corn into the heart of the Mexican corn seed treasure in Oaxaetwa One could imagine the impact were corn, which was the dietary staple of most Mexicans, suddenly analyzed to contain Epicyte’s spermicidal antibodies. “Some spermicidal corn on the cob, or perhaps a killer tortilla, mister?” Or what about that next bowl of corn flakes?

From Terminator suicide seeds to genetically modified corn which was spermicidal, it was soon becoming clearer why powerful elite circles in the United States, committed neo-Malthusians, backed introduction of genetically modified seeds into the world food chain as a strategic priority. That elite included not only the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and other foundations tied to the private family fortunes of the wealthiest American families. It included the US State Department, the National Security Council, the US Department of Agriculture, as well as the leading policy circles of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and agencies of the United Nations including WHO and FAO.

Population reduction and genetically engineered crops were part of the same broad strategy: drastic reduction of the world’s population. Some, especially in and around the Catholic Church, and minority organizations in the US or foreign countries, had the courage to call it by its true name: genocide—the systematic elimination of entire population groups as a matter of wilful policy, promulgated under the name of “solving the world hunger problem.”

The US and UK government backing for the spread of genetically modified seeds globally, was in fact the implementation of the policy of the Rockefeller Foundation since the 1930’s, when it funded Nazi eugenics research: Mass-scale, cheap population reduction- racial purity through eugenics.

In 1925, Britain’s Winston Churchill, a virulent racist, commented favourably about potentials for biological warfare, writing about “pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast…Blight to destroy crops. Anthrax to slay horses and cattle…” In 1996, CNN founder and billionaire, Ted Turner, whose foundation donated $1 billion to the UN for “population control,” declared that a world with no more than 225 million persons would be ideal. This was an ideology of ultra-wealthy, powerful and paranoid people. Unfortunately, they exercised enormous influence in the normal world.

The biological weapons and genetic engineering research project, Sunshine Project, reported, “researchers in the USA, UK, Russia and Germany have genetically engineered biological weapons agents, building new deadly strains…Genetic engineering can be used to broaden the classical bio-weapons arsenal…” Back in the 1980’s around the time the Rockefeller Foundation launched its major genetic engineering rice project, the start of the Gene Revolution, the US Pentagon quietly initiated military applications of biotechnology.

Significantly in the context of GMO spermicides and other developments of the Gene Revolution, the Bush Administration refused in 2001 to accept an international ban on bio-weapons development, the legally binding Biological and Toxic Weapons Protocol, leading to collapse of the international talks. A 2004 study by the British Medical Association concluded the world was only a few years away from “terrifying biological weapons capable of killing only people of specific ethnic groups,” citing advances in “genetic weapons technology.”

“We’re tempted to say that nobody in their right mind would ever use these things,” remarked Stanford University biophysicist, Professor Steven Block, a man with years of personal experience with classified Pentagon and Government biological research. “But,” Block added, “not everybody is in their right mind…”A world where four private companies hold life and death control over our food security is a world where peace is impossible. I encourage you to read and discuss the book.