Food Production & Population Reduction

7/27/2009

Heads up on the new report setting the foundation for population collapse as a climate change issue...

This is the stark warning from the biggest single report to look at the future of the planet – obtained by The Independent on Sunday ahead of its official publication next month. Backed by a diverse range of leading organisations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation, the 2009 State of the Future report runs to 6,700 pages and draws on contributions from 2,700 experts around the globe. Its findings are described by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, as providing "invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society".

The impact of the global recession is a key theme, with researchers warning that global clean energy, food availability, poverty and the growth of democracy around the world are at "risk of getting worse due to the recession". The report adds: "Too many greedy and deceitful decisions led to a world recession and demonstrated the international interdependence of economics and ethics."

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/the-planets-future-climate-change-will-cause-civilisation-to-collapse-1742759.html

The economic driver...

I believe one of the goals of the swine flu vaccine is depopulation. Perhaps it is the goal of a swine flu epidemic as well, whether bio-warfare or hype around a flu season.

These days, I keep remembering my sense of urgency leaving the Bush Administration in 1991. We had to do something to turn around the economy and gather real assets behind retirement plans and the social safety net. If not, Americans could find themselves deeply out on a limb. I felt my family and friends were in danger. They did not share my concern. They had a deep faith in the system.

As my efforts to find ways of reengineering government investment in communities failed to win political support, Washington and Wall Street moved forward with a debt bubble and globalization that was horrifying in its implications for humanity.

Overwhelmed by what was happening, I estimated the end result. My simple calculations guessed that we were going to achieve economic sustainability on Earth by depopulating down to a population of approximately 500 million people from our then current global population of 6 billion. I was a portfolio strategist used to looking at numbers from a very high level. Those around me could not fathom how all the different threads I was integrating could lead to such a conclusion. To me, we had to have radical change in how we governed resources or depopulate. It was a mathematical result.

A year later, in 1999, a very capable investment and portfolio strategist asked me if he could come have a private lunch with me in Washington. We sat in a posh restaurant across from the Capitol. He said quietly that he had calculated out where the derivatives and debt bubble combined with globalization were going. The only logical conclusion he could reach was that significant depopulation was going to occur. He said his estimates led to an approximate population of 500 million. I said very quietly, “that’s my estimate too.” I will never forget the look of sadness that crossed his face. I was amazed to find someone else who understood.

It turns out that we were not alone. Sir James Goldsmith had warned of the consequences of GATT in 1994. He described the process under way, involving the loss of land and livelihood for 3 billion people, “…This is the establishment against the rest of society.” Voices were rising around the planet as hardships exploded from global economic warfare and industrialization of agriculture.

As trillions of dollars were shifted out of America by legal and illegal means to reinvest in Asia and emerging markets and to build a global military empire, we left a sovereign nation economic model behind. Finally, the expense and corruption of empire resulted in bailouts of $12-14 trillion, delivering a new financial war chest to the people leading the financial engineering. Now we have exploding unemployment, an exploding federal deficit, an Inspector General for the TARP bailout program predicting that the ultimate bailout cost could rise to $23.7 trillion and a Congressional Budget Director who is concluding that we can no longer afford the social safety net.

That is, unless you change the actuarial assumptions in the budget – like life expectancy. Lowering immune systems and increasing toxicity levels combined with poor food, water and terrorizing stress will help do the trick. Review the history of vaccines rushed into production without proper testing and peer review - it is clear about the potential side effects. In addition, a plague can so frighten and help control people that they will accept the end of their current benefits (and the resulting implications to life expectancy) without objection. And a plague with proper planning can be highly profitable. Whatever the truth of what swine flu and related vaccines are, it can be used as a way to keep control in a situation that is quickly shifting out of control.

In short, an epidemic can be used to offset the inflation of capital with increasing deflation of the value and income of labor and continual demand destruction. It is a great deal of time and money spent on something that will not help build a real economy. The disinformation and control opportunities are profound. They keep the slow burn going. It is the next, meaner face of “the establishment against the rest of society.”

That’s what I believe. I am not an expert. I have no case worth presenting in a court of law. There are hundreds of hours of research on the swine flu and related vaccines that I have not done and I am not going to do. It is just what I believe, listening to the people I respect, and in no small part because if you map out all the financial ecosystems around the issue and people and incentives involved, it seems to me to be the logical conclusion.

Now, if this sounds ludicrous to you, it may be because you do not appreciate how dark the culture has become that is now in charge. Do you have any idea how impossibly frustrating it is to manage a highly centralized system in which the vast majority of people lack any responsibility to ensure that the whole thing works? Everyone wants their free lunch and there are no real markets or democracy to force accountability or a shared intelligence. Force works. Force has increasingly become the way to achieve most everything. Using force is a lot easier that living with rising risk and the costs of subsidizing an aging population.

So the question for you and me is “what do we do?” Are we going to take a vaccine? Are we going to allow our children to be vaccinated? Will we have a choice? How can we organize to make sure that we do? Is self-quarantine a practical option? How would we prepare for it?

What you believe is your responsibility. The time has come to build time into Summer schedules to research options, discuss them with those you trust and make informed decisions about what you believe and what actions you intend to take under a variety of scenarios.

I don’t have the answers yet. Somehow, I believe we can find them together. And while we do, let’s remember to pray for the love of humanity to be rekindled and nourished in each and every heart.

http://solari.com/blog/?p=3532

More foundation....

In Montreal this week, the Sixth Annual Conference on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioprocessing was using climate change as a fundraising exercise. “The biotech industry is seeking massive public and private investment for their untested technologies, whose health and environmental impacts have not been fully examined.”

The Australian government has given $38.2 million over two years to establish an “Enabling Technologies Strategy.” This is to help promote biotechnology, nanotechnology and ICT to solve our pressing environmental and other problems. Dr Craig Johnson of The Enabling Technologies Policy Section of DTI has released a briefing paper and wants to hear by 24th July if you wish to be part of direct consultation or put in a written submission by 7th August. Contact him at craig.johnson@innovation.gov.au.

MADGE heard about this from a third party three days ago. How can anyone comment in such a short time frame and when virtually no one knows it is happening?

Meanwhile, in Victoria Hexima Ltd has received a grant of $1.3 million to use biotechnology to develop GM cotton. The rational is this will allow “mitigation and adaptation to climate change.”

In fact, effective action over climate change could be undermined by patent law. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) is currently deciding how patents on plants will be enforced. At risk is indigenous peoples control over the plants their cultures developed and protected. If strict rules are enforced this “would lead to a loss of biological diversity and traditional knowledge, and would ultimately limit the abilities of poor communities to adapt to climate change through, for instance, sharing climate-resilient plant varieties.”

The beneficiaries would be the patent holders. The major holders of patents over plants likely to be useful in climate change are big multinational seed, chemical and pharmaceutical companies. Their names should be familiar to digest readers: Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer and BASF.

So is the dismal future predicted the only one possible and is technology the only saviour?

Numerous studies show that organic farming can feed Africa. Production has doubled or trebled when organic methods are used. The reason it is not more widely adopted, cited in this article, is:

“Resistance to organic farming is fuelled by two factors – vested interests and professional ignorance. Companies support methods that help to sell their products. But who benefits from organics? Not companies, but farmers and their customers, as well as the environment.

“Fertiliser, for example, is a by-product of the petro-chemical industry. Billions of dollars have been invested in these industries. Organic farmers do not buy from these multinationals, so of course there will be resistance from the multinationals to organic farming.

“Professionally, those who have been trained in our (South African) colleges and universities have been told that fertilisers, poisons and GE [genetically engineered] seeds are scientific and progressive, while ‘old-fashioned’ methods are unscientific.”

However organic farming in Uganda not only provides food for local communities but also earns $22 million in export earnings annually.

The potential for sustainable farming is reinforced in the book “Food rebellions – Crisis and the hunger for justice” by Eric Holt-Gimenez and Raj Patel. It details how forty years ago the global south had yearly trade surpluses of $1 billion in agricultural products. After decades of development they now import $11 billion of food a year. “International trade agreements opened up the dumping of cheap, subsidized grain from the North, putting local farmers out of business, devastating local crop diversity, and consolidating control of the world’s food system in the hands of multinational corporations.”

http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/shock-doctrine-vs-organic-agriculture/

The current agriculture system is locked in a death spiral. It works like this -

Plants absorb nutrients and minerals from soil. Soil gets depleted. Crop production declines. In an effort to get more crop production fertilizer is applied. Consistent and perpetual application of chemical fertilizer degrades the physical structure of the soil (continues to leech out all the trace minerals with no replacement) and destroys the microbial activity of the soil. As the microbes are killed off the plants lose ability to absorb trace minerals. Deficiencies in trace minerals create unhealthy plants that are more susceptible to disease and insects.

High nitrogen artificial fertilizers can increase yields in some cases (temporarily) of certain grains, however the amino acid content of the protein is actually adversely affected. For example in wheat and barley grown with synthetic fertilizers are less nutritious even though the total protein weight may be higher since critical amino acids are missing or reduced in quantity as compared to organically grown (USDA Researcher).

Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers increase the amounts of toxic nitrates in dietary intake. According to the National Research Council, 6 of the top 7 and 9 of the top 15, foods with oncogenic (cancer causing) risk are produce items with high nitrate content from pesticides or nitrogen fertilizers. A 12 year study comparing organically grown versus chemically grown showed that chemically grown foods had 16 times more nitrate (a carcinogen).

Vitamin C content decreases in crops as the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers increase (Soil Scientist, USDA).

http://www.natureswayresources.com/resource/infosheets/organicfertilizers.html

Worms are relatively large creatures which produce tiny live micro-organisms that actually "eat" rocks! These live micro-organisms eat away at the surfaces of rocks and particles of rock dust, and convert those minerals into an organic form which can be absorbed by trees and plants.

http://www.oralchelation.com/clarks/index.html

The industry reacts by creating stronger pesticides (which further destroy soil microbiology which further degrades plant absorption of trace minerals) and genetically modified organisms or GMO seeds. Pesticides kill the worms. Go out in any farm field and dig for worms. The organic certification is more marketing than anything else. Dig in an organic field for worms...

The general principle of producing a GMO is to add new genetic material into an organism's genome. This is called genetic engineering and was made possible through the discovery of DNA and the creation of the first recombinant bacteria in 1973, i.e., E .coli expressing a Salmonella gene.[4] This led to concerns in the scientific community about potential risks from genetic engineering, which were thoroughly discussed at the Asilomar Conference. One of the main recommendations from this meeting was that government oversight of recombinant DNA research should be established until the technology was deemed safe.[5][6] Herbert Boyer then founded the first company to use recombinant DNA technology, Genentech, and in 1978 the company announced creation of an E. coli strain producing the human protein insulin.[7]

In 1986, field tests of bacteria genetically engineered to protect plants from frost damage (ice-minus bacteria) at a small biotechnology company called Advanced Genetic Sciences of Oakland, California, were repeatedly delayed by opponents of biotechnology. In the same year, a proposed field test of a microbe genetically engineered for a pest resistance protein by Monsanto Company was dropped.

To date the broadest application of GMO technology is patent-protected food crops which are resistant to commercial herbicides or are able to produce pesticidal proteins from within the plant, or stacked trait seeds, which do both. The largest share of the GMO crops planted globally are owned by Monsanto Company, according to the company. In 2007, Monsanto’s trait technologies were planted on 246 million acres (1,000,000 km2) throughout the world, a growth of 13 percent from 2006.

In the corn market, Monsanto’s triple-stack corn – which combines Roundup Ready 2 weed control technology with YieldGard Corn Borer and YieldGard Rootworm insect control – is the market leader in the United States. U.S. corn farmers planted more than 17 million acres (69,000 km2) of triple-stack corn in 2007, and it is estimated the product could be planted on 45 million to 50 million acres (200,000 km2) by 2010. In the cotton market, Bollgard II with Roundup Ready Flex was planted on nearly 3 million acres (12,000 km2) of U.S. cotton in 2007.

Rapid growth in the total area planted is measurable by Monsanto's growing share. On January 3, 2008, Monsanto Company (MON.N) said its quarterly profit nearly tripled, helped by strength in its corn seed and herbicide businesses, and raised its 2008 forecast.[8]

Some critics have raised the concern that conventionally-bred crop plants can be cross-pollinated (bred) from the pollen of modified plants. Pollen can be dispersed over large areas by wind, animals and insects. In 2007, the U.S. Department of Agriculture fined Scotts Miracle-Gro $500,000 when modified genetic material from creeping bentgrass, a new golf-course grass Scotts had been testing, was found within close relatives of the same genus (Agrostis)[56] as well as in native grasses up to 21 km (13 miles) away from the test sites, released when freshly cut grass was blown by the wind.[39]

GM proponents point out that outcrossing, as this process is known, is not new. The same thing happens with any new open-pollinated crop variety—newly introduced traits can potentially cross out into neighboring crop plants of the same species and, in some cases, to closely related wild relatives.

An often cited controversy is a "Technology Protection" technology dubbed 'Terminator'.[57] This yet-to-be-commercialized technology would allow the production of first generation crops that would not generate seeds in the second generation because the plants yield sterile seeds. The patent for this so-called "terminator" gene technology is owned by Delta and Pine Land Company and the United States Department of Agriculture. Delta and Pine Land was bought by Monsanto Company in August 2006. Similarly, the hypothetical Trait-specific Genetic Use Restriction Technology, also known as 'Traitor' or 'T-gut', requires application of a chemical to genetically modified crops to reactivate engineered traits.[58] This technology is intended both to limit the spread of genetically engineered plants, and to require farmers to pay yearly to reactivate the genetically engineered traits of their crops. Traitor is under development by companies including Monsanto and AstraZeneca.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_organism

Genetic engineering can cause unexpected mutations in an organism, which can create new and higher levels of toxins in foods. (Inose 1995, Mayeno 1994)

Transgenic foods may mislead consumers with counterfeit freshness. A luscious-looking, bright red genetically engineered tomato could be several weeks old and of little nutritional worth.

Genetic engineers use antibiotic-resistance genes to mark genetically engineered cells. This means that genetically engineered crops contain genes which confer resistance to antibiotics. These genes may be picked up by bacteria which may infect us. (New Scientist 1999)

Without labels, our public health agencies are powerless to trace problems of any kind back to their source. The potential for tragedy is staggering.

http://www.safe-food.org/-issue/dangers.html

Dr. Arpad Pusztai, PhD, FRSE, "one of the few genuinely independent scientists specializing in plant genetics and animal feeding studies" (OCA, 2005), worked for the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1998. During his employment, he was commissioned to study potatoes "fitted" or genetically modified (GM) with a lectin gene from Galanthus Nivalis, a European plant. He inserted the gene into the potatoes himself, then fed the GM potatoes to lab rats in order to document the effects. What he found was that these potatoes had damaged the organs of the rats and depressed their immune systems. On August 10, 1998, Dr. Pusztai appeared on a British documentary and issued a warning to the public about the inadequate testing of GM foods, and revealed his test results. For his candor, Dr. Pusztai was accused of incompetence, and forced to retire.

http://www.naturalnews.com/023238_GMO_food_Monsanto.html

The FDA has claimed it was not aware of any information showing that GM crops were different “in any meaningful or uniform way,” from non-GMO crops and therefore didn’t require testing. But 44,000 internal FDA documents made public by a lawsuit show that this was a complete lie. The overwhelming consensus among the FDA’s own scientists was that GM foods were quite different and could lead to unpredictable and hard-to-detect allergens, toxins, new diseases and nutritional problems. It turns out that FDA scientists, who had urged superiors to require long-term studies, were ignored. See, Failed Government Regulation.

http://www.seedsofdeception.com/Public/AboutGeneticallyModifiedFoods/index.cfm

Tie that in with Agenda 21 and Codex Alimentarius for a conspiratorial view of history and the future (see respective posts)...back to the topic...

Cells live on the very elements of nature...the 100+ elements found under "periodic table of elements." If the soil is barren of these elements, then the food produced from the soil cannot contain them, and thus your cells will not be fed properly. Our food has been losing essential elements which the cells in our bodies need to survive...

Minerals are essential for good health. The body utilizes over 80 minerals for maximum function. Because our plants and soils are so nutrient depleted, even if we eat the healthiest foods, we are not getting all the minerals we need.

Evidence of mineral malnutrition are various minor and serious health conditions such as energy loss, premature aging, diminished senses, and degenerative diseases like osteoporosis, heart disease, and cancer.

99 Percent of the American population is deficient in minerals. A marked deficiency in any important mineral will result in disease.

"Minerals in the soil control the metabolism of cells in plants, animals and man. All of life will be either healthy or unhealthy according to the fertility of the soil." from 'Man the Unknown', 1912, Dr. Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize winner.

Even earlier, in 1894, Julius Hensel, in his work on the subject, 'Bread from Stones', poignantly remarked that "Our most optimistic expectations are no less than the realization of an old dream. What will fertilizing with rock dust accomplish? It will turn stones into bread...make barren regions (fruitful) (and) feed the hungry."

Our own government admitted the true state of affairs as early as 1936 in U.S. Senate Document #264. "Did you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until the depleted soils from which our foods come are brought back into proper mineral balance? 99% of the American people are deficient in these minerals, a marked deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in disease. Lacking vitamins, the system can make some use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless."

Does anyone wonder about the health of the nation? Does wellness come from a laboratory in the form of red and green pills? Can removing a diseased organ change the health of the whole being? Will radiation or chemotherapy provide the critical missing elements to living cells?

"Sick soils make for sick plants, and sick plants when consumed make for sick animals and people." says Eric Curlee, 'American Survival Guide', June 96.

Because our soils are depleted of minerals so then all the foodstuffs grown on them are depleted also. When we eat depleted foods day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year, then we also develop depleted bodies with serious mineral deficiencies. These deficiencies cause starvation in our organs and tissues resulting in malfunctions and breakdowns called disease.

http://www.northupfamily.com/Farms/Colloids.htm

We are in a death spiral. IMO the only feasible way out is to take control and grow our own food. Learn how to create your own "Terra Preta" soil that will last thousands of years. Once your soil microbiology is healthy and vibrant all you will need is occasional rock dust with full spectrum trace mineral content. See my regenerating soil post...

We are being systematically poisoned from a multitude of angles - everything from toothpaste and water to pharma pills and food pesticides. The fire proofing spray for the new plastic pallets is toxic. The field grown foods have little nutritional value and the hydroponic foods have even less. Some doctors claim every disease known to man can be traced to inadequacies of particular trace elements.

7/21/2009

#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

Sources:

Independent/UK, May 22, 2005
Title: Revealed: “Health Fears Over Secret Study in GM Food”
Author: Geoffrey Lean

Organic Consumers Association website, June 2,2005
Title: “Monsanto's GE Corn Experiments on Rats Continue to Generate Global Controversy”
Authors: GM Free Cymru

Independent/UK, January 8, 2006
Title: GM: New Study Shows Unborn Babies Could Be Harmed”
Author: Geoffrey Lean

Le Monde and Truthout, February 9, 2006
Title: “New Suspicions About GMOs”
Author: Herve Kempf

Faculty Evaluator: Michael Ezra
Student Researchers: Destiny Stone and Lani Ready

Several recent studies confirm fears that genetically modified (GM) foods damage human health. These studies were released as the World Trade Organization (WTO) moved toward upholding the ruling that the European Union has violated international trade rules by stopping importation of GM foods.

* Research by the Russian Academy of Sciences released in December 2005 found that more than half of the offspring of rats fed GM soy died within the first three weeks of life, six times as many as those born to mothers fed on non-modified soy. Six times as many offspring fed GM soy were also severely underweight.

* In November 2005, a private research institute in Australia, CSIRO Plant Industry, put a halt to further development of a GM pea cultivator when it was found to cause an immune response in laboratory mice.1

* In the summer of 2005, an Italian research team led by a cellular biologist at the University of Urbino published confirmation that absorption of GM soy by mice causes development of misshapen liver cells, as well as other cellular anomalies.

* In May of 2005 the review of a highly confidential and controversial Monsanto report on test results of corn modified with Monsanto MON863 was published in The Independent/UK.

Dr. Arpad Pusztai (see Censored 2001, Story #7), one of the few genuinely independent scientists specializing in plant genetics and animal feeding studies, was asked by the German authorities in the autumn of 2004 to examine Monsanto’s 1,139-page report on the feeding of MON863 to laboratory rats over a ninety-day period.

The study found “statistically significant” differences in kidney weights and certain blood parameters in the rats fed the GM corn as compared with the control groups. A number of scientists across Europe who saw the study (and heavily-censored summaries of it) expressed concerns about the health and safety implications if MON863 should ever enter the food chain. There was particular concern in France, where Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini of the University of Caen has been trying (without success) for almost eighteen months to obtain full disclosure of all documents relating to the MON863 study.

Dr. Pusztai was forced by the German authorities to sign a “declaration of secrecy” before he was allowed to see the Monsanto rat feeding study, on the grounds that the document is classified as “CBI” or “confidential business interest.” While Pusztai is still bound by the declaration of secrecy, Monsanto recently declared that it does not object to the widespread dissemination of the “Pusztai Report.”2

Monsanto GM soy and corn are widely consumed by Americans at a time when the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has concluded, “In several cases, GMOs have been put on the market when safety issues are not clear.”

As GMO research is not encouraged by U.S. or European governments, the vast majority of toxicological studies are conducted by those companies producing and promoting consumption of GMOs. With motive and authenticity of results suspect in corporate testing, independent scientific research into the effects of GM foods is attracting increasing attention.

Comment: In May 2006 the WTO upheld a ruling that European countries broke international trade rules by stopping importation of GM foods. The WTO verdict found that the EU has had an effective ban on biotech foods since 1998 and sided with the U.S., Canada, and Argentina in a decision that the moratorium was illegal under WTO rules.3

Notes
1. “GM peas cause immune response–A gap in the approval process?” http://www.GMO-Compass.org, January 3, 2006.
2. Arpad Pusztai, “Mon863-Pusztai Report,” http://www.GMWatch.org, September 12, 2004.
3. Bradley S. Clapper, “WTO Faults EU for Blocking Modified Food,” Associated Press, May 11, 2006.

http://www.illuminati-news.com/Articles/54.html#11

#13 New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup

Sources:

Third World Resurgence, No. 176, April 2005
Title: “New Evidence of Dangers of Roundup Weedkiller”
Author: Chee Yoke Heong

Faculty Evaluator: Jennifer While
Student Researchers: Peter McArthur and Lani Ready

New studies from both sides of the Atlantic reveal that Roundup, the most widely used weedkiller in the world, poses serious human health threats. More than 75 percent of genetically modified (GM) crops are engineered to tolerate the absorption of Roundup—it eliminates all plants that are not GM. Monsanto Inc., the major engineer of GM crops, is also the producer of Roundup. Thus, while Roundup was formulated as a weapon against weeds, it has become a prevalent ingredient in most of our food crops.

Three recent studies show that Roundup, which is used by farmers and home gardeners, is not the safe product we have been led to trust.

A group of scientists led by biochemist Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini from the University of Caen in France found that human placental cells are very sensitive to Roundup at concentrations lower than those currently used in agricultural application.

An epidemiological study of Ontario farming populations showed that exposure to glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, nearly doubled the risk of late miscarriages. Seralini and his team decided to research the effects of the herbicide on human placenta cells. Their study confirmed the toxicity of glyphosate, as after eighteen hours of exposure at low concentrations, large proportions of human placenta began to die. Seralini suggests that this may explain the high levels of premature births and miscarriages observed among female farmers using glyphosate.

Seralini’s team further compared the toxic effects of the Roundup formula (the most common commercial formulation of glyphosate and chemical additives) to the isolated active ingredient, glyphosate. They found that the toxic effect increases in the presence of Roundup ‘adjuvants’ or additives. These additives thus have a facilitating role, rendering Roundup twice as toxic as its isolated active ingredient, glyphosate.

Another study, released in April 2005 by the University of Pittsburgh, suggests that Roundup is a danger to other life-forms and non-target organisms. Biologist Rick Relyea found that Roundup is extremely lethal to amphibians. In what is considered one of the most extensive studies on the effects of pesticides on nontarget organisms in a natural setting, Relyea found that Roundup caused a 70 percent decline in amphibian biodiversity and an 86 percent decline in the total mass of tadpoles. Leopard frog tadpoles and gray tree frog tadpoles were nearly eliminated.

In 2002, a scientific team led by Robert Belle of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) biological station in Roscoff, France showed that Roundup activates one of the key stages of cellular division that can potentially lead to cancer. Belle and his team have been studying the impact of glyphosate formulations on sea urchin cells for several years. The team has recently demonstrated in Toxicological Science (December 2004) that a “control point” for DNA damage was affected by Roundup, while glyphosate alone had no effect. “We have shown that it’s a definite risk factor, but we have not evaluated the number of cancers potentially induced, nor the time frame within which they would declare themselves,” Belle acknowledges.

There is, indeed, direct evidence that glyphosate inhibits an important process called RNA transcription in animals, at a concentration well below the level that is recommended for commercial spray application.

There is also new research that shows that brief exposure to commercial glyphosate causes liver damage in rats, as indicated by the leakage of intracellular liver enzymes. The research indicates that glyphosate and its surfactant in Roundup were found to act in synergy to increase damage to the liver.

UPDATE BY CHEE YOKE HEONG
Roundup Ready weedkiller is one of the most widely used weedkillers in the world for crops and backyard gardens. Roundup, with its active ingredient glyphosate, has long been promoted as safe for humans and the environment while effective in killing weeds. It is therefore significant when recent studies show that Roundup is not as safe as its promoters claim.

This has major consequences as the bulk of commercially planted genetically modified crops are designed to tolerate glyphosate (and especially Roundup), and independent field data already shows a trend of increasing use of the herbicide. This goes against industry claims that herbicide use will drop and that these plants will thus be more “environment-friendly.” Now it has been found that there are serious health effects, too. My story therefore aimed to highlight these new findings and their implications to health and the environment.

Not surprisingly, Monsanto came out refuting some of the findings of the studies mentioned in the article. What ensued was an open exchange between Dr. Rick Relyea and Monsanto, whereby the former stood his grounds. Otherwise, to my knowledge, no studies have since emerged on Roundup.

For more information look to the following sources:
Professor Gilles-Eric, criigen@ibfa.unicaen.fr
Biosafety Information Center, http://www.biosafety-info.net
Institute of Science in Society, http://www.i-sis.org.uk

http://www.illuminati-news.com/Articles/54.html#13

And in this case, the USDA's new data on the U.S. adoption of genetically-modified food crops is so off the charts that there was little choice but to make a chart: (See link)

Wowza. The blue line represents soybeans. The red line is corn. What we're looking at is the growth in the percentage of all the acres of U.S. farmland used to raise the respective crops that is now used to grow what's known as Herbicide Tolerant, or HT, varieties. HT crops are designed in a lab to be resistant to chemical herbicide; the best-known HT brand are Monsanto's Roundup-Ready products. Sprayed on a non-modified plant, Roundup kills. But HT are engineered to be able to tolerate the herbicide, allowing for weed control through blanket-spraying of farm acres. For years, food advocates and food producers have been arguing over the merits and risks of HT crops. Monsanto, for example, has engaged in a long battle with food advocates over whether or not it should develop strains of genetically-engineered wheat.

But what's clear from the new USDA numbers is how quickly the U.S. food supply is changing, whether we eaters like it or not. The simple fact is that for many of us, the food we eat today is simply different than what we ate as kids. When I was a sophomore in college* back in 1996, for example, just 3% of farmland used to grow corn was given over to HT varieties of the crop. Today, 68% of U.S. farmland used to grow corn grows corn that is genetically engineered to be HT. The leap has been even greater for soybeans -- from 7% in 1996 to a whopping 91% in 2009.

We might, as American eaters, still be having a healthy debate about whether we want to eat genetically-engineered corn, soybeans, and other foods. But the USDA data shows that our farmland is much farther along in making up its mind.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-scola/racing-toward-a-roundup-r_b_238392.html

A recent report, based on U.S. agriculture records has found that the nutrient content of fruits and vegetables has been dropping since records were first taken. You would need to eat five apples today just to get the same nutrients from eating one apple in 1965!

http://remineralize.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=104&Itemid=113

The negative health effects, due to exposure to Monsanto's Agent Orange, have been well documented over the past three decades. The dioxin in Agent Orange has been accepted internationally as one of the most toxic chemicals on the planet, causing everything from severe birth defects, to cancer, to neurological disorders, to death. But Monsanto has successfully blocked any major movement towards compensating veterans and civilians who were exposed to the company's Agent Orange.

Long before Agent Orange was used as a herbicide in the Vietnam war, Monsanto knew of its negative health impacts on humans. Since then, Monsanto has been unsuccessful at covering its tracks and has even been convicted of fabricating false research documentation that claims Agent Orange has no negative health effects, other than a possible skin rash. Thanks to Monsanto's influence, the Center for Disease Control also released a report claiming veterans were never exposed to harmful levels of Agent Orange.

"TCDD (dioxin) has been shown to be extremely toxic to a number of animal species. Mortality does not occur immediately.it appears that the animals' environment suddenly becomes toxic to them."

Casarett and Doull's Toxicology, 1996

As a note, from 1962 to 1970, the US military sprayed 72 million liters of herbicides, mostly Agent Orange, on over one million Vietnamese civilians and over 100,000 U.S. troops. As a result, within ten years of the close of the war, 9170 veterans had filed claims for disabilities caused by Agent Orange. The VA denied compensation to 7709, saying that a facial rash was the only disease associated with exposure.

In 2002, Vietnam requested assistance in dealing with the tens of thousands of birth defects due to Agent Orange. In order to avoid medical compensation expenses, Monsanto continues to claim this now banned chemical is not toxic.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/agentorange032102.cfm

To our analysis, dioxin is, in fact, a tremendously toxic compound which is found in significant concentrations in Roundup (c). In fact, Roundup’s principal ingredient, glyphosate, is often referred to as the second most toxic compound known in nature. If dioxin is the first, and glyphosate is the second, what are they doing on your food?

And, since dioxin is found in Roundup(c) and does not break down in nature, it certainly is in your food and your environment, your water and, sadly, your bodies. For example, dioxin contamination from 800 to 2000 times greater than permitted was recently found in Irish pork products and was traced to a feed from a feed plant there. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready (c) corn and soy are permitted in the EU for animal feed although GMO foods are banned for human consumption unless labeled clearly there.

Monsanto’s potential for damage is not limited to pesticides, of which they list 29 products approved for use in the US.

They make aspartame, having acquired the patent when they bought the Searle drug company. It is no surprise that aspartame, included in many vaccines, by the way, is viewed by Advanced Healthcare Researchers as a leading cause of MS, Lupus and other life threatening diseases, including cancer. Despite this evidence, which led the FDA to keep aspartame out of food and drink for 11 years, as soon as Donald Rumsfeld and Ronald Regan came into power, the old head of FDA was out in a flash and the first act of the next FDA head was to approve unlimited use of this toxic material.

Monsanto is the world’s leading owner of genetic patents and the world’s leading GMO seed producer. Most of their GMO seeds are modified to allow them to tolerate high doses - really, really high doses - of an herbicide called ‘Glyphosate’. According to toxicologists, exposure to Glyphosate is strongly associated with cancer, infertility, loss of pregnancies, birth defects, auto immune disorders (such as Lupus), neurological disorders and other serious adverse events up to, and including, death.

Glyphosate is marketed around the world as “Roundup” (R) and its seeds are marketed as “Roundup Ready” (R) soy, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, rice, strawberries, papaya, taro, coffee, etc. Roundup Ready(R) soy and corn are widely used as animal feed, which means that their deadly genetic materials and toxic load wind up in your cells and your baby’s if you are pregnant or feeding your children GMO foods.

Roundup (R) is an herbicide. It kills plants which have not been modified to accept it. The material which is sprayed on the plants kills agricultural workers, makes them infertile and creates a host of horrific diseases in them and their children, as well as people down wind or down river from them. In fact, as you look at your lush, bright, chemically contaminated GMO veggies and eat your 90% GMO modified diet (if you are eating prepared and conventional “food” that is) we rarely think of the fact that agricultural workers in what is sadly called “conventional agriculture” have astoundingly high cancer, infertility and birth defect rates.

http://www.healthfreedomusa.org/?p=2915

More on Monsanto - http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Monsanto

7-13-2009

(07-13) 04:00 PDT Washington -- Dick Peixoto planted hedges of fennel and flowering cilantro around his organic vegetable fields in the Pajaro Valley near Watsonville to harbor beneficial insects, an alternative to pesticides.

He has since ripped out such plants in the name of food safety, because his big customers demand sterile buffers around his crops. No vegetation. No water. No wildlife of any kind.

"I was driving by a field where a squirrel fed off the end of the field, and so 30 feet in we had to destroy the crop," he said. "On one field where a deer walked through, didn't eat anything, just walked through and you could see the tracks, we had to take out 30 feet on each side of the tracks and annihilate the crop."

In the verdant farmland surrounding Monterey Bay, a national marine sanctuary and one of the world's biological jewels, scorched-earth strategies are being imposed on hundreds of thousands of acres in the quest for an antiseptic field of greens. And the scheme is about to go national.

Invisible to a public that sees only the headlines of the latest food-safety scare - spinach, peppers and now cookie dough - ponds are being poisoned and bulldozed. Vegetation harboring pollinators and filtering storm runoff is being cleared. Fences and poison baits line wildlife corridors. Birds, frogs, mice and deer - and anything that shelters them - are caught in a raging battle in the Salinas Valley against E. coli O157:H7, a lethal, food-borne bacteria.

In pending legislation and in proposed federal regulations, the push for food safety butts up against the movement toward biologically diverse farming methods, while evidence suggests that industrial agriculture may be the bigger culprit.

Galvanized by the spinach disaster, large growers instituted a quasi-governmental program of new protocols for growing greens safely, called the "leafy greens marketing agreement." A proposal was submitted last month in Washington to take these rules nationwide.

A food safety bill sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, passed this month in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It would give new powers to the Food and Drug Administration to regulate all farms and produce in an attempt to fix the problem. The bill would require consideration of farm diversity and environmental rules, but would leave much to the FDA.

An Amish farmer in Ohio who uses horses to plow his fields could find himself caught in a net aimed 2,000 miles away at a feral pig in San Benito County. While he may pick, pack and sell his greens in one day because he does not refrigerate, the bagged lettuce trucked from Salinas with a 17-day shelf life may be considered safer.

The leafy-green agreement is based on available science, but it is just a jumping-off point.

Large produce buyers have compiled secret "super metrics" that go much further. Farmers must follow them if they expect to sell their crops. These can include vast bare-dirt buffers, elimination of wildlife, and strict rules on water sources. To enforce these rules, retail buyers have sent forth armies of food-safety auditors, many of them trained in indoor processing plants, to inspect fields.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/12/MN0218DVJ8.DTL#ixzz0LSGa9CRS

6/26/2009

WASHINGTON, -- Large plastic pallets used to ship, cool and store produce contain decabromodiphenyl ether (Deca), a flame retardant chemical and known neurotoxin that may leach onto the fruits and vegetables inside.

In a letter sent today, Richard Wiles, senior Vice President and for Policy and Communications of Environmental Working Group (EWG), urged Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the federal Food and Drug Administration, to order the food industry to stop using plastic pallets made with Deca.

Wiles pointed out that significant levels of Deca could accumulate during the standard food industry practice of “hydro-cooling” produce by submerging stacked pallets filled with fruits or vegetables in water or by dripping water over the pallets. As the water is recycled, its Deca concentration intensifies and leaves Deca residues on the produce.

Citing concerns that this practice could lead to Deca contamination of food, on April 29, 2009 Dr. Elizabeth Sánchez of the FDA’S Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition advised a Washington, D.C.-area consulting firm that Deca is “not authorized” as a component of plastic pallets used in the hydro-cooling produce. She said that FDA required pre-market approval for the chemical “to be used in contact with food.”

According to statements by iGPS , the shipping industry’s largest plastic pallet supplier, plastic pallets are now being used by General Mills, Borders Melon Company, PepsiCo, Cott, Okray Family Farmsand Martoni Farm. The company said that Dole Foods and Kraft Foods are conducting trials of plastic pallets. If the iGPS statements are accurate, the food industry’s ongoing transition from wooden to plastic pallets raises the threat of Deca food contamination.

“This is yet another example of our tattered food and chemical safety net,” Wiles said in a separate statement. “Highly toxic chemicals creep into the food supply while no one in government is paying any attention.”

According to studies by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and academic scientists, Deca, like other flame-retardants, can disrupt brain and reproductive system development.

The EPA website says that some research on Deca has yielded "suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential." It cites studies showing increased incidence of four different cancers and non-cancerous tumors in rats and mice.

Other research cited by EPA has found that activity levels and behavior of mice exposed to Deca for a single day undergo notable changes associated with neurotoxicity. EPA says that “the neurotoxic effect of neonatal decaBDE exposure was persistent and also worsened with age.”

“Fruits and vegetables are an essential part of a healthy diet, but contaminated produce pallets could cause millions of men, women and children to consume harmful levels of a chemical neurotoxin,” Wiles said. “A toxic chemical designed to suppress fire should not be allowed to taint the food we eat.”

http://www.ewg.org/node/27978

Environmental Working Group (EWG) is writing to request an immediate halt to the use by the food industry of plastic pallets made with the neurotoxic flame retardant decabromodiphenyl ether (Deca). Based on an EWG review of publicly available information it appears likely that Deca treated pallets are being used in ways that could contaminate food with Deca without the necessary pre-market approval. Food contaminated with Deca used in plastic pallets without pre-market approval could be deemed adulterated under the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, Sec. 402 (21 USC 342).

Deca is a neurotoxin and suspected carcinogen that persists in the environment and accumulates in human tissue. Millions of plastic pallets, each containing 3.4 pounds of Deca (according to industry estimates) are currently in use. These contaminated pallets could introduce millions of pounds of toxic fire retardant into the environment each year.

According to a series of public statements by the shipping industry’s largest plastic pallet user, iGPS, plastic pallets are now being used by General Mills, Borders Melon Company, PepsiCo, Cott, Okray Family Farms, and Martoni Farms, with trials up and running at Dole Foods and Kraft. This widespread use, if true, creates a significant opportunity for food contamination with Deca.

It is standard practice in the food industry to “hydro-cool” produce by submerging food stacked on pallets in water or by dripping water over stacked pallets containing produce. Preliminary studies strongly suggest that Deca leaches from pallets into the cooling water. Because water is recycled numerous times during the hydro-cooling process, considerable levels of Deca residue could be left on hydro-cooled produce.

In an April 29, 2009 letter, Dr. Elizabeth Sánchez Furukawa of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made clear that plastic pallets containing Deca were “not authorized” for use in hydro-cooling, given the potential health risks and the likelihood that the chemical would come in contact with food. Furukawa wrote that “in order for it (Deca) to be used in contact with food under the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, it must have pre-market approval.”

Public health authorities in Maine and Washington have restricted Deca, and legislators in 13 states have proposed Deca bans this year.

In addition, Deca can break down into related chemicals – Penta and Octa bromodiphenyl ether – whose production and importation is banned in the United States and Europe.

There are an estimated 4 million Deca-treated plastic pallets in use today, with a significant portion used in the food industry. In September 2008, iGPS, a major plastic pallet shipping company, announced an agreement with Netherlands-based Schoeller Arca Systems to buy 30 million Deca treated plastic pallets over the next five years.

http://www.ewg.org/FlameRetardants/letter/EWG%27s-letter-to-FDA-Use-of-Deca-in-plastic-food-pallets

6/23/2009

June 23, 2009

Used in yards, farms and parks throughout the world, Roundup has long been a top-selling weed killer. But now researchers have found that one of Roundup’s inert ingredients can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells.

The new findings intensify a debate about so-called “inerts” — the solvents, preservatives, surfactants and other substances that manufacturers add to pesticides. Nearly 4,000 inert ingredients are approved for use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Glyphosate, Roundup’s active ingredient, is the most widely used herbicide in the United States. About 100 million pounds are applied to U.S. farms and lawns every year, according to the EPA.

Until now, most health studies have focused on the safety of glyphosate, rather than the mixture of ingredients found in Roundup. But in the new study, scientists found that Roundup’s inert ingredients amplified the toxic effect on human cells—even at concentrations much more diluted than those used on farms and lawns.

One specific inert ingredient, polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, was more deadly to human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells than the herbicide itself – a finding the researchers call “astonishing.”

“This clearly confirms that the [inert ingredients] in Roundup formulations are not inert,” wrote the study authors from France’s University of Caen. “Moreover, the proprietary mixtures available on the market could cause cell damage and even death [at the] residual levels” found on Roundup-treated crops, such as soybeans, alfalfa and corn, or lawns and gardens.

The research team suspects that Roundup might cause pregnancy problems by interfering with hormone production, possibly leading to abnormal fetal development, low birth weights or miscarriages.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=weed-whacking-herbicide-p

6/4/2009

The numbers for this year’s wheat output are horrible.

1) Romania = output wheat down -30%

2) Ukraine = output wheat down -27%

3) Hungary = output wheat down -28.5%

4) Czech = output wheat down -20%

5) Bulgaria = output wheat down -30%

6) Poland = output wheat down -10%

7) Spain = output wheat down -42%

8) Australia = output down -10-35%

9) Argentina = output down -34%

10) China = output down -20% or more

11) US = output down -20% or more

12) Canada = output down -12%

13) Russia = output wheat down -21.5%

Conclusion: Nothing has changed. Estimates for agricultural production are being continuously downgraded every month. Droughts, under planting, and lack of credit have devastated global agricultural output. The world is still facing food shortages in 2009.

http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/05/terrible-outlook-for-this-years-weat.html

There is really scary idea. What if China’s 60 million tons of wheat reserves don't actually exists?

1) The Chinese wheat crop is the single largest wheat crop in the world, roughly equal to the entire US and Russian wheat crops put together.

2) A serious crop failure in China would have major global implications, if China’s wheat reserve don’t actually exist.

3) Considering it (theoretically) has an amount of wheat roughly equal to the anticipated entire US 2009 production in state reserves, the Chinese government is making an extreme effort to save its crops (spending $12.69 billion in drought-hit areas).

4) There was a huge scandal in China not that long ago when it was discovered that storekeepers were getting paid by the government to store grain that wasn't actually there.

5) China’s 60mmt wheat reserves could be a giant Madoff-style grain storage scheme.

6) China imported wheat last month.

Conclusion: If this is even remotely true, 2009 is going to be a really interesting year.

http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/02/does-chinas-60-million-tons-of-wheat.html

WASHINGTON - Larry Matlack, President of the American Agriculture Movement (AAM), has raised concerns over the issue of U.S. grain reserves after it was announced that the sale of 18.37 million bushels of wheat from USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust.

“According to the May 1, 2008 CCC inventory report there are only 24.1 million bushels of wheat in inventory, so after this sale there will be only 2.7 million bushels of wheat left the entire CCC inventory,” warned Matlack. “Our concern is not that we are using the remainder of our strategic grain reserves for humanitarian relief. AAM fully supports the action and all humanitarian food relief. Our concern is that the U.S. has nothing else in our emergency food pantry. There is no cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or anything else left in reserve. The only thing left in the entire CCC inventory will be 2.7 million bushels of wheat which is about enough wheat to make 1⁄2 of a loaf of bread for each of the 300 million people in America.”

http://www.fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/health/food/news.php?q=1212803067

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2029323/posts

Currently there are ZERO wheat reserves (CCC Inventory) in the US....

http://www.fsa.usda.gov/Internet/FSA_File/wid2a.pdf

As if farmers didn’t already have enough problems, now Kansas custom cutters are saying they may not come into Oklahoma or Texas because of poor wheat conditions.

Drought and freeze have damaged the wheat crops in both states to the point many cutters are making the decision to cut their losses. Officials estimate Oklahoma’s crops will be about half of its normal yield.

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, Oklahoma’s wheat crop is estimated to total 80.5 million bushels, less than half the 166.5 million bushels harvested last year.

http://www.enidnews.com/localnews/local_story_146224521.html

Russia will harvest 90 MMT of grain in 2009, according to the Minister of Agriculture of Russia, Elena Skrynnik.

That's a reduction of 16.7% on last year's 108.1 MMT.

Russian exports of grains in the current 2008/09 MY will total a record of about 20 MMT, including 1 MMT of maize, she added.

Russia's previous grain exports record was reached in the 2002-2003 agricultural year when the country exported 15.8 MMT of grain. Last year, Russia exported 13.6 MMT of grain.

Spring grains have so far been planted on 27.5 million hectares, or 88% of the planned area, said the Ministry. That's 2 million hectares lower than in 2008.

http://nogger-noggersblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/russian-grain-harvest-seen-down-167.html

After reading about the droughts in two major agricultural countries, China and Argentina, I decided to research the extent other food producing nations were also experiencing droughts. This project ended up taking a lot longer than I thought. 2009 looks to be a humanitarian disaster around much of the world

To understand the depth of the food Catastrophe that faces the world this year, consider the graphic below depicting countries by USD value of their agricultural output, as of 2006.

Some observers are anticipating “competitive currency devaluations” in addition to deflation for 2009 (nations devalue their currencies to help their export sector). The coming global food shortage makes this highly unlikely. Depreciating their currency in the current environment will produce the unwanted consequence of boosting exports—of food. Even with export restrictions like those in China, currency depreciation would cause the outflow of significant quantities of grain via the black market.

Instead of “competitive currency devaluations”, spiking food prices will likely cause competitive currency appreciation in 2009. Foreign exchange reserves exist for just this type of emergency . Central banks around the world will lower domestic food prices by either directly selling off their reserves to appreciate their currencies or by using them to purchase grain on the world market.

Appreciating a currency is the fastest way to control food inflation. A more valuable currency allows a nation to monopolize more global resources (ie: the overvalued dollar allows the US to consume 25% of the world's oil despite having only 4% of the world's population). If China were to selloff its US reserves, its enormous population would start sucking up the world's food supply like the US has been doing with oil.

On the flip side, when a nation appreciates its currency and starts consuming more of the world's resources, it leaves less for everyone else. So when china appreciates the yuan, food shortages worldwide will increase and prices everywhere else will jump upwards. As there is nothing that breeds social unrest like soaring food prices, nations around the world, from Russia, to the EU, to Saudi Arabia, to India, will sell off their foreign reserves to appreciate their currencies and reduce the cost of food imports. In response to this, China will sell even more of its reserves and so on. That is competitive currency appreciation.

When faced with competitive currency appreciation, you do NOT want to be the world's reserve currency. The dollar is likely to do very poorly as central banks liquidate trillions in US holdings to buy food and appreciate their currencies.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=DEC20090210&articleId=12252

Wednesday, 3 June 2009
Argentine Wheat Plantings In A Stunningly Bad Way
If ever you needed some news to proof that tonight's losses on CBOT were overdone then this surely has to be it.

The Buenos Aires Cereals Exchange said in it's weekly crop report Wednesday that Argentine farmers will now only plant 3.2 million hectares of wheat in 2009.

To try and attempt to put that into perspective, get a grip on this:

That is half a million hectares less than they were forecasting just a week ago, and the figure then was the lowest on record.

This number is now almost half the area planted with wheat just two years ago.

The revised acreage now amounts to a 30.4% decrease on what was planted last year.

If you want any worse you can have it:

Soil moisture profiles are so poor that the final planted area could fall further the Exchange say. Well, if it can drop half a million hectares in a week then anything can happen.

Not only that, but the area planted so far amounts to just 420,000 hectares, slightly more than half of what was planted at this time last year, and little more than a third of what was seeded in 2007 at this time.

As well as the severe drought, which has now lasted almost eighteen months, lack of credit and political concerns are also behind the dramatic fall in plantings the Exchange say.

Food for thought: if Argentina only gets the same yield as last year, then they will be looking at a crop of less than 6 MMT in 2009. That's 10 MMT below their output just two years ago, and well below their domestic requirements, turning them from fifth largest exporter in the world to net importer in just two years!

http://nogger-noggersblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/argentina-wheat-plantings-in-stunningly.html

What’s with the secret squirrel business? Some of America’s billionaires (now, what would it be like to be a billionaire!) have been meeting secretly. They are not plotting a secret new world government. They have been meeting to discuss how their combined humongous wealth could be used to curb global population and improve health and education. I’m all for the latter, not so sure I like the sound of rich dudes thinking they have the right or power to control population numbers. Smacks of that dark bit of history – eugenics – and we know what the Nazis did with eugenics.

So the likes of Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffet, George Soros, David Rockefeller Jr, Ted Turner and Michael Bloomberg (is he a billionaire?) are known as the Good Club. They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist, on May 5 in Manhattan, US and even some aides didn’t know the real purpose of the meeting, being told their boss was off to a security briefing (Oprah goes to security briefings?). I guess over some top notch champagne and caviar they had a friendly chat and at some point Bill Gates dropped the clanger – that he wants to cap the world’s population at 8.3 billion people. So whilst these “philanthropists” will no doubt throw millions at schools and better health care, I’m wondering how they’re thinking of “curbing the population”. And I’m sure that Ted Turner would have trumped Gates by outlining his plans – bringing the world’s population down to two billion through a global voluntary one-child policy (guess his plans wouldn’t run to himself as he has five kids). Perhaps they even discussed Henry Kissinger’s secret 1974 “food control genocide” plan (a covert plan to reduce population growth through birth control, war and famine).

Possibly, Gates even mentioned that his dad, William H Gates Sr is a board member of Planned Parenthood and a quick search of the American Eugenics Society Records shows Bill’s dad crops up in their records. And no doubt David Rockfellers Jr confessed that his own dad, John D. Rockefeller, bankrolled the eugenics programme in Nazi Germany through the Kaiser Wilhelm institute.

We know the planet cannot sustain a projected world population of 9 billion by 2050. And I’m sure the Good Club discussed many initiatives around health and education that would benefit Third World countries but when you delve into the backgrounds of some of the gathered few and note the link to eugenics, a feeling of uneasiness occurs. The eugenics movement has never really gone away; it’s simply moved into a new era and has converged with concerns over the sustainability of our planet and global population. Some interesting quotes:

* “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal”. Ted Turner, CNN founder & UN supporter – quoted in the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor, June 1996

* “Even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically & psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable”. Sir Julian Huxley, first director general of UNESCO (1946-1948)

* “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels”. Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund – quoted in “Are You Ready For Our New Age Future?” Insiders Report, American Policy Center, December 1995

* “In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it”. Jacques Cousteau

* “The world has a cancer and that cancer is man”. Merton Lambert, former spokesman for the Rockefeller Foundation.

* “…The first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size”. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb. pp 130-131.

There is even a suggestion that the Human Genome Programme is eugenics in disguise – that the genetic code can be altered to produce designer babies and that ultimately our world will consist of GenRich and GenPoor (those who can afford to have their DNA tinkered with and those who can’t – the latter being referred to as naturals or God children and who may form a future class of lowly-paid service workers or labourers. This of course was depicted in the movie Gattaca).

This secret billionaire club business makes me a tad nervous, with their talk of trying to shrink the world. As though they, due to their humongous combined wealth, believe they have some sort of moral imperative to decide the world’s population numbers. Creepy. It’s like the recent Australian Government announcement that should swine flu hit us, then half the population (10 million) will be inoculated – which half would that be? Who makes the decision as to who gets the jab and who doesn’t and on what basis?

http://thinkingshift.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/secret-billionaire-club/

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

These members, along with Gates, have given away more than £45 billion since 1996 to causes ranging from health programmes in developing countries to ghetto schools nearer to home.

They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at “security briefings”.

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said.

Some details were emerging this weekend, however. The billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favourite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an “umbrella cause” that could harness their interests.

The issues debated included reforming the supervision of overseas aid spending to setting up rural schools and water systems in developing countries. Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority.

This could result in a challenge to some Third World politicians who believe contraception and female education weaken traditional values.

Gates, 53, who is giving away most of his fortune, argued that healthier families, freed from malaria and extreme poverty, would change their habits and have fewer children within half a generation.

At a conference in Long Beach, California, last February, he had made similar points. “Official projections say the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive healthcare, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion,” Gates said then.

Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives more than £2 billion a year to good causes, attended the Rockefeller summit. She said the billionaires met to “discuss how to increase giving” and they intended to “continue the dialogue” over the next few months.

Another guest said there was “nothing as crude as a vote” but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.

“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” said the guest. “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.”

Why all the secrecy? “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,” he said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6350303.ece

Kissinger's 1974 Plan for
Food Control Genocide

by Joseph Brewda

On Dec. 10, 1974, the U.S. National Security Council under Henry Kissinger completed a classified 200-page study, "National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests." The study falsely claimed that population growth in the so-called Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) was a grave threat to U.S. national security. Adopted as official policy in November 1975 by President Gerald Ford, NSSM 200 outlined a covert plan to reduce population growth in those countries through birth control, and also, implicitly, war and famine. Brent Scowcroft, who had by then replaced Kissinger as national security adviser (the same post Scowcroft was to hold in the Bush administration), was put in charge of implementing the plan. CIA Director George Bush was ordered to assist Scowcroft, as were the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture.

The bogus arguments that Kissinger advanced were not original. One of his major sources was the Royal Commission on Population, which King George VI had created in 1944 "to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population." The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since "a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production." The combined effects of increasing population and industrialization in its colonies, it warned, "might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West," especially effecting "military strength and security."

NSSM 200 similarly concluded that the United States was threatened by population growth in the former colonial sector. It paid special attention to 13 "key countries" in which the United States had a "special political and strategic interest": India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. It claimed that population growth in those states was especially worrisome, since it would quickly increase their relative political, economic, and military strength.

For example, Nigeria: "Already the most populous country on the continent, with an estimated 55 million people in 1970, Nigeria's population by the end of this century is projected to number 135 million. This suggests a growing political and strategic role for Nigeria, at least in Africa." Or Brazil: "Brazil clearly dominated the continent demographically." The study warned of a "growing power status for Brazil in Latin America and on the world scene over the next 25 years."
Food as a weapon

There were several measures that Kissinger advocated to deal with this alleged threat, most prominently, birth control and related population-reduction programs. He also warned that "population growth rates are likely to increase appreciably before they begin to decline," even if such measures were adopted.

A second measure was curtailing food supplies to targetted states, in part to force compliance with birth control policies: "There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion."

"Mandatory programs may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now," the document continued, adding, "Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?"

Kissinger also predicted a return of famines that could make exclusive reliance on birth control programs unnecessary. "Rapid population growth and lagging food production in developing countries, together with the sharp deterioration in the global food situation in 1972 and 1973, have raised serious concerns about the ability of the world to feed itself adequately over the next quarter of century and beyond," he reported.

The cause of that coming food deficit was not natural, however, but was a result of western financial policy: "Capital investments for irrigation and infrastucture and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many LDCs. For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food."

"It is questionable," Kissinger gloated, "whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis." Consequently, "large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades—a kind the world thought had been permanently banished," was foreseeable—famine, which has indeed come to pass.

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/1995/2249_kissinger_food.html

For more on Kissinger see my post...

http://yophat.blogspot.com/2009/05/henry-kissinger.html

One thing Microsoft founder Bill Gates can’t be accused of is sloth. He was already programming at 14, founded Microsoft at age 20 while still a student at Harvard. By 1995 he had been listed by Forbes as the world’s richest man from being the largest shareholder in his Microsoft, a company which his relentless drive built into a de facto monopoly in software systems for personal computers.

In 2006 when most people in such a situation might think of retiring to a quiet Pacific island, Bill Gates decided to devote his energies to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest ‘transparent’ private foundation as it says, with a whopping $34.6 billion endowment and a legal necessity to spend $1.5 billion a year on charitable projects around the world to maintain its tax free charitable status. A gift from friend and business associate, mega-investor Warren Buffett in 2006, of some $30 billion worth of shares in Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway put the Gates’ foundation into the league where it spends almost the amount of the entire annual budget of the United Nations’ World Health Organization.

So when Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some $30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth looking at.

No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world’s most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see map).

On this God-forsaken island Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what is called the ‘doomsday seed bank.’ Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group.

The seed bank is being built inside a mountain on Spitsbergen Island near the small village of Longyearbyen. It’s almost ready for ‘business’ according to their releases. The bank will have dual blast-proof doors with motion sensors, two airlocks, and walls of steel-reinforced concrete one meter thick. It will contain up to three million different varieties of seeds from the entire world, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future,’ according to the Norwegian government. Seeds will be specially wrapped to exclude moisture. There will be no full-time staff, but the vault's relative inaccessibility will facilitate monitoring any possible human activity.

Did we miss something here? Their press release stated, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future.’ What future do the seed bank’s sponsors foresee, that would threaten the global availability of current seeds, almost all of which are already well protected in designated seed banks around the world?

Anytime Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto and Syngenta get together on a common project, it’s worth digging a bit deeper behind the rocks on Spitsbergen. When we do we find some fascinating things.

The first notable point is who is sponsoring the doomsday seed vault. Here joining the Norwegians are, as noted, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the US agribusiness giant DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred, one of the world’s largest owners of patented genetically-modified (GMO) plant seeds and related agrichemicals; Syngenta, the Swiss-based major GMO seed and agrichemicals company through its Syngenta Foundation; the Rockefeller Foundation, the private group who created the “gene revolution with over $100 million of seed money since the 1970’s; CGIAR, the global network created by the Rockefeller Foundation to promote its ideal of genetic purity through agriculture change.

CGIAR and ‘The Project’

As I detailled in the book, Seeds of Destruction, in 1960 the Rockefeller Foundation, John D. Rockefeller III’s Agriculture Development Council and the Ford Foundation joined forces to create the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, the Philippines.1 By 1971, the Rockefeller Foundation’s IRRI, along with their Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and two other Rockefeller and Ford Foundation-created international research centers, the IITA for tropical agriculture, Nigeria, and IRRI for rice, Philippines, combined to form a global Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR).

CGIAR was shaped at a series of private conferences held at the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference center in Bellagio, Italy. Key participants at the Bellagio talks were the Rockefeller Foundation’s George Harrar, Ford Foundation’s Forrest Hill, Robert McNamara of the World Bank and Maurice Strong, the Rockefeller family’s international environmental organizer, who, as a Rockefeller Foundation Trustee, organized the UN Earth Summit in Stockholm in 1972. It was part of the foundation’s decades long focus to turn science to the service of eugenics, a hideous version of racial purity, what has been called The Project.

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

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

Genetically engineering a master race?

Now the Svalbard Seed Bank begins to become interesting. But it gets better. ‘The Project’ I referred to is the project of the Rockefeller Foundation and powerful financial interests since the 1920’s to use eugenics, later renamed genetics, to justify creation of a genetically-engineered Master Race. Hitler and the Nazis called it the Ayran Master Race.

The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet. Now this is getting really intriguing. The same Rockefeller Foundation created the pseudo-science discipline of molecular biology in their relentless pursuit of reducing human life down to the ‘defining gene sequence’ which, they hoped, could then be modified in order to change human traits at will. Hitler’s eugenics scientists, many of whom were quietly brought to the United States after the War to continue their biological eugenics research, laid much of the groundwork of genetic engineering of various life forms, much of it supported openly until well into the Third Reich by Rockefeller Foundation generous grants.2

The same Rockefeller Foundation created the so-called Green Revolution, out of a trip to Mexico in 1946 by Nelson Rockefeller and former New Deal Secretary of Agriculture and founder of the Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Company, Henry Wallace.

The Green Revolution purported to solve the world hunger problem to a major degree in Mexico, India and other select countries where Rockefeller worked. Rockefeller Foundation agronomist, Norman Borlaug, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work, hardly something to boast about with the likes of Henry Kissinger sharing the same.

In reality, as it years later emerged, the Green Revolution was a brilliant Rockefeller family scheme to develop a globalized agribusiness which they then could monopolize just as they had done in the world oil industry beginning a half century before. As Henry Kissinger declared in the 1970’s, ‘If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.’

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

John H. Davis had been Assistant Agriculture Secretary under President Dwight Eisenhower in the early 1950’s. He left Washington in 1955 and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business, an unusual place for an agriculture expert in those days. He had a clear strategy. In 1956, Davis wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review in which he declared that “the only way to solve the so-called farm problem once and for all, and avoid cumbersome government programs, is to progress from agriculture to agribusiness.” He knew precisely what he had in mind, though few others had a clue back then--- a revolution in agriculture production that would concentrate control of the food chain in corporate multinational hands, away from the traditional family farmer.3

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

That declining yield characteristic of hybrids meant farmers must normally buy seed every year in order to obtain high yields. Moreover, the lower yield of the second generation eliminated the trade in seed that was often done by seed producers without the breeder’s authorization. It prevented the redistribution of the commercial crop seed by middlemen. If the large multinational seed

companies were able to control the parental seed lines in house, no competitor or farmer would be able to produce the hybrid. The global concentration of hybrid seed patents into a handful of giant seed companies, led by DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto’s Dekalb laid the ground for the later GMO seed revolution.4

In effect, the introduction of modern American agricultural technology, chemical fertilizers and commercial hybrid seeds all made local farmers in developing countries, particularly the larger more established ones, dependent on foreign, mostly US agribusiness and petro-chemical company inputs. It was a first step in what was to be a decades-long, carefully planned process.

Under the Green Revolution Agribusiness was making major inroads into markets which were previously of limited access to US exporters. The trend was later dubbed “market-oriented agriculture.” In reality it was agribusiness-controlled agriculture.

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

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

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

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

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

Applied in a large number of developing countries, those loans went mostly to the large landowners. For the smaller peasants the situation worked differently. Small peasant farmers could not afford the chemical and other modern inputs and had to borrow money.

Initially various government programs tried to provide some loans to farmers so that they could purchase seeds and fertilizers. Farmers who could not participate in this kind of program had to borrow from the private sector. Because of the exorbitant interest rates for informal loans, many small farmers did not even get the benefits of the initial higher yields. After harvest, they had to sell most if not all of their produce to pay off loans and interest. They became dependent on money-lenders and traders and often lost their land. Even with soft loans from government agencies, growing subsistence crops gave way to the production of cash crops.5

Since decades the same interests including the Rockefeller Foundation which backed the initial Green Revolution, have worked to promote a second ‘Gene Revolution’ as Rockefeller Foundation President Gordon Conway termed it several years ago, the spread of industrial agriculture and commercial inputs including GMO patented seeds.

Gates, Rockefeller and a Green Revolution in Africa

With the true background of the 1950’s Rockefeller Foundation Green Revolution clear in mind, it becomes especially curious that the same Rockefeller Foundation along with the Gates Foundation which are now investing millions of dollars in preserving every seed against a possible “doomsday” scenario are also investing millions in a project called The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

AGRA, as it calls itself, is an alliance again with the same Rockefeller Foundation which created the “Gene Revolution.” A look at the AGRA Board of Directors confirms this.

It includes none other than former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as chairman. In his acceptance speech in a World Economic Forum event in Cape Town South Africa in June 2007, Kofi Annan stated, ‘I accept this challenge with gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and all others who support our African campaign.’

In addition the AGRA board numbers a South African, Strive Masiyiwa who is a Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. It includes Sylvia M. Mathews of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Mamphela Ramphele, former Managing Director of the World Bank (2000 – 2006); Rajiv J. Shah of the Gates Foundation; Nadya K. Shmavonian of the Rockefeller Foundation; Roy Steiner of the Gates Foundation. In addition, an Alliance for AGRA includes Gary Toenniessen the Managing Director of the Rockefeller Foundation and Akinwumi Adesina, Associate Director, Rockefeller Foundation.

To fill out the lineup, the Programmes for AGRA includes Peter Matlon, Managing Director, Rockefeller Foundation; Joseph De Vries, Director of the Programme for Africa’s Seed Systems and Associate Director, Rockefeller foundation; Akinwumi Adesina, Associate Director, Rockefeller Foundation. Like the old failed Green Revolution in India and Mexico, the new Africa Green Revolution is clearly a high priority of the Rockefeller Foundation.

While to date they are keeping a low profile, Monsanto and the major GMO agribusiness giants are believed at the heart of using Kofi Annan’s AGRA to spread their patented GMO seeds across Africa under the deceptive label, ‘bio-technology,’ the new euphemism for genetically engineered patented seeds. To date South Africa is the only African country permitting legal planting of GMO crops. In 2003 Burkina Faso authorized GMO trials. In 2005 Kofi Annan’s Ghana drafted bio-safety legislation and key officials expressed their intentions to pursue research into GMO crops.

Africa is the next target in the US-government campaign to spread GMO worldwide. Its rich soils make it an ideal candidate. Not surprisingly many African governments suspect the worst from the GMO sponsors as a multitude of genetic engineering and biosafety projects have been initiated in Africa, with the aim of introducing GMOs into Africa’s agricultural systems. These include sponsorships offered by the US government to train African scientists in genetic engineering in the US, biosafety projects funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank; GMO research involving African indigenous food crops.

The Rockefeller Foundation has been working for years to promote, largely without success, projects to introduce GMOs into the fields of Africa. They have backed research that supports the applicability of GMO cotton in the Makhathini Flats in South Africa.

Monsanto, who has a strong foothold in South Africa’s seed industry, both GMO and hybrid, has conceived of an ingenious smallholders’ programme known as the ‘Seeds of Hope’ Campaign, which is introducing a green revolution package to small scale poor farmers, followed, of course, by Monsanto’s patented GMO seeds. 6

Syngenta AG of Switzerland, one of the ‘Four Horsemen of the GMO Apocalypse’ is pouring millions of dollars into a new greenhouse facility in Nairobi, to develop GMO insect resistant maize. Syngenta is a part of CGIAR as well.7

Move on to Svalbard

Now is it simply philosophical sloppiness? What leads the Gates and Rockefeller foundations to at one and the same time to back proliferation of patented and soon-to-be Terminator patented seeds across Africa, a process which, as it has in every other place on earth, destroys the plant seed varieties as monoculture industrialized agribusiness is introduced? At the same time they invest tens of millions of dollars to preserve every seed variety known in a bomb-proof doomsday vault near the remote Arctic Circle ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future’ to restate their official release?

It is no accident that the Rockefeller and Gates foundations are teaming up to push a GMO-style Green Revolution in Africa at the same time they are quietly financing the ‘doomsday seed vault’ on Svalbard. The GMO agribusiness giants are up to their ears in the Svalbard project.

Indeed, the entire Svalbard enterprise and the people involved call up the worst catastrophe images of the Michael Crichton bestseller, Andromeda Strain, a sci-fi thriller where a deadly disease of extraterrestrial origin causes rapid, fatal clotting of the blood threatening the entire human species. In Svalbard, the future world’s most secure seed repository will be guarded by the policemen of the GMO Green Revolution--the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, Syngenta, DuPont and CGIAR.

The Svalbard project will be run by an organization called the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT). Who are they to hold such an awesome trust over the planet’s entire seed varieties? The GCDT was founded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Bioversity International (formerly the International Plant Genetic Research Institute), an offshoot of the CGIAR.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is based in Rome. Its Board is chaired by Margaret Catley-Carlson a Canadian also on the advisory board of Group Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, one of the world’s largest private water companies. Catley-Carlson was also president until 1998 of the New York-based Population Council, John D. Rockefeller’s population reduction organization, set up in 1952 to advance the Rockefeller family’s eugenics program under the cover of promoting “family planning,” birth control devices, sterilization and “population control” in developing countries.

Other GCDT board members include former Bank of America executive presently head of the Hollywood DreamWorks Animation, Lewis Coleman. Coleman is also the lead Board Director of Northrup Grumman Corporation, one of America’s largest military industry Pentagon contractors.

Jorio Dauster (Brazil) is also Board Chairman of Brasil Ecodiesel. He is a former Ambassador of Brazil to the European Union, and Chief Negotiator of Brazil’s foreign debt for the Ministry of Finance. Dauster has also served as President of the Brazilian Coffee Institute and as Coordinator of the Project for the Modernization of Brazil’s Patent System, which involves legalizing patents on seeds which are genetically modified, something until recently forbidden by Brazil’s laws.

Cary Fowler is the Trust’s Executive Director. Fowler was Professor and Director of Research in the Department for International Environment & Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He was also a Senior Advisor to the Director General of Bioversity International. There he represented the Future Harvest Centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in negotiations on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources. In the 1990s, he headed the International Program on Plant Genetic Resources at the FAO. He drafted and supervised negotiations of FAO’s Global Plan of Action for Plant Genetic Resources, adopted by 150 countries in 1996. He is a past-member of the National Plant Genetic Resources Board of the US and the Board of Trustees of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, another Rockefeller Foundation and CGIAR project.

GCDT board member Dr. Mangala Rai of India is the Secretary of India’s Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE), and Director General of the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR). He is also a Board Member of the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), which promoted the world’s first major GMO experiment, the much-hyped ‘Golden Rice’ which proved a failure. Rai has served as Board Member for CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), and a Member of the Executive Council of the CGIAR.

Global Crop Diversity Trust Donors or financial angels include as well, in the words of the Humphrey Bogart Casablanca classic, ‘all the usual suspects.’ As well as the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, the Donors include GMO giants DuPont-Pioneer Hi-Bred, Syngenta of Basle Switzerland, CGIAR and the State Department’s energetically pro-GMO agency for development aid, USAID. Indeed it seems we have the GMO and population reduction foxes guarding the hen-house of mankind, the global seed diversity store in Svalbard. 8

Why now Svalbard?

We can legitimately ask why Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation along with the major genetic engineering agribusiness giants such as DuPont and Syngenta, along with CGIAR are building the Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic.

Who uses such a seed bank in the first place? Plant breeders and researchers are the major users of gene banks. Today’s largest plant breeders are Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and Dow Chemical, the global plant-patenting GMO giants. Since early in 2007 Monsanto holds world patent rights together with the United States Government for plant so-called ‘Terminator’ or Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT). Terminator is an ominous technology by which a patented commercial seed commits ‘suicide’ after one harvest. Control by private seed companies is total. Such control and power over the food chain has never before in the history of mankind existed.

This clever genetically engineered terminator trait forces farmers to return every year to Monsanto or other GMO seed suppliers to get new seeds for rice, soybeans, corn, wheat whatever major crops they need to feed their population. If broadly introduced around the world, it could within perhaps a decade or so make the world’s majority of food producers new feudal serfs in bondage to three or four giant seed companies such as Monsanto or DuPont or Dow Chemical.

That, of course, could also open the door to have those private companies, perhaps under orders from their host government, Washington, deny seeds to one or another developing country whose politics happened to go against Washington’s. Those who say ‘It can’t happen here’ should look more closely at current global events. The mere existence of that concentration of power in three or four private US-based agribusiness giants is grounds for legally banning all GMO crops even were their harvest gains real, which they manifestly are not.

These private companies, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical hardly have an unsullied record in terms of stewardship of human life. They developed and proliferated such innovations as dioxin, PCBs, Agent Orange. They covered up for decades clear evidence of carcinogenic and other severe human health consequences of use of the toxic chemicals. They have buried serious scientific reports that the world’s most widespread herbicide, glyphosate, the essential ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide that is tied to purchase of most Monsanto genetically engineered seeds, is toxic when it seeps into drinking water.9 Denmark banned glyphosate in 2003 when it confirmed it has contaminated the country’s groundwater.10

The diversity stored in seed gene banks is the raw material for plant breeding and for a great deal of basic biological research. Several hundred thousand samples are distributed annually for such purposes. The UN’s FAO lists some 1400 seed banks around the world, the largest being held by the United States Government. Other large banks are held by China, Russia, Japan, India, South Korea, Germany and Canada in descending order of size. In addition, CGIAR operates a chain of seed banks in select centers around the world.

CGIAR, set up in 1972 by the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation to spread their Green Revolution agribusiness model, controls most of the private seed banks from the Philippines to Syria to Kenya. In all these present seed banks hold more than six and a half million seed varieties, almost two million of which are ‘distinct.’ Svalbard’s Doomsday Vault will have a capacity to house four and a half million different seeds.

GMO as a weapon of biowarfare?

Now we come to the heart of the danger and the potential for misuse inherent in the Svalbard project of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller foundation. Can the development of patented seeds for most of the world’s major sustenance crops such as rice, corn, wheat, and feed grains such as soybeans ultimately be used in a horrible form of biological warfare?

The explicit aim of the eugenics lobby funded by wealthy elite families such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and others since the 1920’s, has embodied what they termed ‘negative eugenics,’ the systematic killing off of undesired bloodlines. Margaret Sanger, a rapid eugenicist, the founder of Planned Parenthood International and an intimate of the Rockefeller family, created something called The Negro Project in 1939, based in Harlem, which as she confided in a letter to a friend, was all about the fact that, as she put it, ‘we want to exterminate the Negro population.’ 11

A small California biotech company, Epicyte, in 2001 announced the development of genetically engineered corn which contained a spermicide which made the semen of men who ate it sterile. At the time Epicyte had a joint venture agreement to spread its technology with DuPont and Syngenta, two of the sponsors of the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault. Epicyte was since acquired by a North Carolina biotech company. Astonishing to learn was that Epicyte had developed its spermicidal GMO corn with research funds from the US Department of Agriculture, the same USDA which, despite worldwide opposition, continued to finance the development of Terminator technology, now held by Monsanto.

In the 1990’s the UN’s World Health Organization launched a campaign to vaccinate millions of women in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines between the ages of 15 and 45, allegedly against Tentanus, a sickness arising from such things as stepping on a rusty nail. The vaccine was not given to men or boys, despite the fact they are presumably equally liable to step on rusty nails as women.

Because of that curious anomaly, Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization became suspicious and had vaccine samples tested. The tests revealed that the Tetanus vaccine being spread by the WHO only to women of child-bearing age contained human Chorionic Gonadotrophin or hCG, a natural hormone which when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier stimulated antibodies rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. None of the women vaccinated were told.

It later came out that the Rockefeller Foundation along with the Rockefeller’s Population Council, the World Bank (home to CGIAR), and the United States’ National Institutes of Health had been involved in a 20-year-long project begun in 1972 to develop the concealed abortion vaccine with a tetanus carrier for WHO. In addition, the Government of Norway, the host to the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault, donated $41 million to develop the special abortive Tetanus vaccine. 12

Is it a coincidence that these same organizations, from Norway to the Rockefeller Foundation to the World Bank are also involved in the Svalbard seed bank project? According to Prof. Francis Boyle who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by the US Congress, the Pentagon is ‘now gearing up to fight and win biological warfare’ as part of two Bush national strategy directives adopted, he notes, ‘without public knowledge and review’ in 2002. Boyle adds that in 2001-2004 alone the US Federal Government spent $14.5 billion for civilian bio-warfare-related work, a staggering sum.

Rutgers University biologist Richard Ebright estimates that over 300 scientific institutions and some 12,000 individuals in the USA today have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare. Alone there are 497 US Government NIH grants for research into infectious diseases with biowarfare potential. Of course this is being justified under the rubric of defending against possible terror attack as so much is today.

Many of the US Government dollars spent on biowarfare research involve genetic engineering. MIT biology professor Jonathan King says that the ‘growing bio-terror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population.’ King adds, ‘while such programs are always called defensive, with biological weapons, defensive and offensive programs overlap almost completely.’ 13

Time will tell whether, God Forbid, the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Bank of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation is part of another Final Solution, this involving the extinction of the Late, Great Planet Earth.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7529

The World Bank study confirms what we wrote more than a year ago about the madness of bio-fuels. It fits the agenda described in the 1970’s by Henry Kissinger, namely,

‘If you control the food you control the people.’

According to the London Guardian newspaper which has been given a copy of the suppressed report, the World Bank study was completed in April, well before the June Rome Food Summit, but was deliberately suppressed as "embarrassing to the position of the Bush Administration."

The President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, is a former top Bush Administration official. Washington is trying to use a crisis which its bio-fuel subsidies created, since a new Farm bill passed in 2005, to advance the spread of Genetically Manipulated Organisms such as GMO maize, soybeans, rice and other crops patented by Monsanto and other "gene giants."

Their strategy is to use the explosive rise in grain prices worldwide, a rise fuelled by hedge funds and troubled US and European banks and investment funds pouring billions of dollars into speculation that grain prices will continue to soar.

In other words, the food "crisis" is a crisis of speculation in food futures.

The planned EU and USA bio-fuel acreage quotas and the periodic droughts and floods in key growing regions such as the USA Midwest then provide backdrop for speculative price run-ups.

But the main driver is that tens of millions of hectares of prime agriculture land in the world’s two largest food export regions - the USA and the EU - are being permanently removed from food production in order to grow raw material to be burned for vehicle fuel.

http://yajnacentre.blogspot.com/

It seems the powers-that-be are steering us into a Solylent Green or a 2001: Space Odyssey future where food as we know and enjoy it no longer exists. Gone will be our daily bread, to be replaced with some genetically engineered wafer. Potatoes will be gone too - and rice. And meat. Right now we're in the stage where they are villifying our basic foods and training people to no longer eat them. Next the farmers will no longer grow them.

The Atkins diet that is all the rage is an example of them changing peoples' mindsets and eating habits away from bread and potatoes. The mega-mega fast food outlets like MacDonalds are starting to push hamburgers without the bun. Same price, of course.

Meat is being phased out too, with attacks from various directions - the latest being Mad Cow, which gives them an excuse to destroy cattle and drive ranchers out of business, and Bird Flu, with the destruction of chickens.

This section of Orwell Today will be comprised of stories relating to the vilification and the elimination of food from our diets, toward which WEATHER CONTROL is a major component. ~ Jackie Jura

http://www.orwelltoday.com/bread.shtml







5/14/2009
THE rice harvest has been ravaged by both drought and flooding, with the NSW Riverina expected to deliver just 5 per cent of its normal output.

About 65,000 tonnes are expected to be harvested this year in the nation's rice growing heartland - down from 1.2 million tonnes in a typical year - while trial crops in northeast NSW have been destroyed by heavy rainfall. Mike Hedditch, from the ricegrower-owned company SunRice, said so far 56,000 tonnes of paddy had come in.

"We expect harvest to wrap up with receives of around 65,000 tonnes," he said.

Early forecasts for a 75,000-tonne crop in the Riverina were not realised, after a heatwave in February damaged flowering.

"That is a disappointment to the growers and to us, because we were hoping in another drought-affected year to maximise production through good management and (otherwise) good weather conditions," Mr Hedditch said.

But despite the poor conditions, this year's crop is bigger than last year's, when just 19,300 tonnes were harvested - the smallest crop since the industry began in 1928.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25459210-30417,00.html

In case you missed it that was a 95% reduction...

Winter Wheat: Production is forecast at 1.50 billion bushels, down 20 percent from 2008. Based on May 1 conditions, the U.S. yield is forecast at 44.2 bushels per acre, 3.0 bushels below last year. Expected grain area totals 34.0 million acres, down 14 percent from last year. Hard Red Winter (HRW) harvested acreage is down about 9 percent from the previous year. Soft Red Winter (SRW) harvested acreage is estimated to be down 30 percent from last year.

http://www.agweb.com/get_article.aspx?pageid=150944

In the United States, when people say “eat your veggies,” they are essentially urging you to take a bite out of California—or, more to the point, take a a big swig of its increasingly scarce water supply.

How much do we rely on California for fruits and veg? With its rich soils, variety of microclimates, long growing season, and huge geographical footprint, California should be a major ag producer—certainly a regional food-production hub for the southwest. But its sheer dominance of U.S. fruit and veg production (numbers from the the California Department of Food and Agriculture (PDF)) is dizzying.

The state produces 99 percent of the artichokes consumed in the U.S., half of asparagus , a fifth of cabbage, two-thirds of carrots, 86 percent of cauliflower, 93 percent of broccoli, and 95 percent of celery. Leafy greens? California’s got the market corned: 90 percent of the leaf lettuce we consume, along with and 83 percent of Romaine lettuce and 83 percent of fresh spinach, come from the big state on the left side of the map. Cali also cranks out a third of total fresh tomatoes consumed in the U.S. - and 95 percent of ones destined for cans and other processing purposes.

As for fruit, I get that 86 percent of lemons and a quarter of oranges come from there; its sunny climate makes it perfect for citrus, and these fruits store relatively well. Ninety percent of avaocados? Fine. But 84 percent of peaches? Eighty-six percent of fresh strawberries?

We in the other 49 states can do better. And will probably have to, soon. California’s most ag-centric counties, mostly clustered in the fertile Central Valley, are also its most heavily irrigated. And the Central Valley is locked in a three-year drought that shows no sign of easing up. From NPR:

California is in its third year of drought, and many farmers in the state’s crop-rich Central Valley are looking at dusty fields, or worse, are cutting down their orchards before the trees die.

Hardest hit is Westlands, the biggest irrigated region in the country, where much of the nation’s fruit, nuts and produce come from. This year, farmers have been told they are getting only a small fraction of the water they need.

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-05-12-drought-fish-veg/

http://www2.grist.org/files/CDFA_Sec2.pdf

Across northern California, livestock ranchers are being forced into making difficult choices due to the shortage of forage on ranchlands caused by three years of drought.

Some ranchers can't afford the extra cost of hay and are selling their cattle a year younger than they otherwise would, according to Kevin Devine, a spokesman for Shasta Livestock Auction Yard in Cottonwood.

"You can foresee that you're not going to have feed, so you cull," Devine said.

"It's the first time in 30 years we've had to feed hay in the winter months," said Prather Ranch manager Jim Rickert, who estimated that he spent an additional $30,000 in feed on his 1,500 cows.

Grass on the open range is a cheaper source of feed. But after three years of drought, it's not in abundance.

http://www.andersonvalleypost.com/news/2009/may/12/ranches-profits-evaporate/