Corruptie:
Europese Commissie maakt gemene zaak met Monsanto over toestaan
glyfosaat!
In
een uitgebreid schrijven toont William Engdahl aan (hij is economie onderzoeker,
historicus en journalist) dat Monsanto en de Europese Commissie
onder één hoedje hebben gespeeld, om glyfosaat, een onderdeel van
Monsanto's Roundup, op de EU markt te houden........
Voorts
toont Engdahl aan dat het onderzoek van Monsanto naar de effecten van
haar gif op de gezondheid, totaal onvoldoende was en dat een echt
wetenschappelijk onderzoek wel degelijk aantoont dat glyfosaat
kankerverwekkend is!!
Engdahl
spreekt zelfs onomwonden over corruptie: “In
this installment I want to share with you something I have written on
one of the most shocking corruption scandals in the history of a very
corrupt European Union Commission together with corruption by
Monsanto and the related GMO agribusiness industry”. Een Nederlandse wetenschapper, Harry Kuiper speelt ook een smerige rol in het geheel, deze plork pleit er voor de regulering op GMO zaden (o.a. van Monsanto en haar opkoper Bayer) te verzwakken en het gebruik van deze zaden toe te staan in de EU
Lees
over de hele smerige gang van zaken aangaande het toestatan van een
kankerverwekkend gif, dat ook jij al jaren binnenkrijgt, althans als je niet jouw producten in een ecologische levensmiddelenzaak, dan wel op een
ecologische groentemarkt kocht/koopt.....
Ten
overvloede blijkt nogmaals dat de overheid allesbehalve oog heeft
voor uw gezondheid en veiligheid, maar wel voor de financiële belangen
van (grote) bedrijven en aandeelhouders...... De overheid in deze, de Europese
Commissie, is ook nog eens een niet democratisch gekozen orgaan, waarin godbetert de enorme PvdA kwal Timmermans zitting heeft...... Moet
je nagaan: men geeft als excuus voor het geven van extreem hoge inkomens en onkostenvergoedingen in het EU parlement,
zoals die aan politici en nog hogere inkomens voor figuren als Timmermans, dat men
dan niet 'vattelijk' is voor corruptie.... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
Nogmaals: NEXIT NU!
Cancerous
rats, corruption and Terminator seeds
©
F. William Engdahl
The
Cancer of Corruption in Brussels
September
2012 a respected international scientific journal, Food
and Chemical Toxicology,
released a study by a team of scientists at France’s Caen
University led by Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini. The Seralini study
had been reviewed over a four-month period by a qualified group of
scientific peers for its methodology and was deemed publishable.
It
was no amateur undertaking but rather, the carefully-documented
results of tests on a group of 200 rats over a two-year life span,
with one group of non-GMO fed rats, a so-called control group, and
the other a group of GMO-fed rats.
Significantly,
following a long but finally successful legal battle to force
Monsanto to release the details of its own study of the safety of its
own NK603 maize, Seralini and colleagues reproduced a 2004 Monsanto
study published in the same journal and used by the European Food
Safety Authority (EFSA) for its 2009 positive evaluation of NK603.
Seralini’s
group based their experiment on the same protocol as the Monsanto
study but, critically, testing more parameters more frequently. And
the rats were studied for much longer—their full two year average
life-time instead of just 90 days in the Monsanto study. The long
time span proved critical. The first tumors only appeared 4 to7
months into the study. In industry's earlier 90-day study on the same
GMO maize Monsanto NK603, signs of toxicity were seen but were
dismissed as “not biologically meaningful” by industry and EFSA
alike. It seems they were indeed very biologically meaningful.
The
study was also done with the highest number of rats ever measured in
a standard GMO diet study. They tested “also for the first time 3
doses (rather than two in the usual 90 day long protocols) of the
Roundup-tolerant NK603 GMO maize alone, the GMO maize treated with
Roundup, and Roundup alone at very low environmentally relevant doses
starting below the range of levels permitted by regulatory
authorities in drinking water and in GM feed.” [1]
Their
findings were more than alarming. The Seralini study concluded, “In
females, all treated groups died 2–3 times more than controls, and
more rapidly. This difference was visible in 3 male groups fed GMOs.
All results were hormone and sex dependent, and the pathological
profiles were comparable. Females developed large mammary tumors
almost always more often than and
before
controls; the pituitary was the second most disabled organ; the sex
hormonal balance was modified by GMO and Roundup treatments. In
treated males, liver congestions and necrosis were 2.5–5.5 times
higher. This pathology was confirmed by optic and transmission
electron microscopy. Marked and severe kidney nephropathies were also
generally 1.3–2.3 greater. Males presented 4 times more large
palpable tumors than controls…” [2]
Four
times meant four hundred percent more large tumors in GMO fed rats
than in normally fed ones of the control group. Moreover, they
reported, “By the beginning of the 24th month, 50–80% of female
animals had developed tumors in all treated groups, with up to 3
tumors per animal, whereas only 30% of controls [non-GMO-fed—w.e.]
were affected. The Roundup treatment groups showed the greatest rates
of tumor incidence with 80% of animals affected with up to 3 tumors
for one female, in each group.” [3]
Such
alarming results had not yet become evident in the first 90 days, the
length of most all Monsanto and agrichemical industry tests to date,
a clear demonstration of how important it was to conduct longer-term
tests and apparently why the industry avoided the longer tests.
Seralini
and associates continued to document their alarming findings: “We
observed a strikingly marked induction of mammary tumors by R
(Roundup) alone, a major formulated pesticide, even at the very
lowest dose administered. R has been shown to disrupt aromatase which
synthesizes estrogens (Richard et al., 2005), but to also interfere
with estrogen and androgen receptors in cells (Gasnier et al., 2009).
In addition, R appears to be a sex endocrine disruptor in vivo, also
in males (Romano et al., 2010). Sex steroids are also modified in
treated rats. These hormone-dependent phenomena are confirmed by
enhanced pituitary dysfunction in treated females.” [4]
Roundup
herbicide, by terms of the license contract with Monsanto, must be
used on Monsanto and most other GMO seeds. The seeds are in fact
“modified” only to resist the weed-killing effect of Roundup, the
world’s largest-selling weed-killer.
In
plain language, as another scientific study noted, “GMO plants have
been modified to contain pesticides, either through herbicide
tolerance or by producing insecticides, or both, and could therefore
be considered as ‘pesticide plants’” [5]
Further,
“Roundup Ready crops [such
as Monsanto NK603 maize-w.e.]
have been modified in order to become insensitive to glyphosate. This
chemical, together with adjuvants in formulations, constitutes a
potent herbicide. It has been used for many years as a weed
killer…GMO plants exposed to glyphosate-based herbicides such as
Roundup…can even accumulate Roundup residues throughout their
life…Glyphosate and its main metabolite AMPA (with its own
toxicity) are found in GMOs on a regular and regulatory basis.
Therefore, such residues are absorbed by people eating most GMO
plants (as around 80% of these plants are Roundup tolerant).” [6]
Monsanto
had repeatedly refused scientific requests to publish the exact
chemicals used in its Roundup aside from one—glyphosate. They
argued that it was a “trade secret.” Independent analyses by
scientists indicated, however, that the combination of glyphosate
with Monsanto’s mystery added chemicals created a highly toxic
cocktail that was shown to toxically affect human embryo cells in
doses far lower than used in agriculture.[7]
Mammary
tumors that developed in rats fed GMO corn and/or low levels of
Roundup. From the paper "Long term toxicity of a Roundup
herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize,"
published in Food
and Chemical Toxicology.
What
was more than alarming in the context of that first long-term
independent study of the effects of a GMO diet on rats was that it
took place some twenty years after US President George H.W. Bush gave
the commercial release of GMO seeds the green light and mandated no
government safety tests before release. Bush did so following a
closed-door meeting with top officials of Monsanto Corporation, the
world’s largest GMO concern. The US President decreed that GMO
seeds were to be permitted in the United States with not one single
independent precautionary government test to determine if they were
safe for human or animal consumption. It became known as the Doctrine
of Substantial Equivalence, about which more in a subsequent chapter.
The EU Commission dutifully aped the US Substantial Equivalence
Doctrine of “hear no bad effects, see no bad effects…hear no
evil, see no evil.”
EFSA
‘science’ exposed
What
the Seralini study set off was the scientific equivalent of a
thermonuclear explosion. It exposed the fact that the EU “scientific”
controls on GMO were nothing other than accepting without question
the tests given them by Monsanto and the other GMO companies
themselves. As far as the irresponsible bureaucrats of the EU
Commission were concerned, when it came to GMO, the Monsanto fox
could indeed “guard the hen house.”
Suddenly,
with worldwide attention to the new Seralini results, the EU
Commission and its EFSA was under fire as never in their history. How
they reacted was worthy of a bad copy of an Agatha Christie murder
novel. Only it was no novel but a real-life conspiracy (yes,
Virginia, there are conspiracies in the real world…). The
conspiracy evidently involved some form of collusion between Monsanto
and the GMO agrichemical cartel, EU commissioners, the GMO panel
members of EFSA, complacent major media and several member
governments of the EU, including Spain and Holland.
The
Brussels EU scientific food regulatory organization, EFSA, was under
the gun from the damning results of the long-term Seralini study.
EFSA had recommended approval of Monsanto’s NK603 Roundup-tolerant
maize in 2009 without first conducting or insuring any independent
testing. They admitted in their official journal that they relied on
“information supplied by the applicant (Monsanto), the scientific
comments submitted by Member States and the report of the Spanish
Competent Authority and its Biosafety Commission.” EFSA also
admitted that the Monsanto tests on rats were for only 90 days.
Seralini’s group noted that the massive toxic effects and deaths of
GMO-fed rats took place well after 90 days, a reason why longer-term
studied were obviously warranted. [8]
The
Spanish report cited by EFSA was itself hardly convincing and was
anything but independent. It stated, “according to the current
state of scientific knowledge and after examining the existing
information and data provided by the Monsanto Company, the Spanish
Commission on Biosafety could give a favorable opinion to the
commercialization in the EU of maize NK603…” And the scientific
comments submitted by Member States seemed to include Spain and
Holland which applied to license the Monsanto seed in the first
place. [9]
The
EFSA concluded at the time of its approval in 2009 that, “the
molecular data provided [by
Monsanto-w.e.]
are sufficient and do not raise a safety concern.” The Brussels
scientific panel further declared amid scientific-sounding verbiage
that, “The EFSA GMO Panel is of the opinion that maize NK603 is as
safe as conventional maize. Maize NK603 and derived products are
unlikely to have any adverse effect on human and animal health in the
context of the intended uses.” [10]
Now,
in September 2012, three years after the commercial introduction of
Monsanto GMO maize in the EU, Seralini showed, complete with ghastly
photos, that Monsanto’s GMO maize demonstrably caused severe rates
of cancerous tumors and early death in rats.
The
EU Commission in Brussels had stated clear guidelines that were as
revealing for what they did not say as for what they did say about
what precautions are taken to insure public health and safety from
exposure to GMO plants and their paired toxic herbicides:
“Toxicological assessments on test animals are not explicitly
required for the approval of a new food in the EU or the US.
Independent experts have decided that in some cases, chemical
analyses of the food’s makeup are enough to indicate that the new
GMO is substantially equivalent to its traditional counterpart…In
recent years, biotech companies have tested their transgenic products
(maize, soy, tomato) before introducing them to the market on several
different animals over the course of up to 90 days. Negative effects
have not yet been observed.” [11]
Because
of US Government arm-twisting and of the obviously powerful lobby
power of the Monsanto-led GMO agrichemical lobby in the US and EU, as
of the time of the Seralini study, no regulatory authority in the
world had requested mandatory chronic animal feeding studies to
be performed for edible GMOs and formulated pesticides. The only
studies available were a tiny handful of 90 day rat feeding trials
carried out by the biotech industry and no studies longer than that,
apparently on the principle that conflict of interest in an area as
important as the safety of food should not be taken as a serious
matter.
Revealingly,
the EU stated publicly the following seemingly reassuring policy:
“GMO critics claim that feeding studies with authorized GMOs have
revealed negative health effects. Such claims have not been based on
peer-reviewed, scientifically accepted evaluations. If reliable,
scientific studies were to indicate any type of health risk, the
respective GMO would not receive authorization.” [12] That
was the EU official line until the 2012 Seralini bomb exploded in
their faces.
EU
Commission coverup
The
September 2012 Seralini study was peer-reviewed, and it was published
in a highly respected international scientific journal after such
review. What was the response of the EU Commission and the EFSA?
Nothing short of fraudulent deception and coverup of their corruption
by the Monsanto GMO lobby.
On
November 28, 2012, only a few weeks after the study was published,
EFSA in Brussels issued a press release with the following
conclusion: “Serious defects in the design and methodology of a
paper by Séralini et al. mean it does not meet acceptable scientific
standards and there is no need to re-examine previous safety
evaluations of genetically modified maize NK603.” Per
Bergman, who led EFSA’s work, said: “EFSA’s analysis has shown
that deficiencies in the Séralini et al. paper mean it is of
insufficient scientific quality for risk assessment. We believe the
completion of this evaluation process has brought clarity to the
issue.” [13] Nothing
could have been farther from the truth.
At
the very minimum, the precautionary principle in instances involving
even the potential for grave damage to the human population would
mandate that the EU Commission and its EFSA should order immediate
further serious, independent long-term studies to prove or disprove
the results of the Seralini tests. That refusal to re-examine its
earlier decision to approve Monsanto GMO maize, no matter what flaws
might or might not have been in the Seralini study, suggested the
EFSA might be trying to cover for the GMO agrichemical lobby at the
very least.
Instead
of clarity, the EFSA statement once more fed EFSA critics who had
long argued that the scientists on EFSA’s GMO Panel had blatant
conflicts of interest with the very GMO lobby they were supposed to
regulate. Corporate Europe Observer, an independent EU corporate
watchdog group noted about the EFSA response, “EFSA failed to
properly and transparently appoint a panel of scientists beyond any
suspicion of conflict of interests; and it failed to appreciate that
meeting with Europe's largest biotech industry lobby group to discuss
GMO risk assessment guidelines in the very middle of a EU review
undermines its credibility.” [14]
More
damaging for the shoddy EFSA coverup on behalf of Monsanto was the
fact that over half of the scientists involved in the GMO panel which
positively reviewed the Monsanto's study for GMO maize in 2009,
leading to its EU-wide authorization, had conflicts of interests with
the biotech industry.[15]
A
report by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) found that more than
half of the GMO panel experts who signed the approval had conflicts
of interest.
The
conflicts ranged from receiving research funding from the biotech
industry, being a member or collaborator in a pro-biotech industry
association, to writing or reviewing industry-sponsored publications.
Some conflicts revealed a conflict of scientific interests, with some
panel members involved in working on the creation of transgenic
plants – including potatoes – with antibiotic-resistant marker
genes – including nptII.[16]
Secondly,
although none of EFSA’s GMO panel members were medical experts in
the use of antibiotics in human medicine, they decided that neomycin
and kanamycin were antibiotics with “no or only minor therapeutic
relevance”. The World Health Organisation (WHO) classified these
antibiotics as “critically important” in 2005.
Dutch
scientist Harry Kuiper, chair of the EFSA GMO panel who had close
links to the biotech industry, played a key role in the framing of
this disputed key scientific advice.
Kuiper
himself was an open advocate of less controls on GMO seed
proliferation in the EU. He led the EFSA GMO panel since 2003, during
which time EFSA went from no GMO approvals to 38 GMO seeds approved
for human consumption. The criteria for approval were developed by
Kuiper for EFSA in cooperation with Monsanto and the GMO industry and
a Monsanto pseudo-scientific front group called ILSI, the
Washington-based International Life Sciences Institute, between 2001
and 2003. The board of the noble-sounding ILSI in 2011 was comprised
of senior people from Monsanto, ADM (one of the world’s biggest
purveyors of GMO soybeans and corn), Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods (major
proponent of GMO in foods) and Nestle, another giant GMO food
industry user. [17]
One
critic of the blatant conflict of interest in EFSA regulator in bed
with the industry whose practices he was mandated to objectively
assess noted, “During that period, Harry Kuiper and Gijes Kleter
(both members of the EFSA GMO Panel) were active within the ILSI Task
Force as experts and as authors of the relevant scientific
publications. It is a scandal that Kuiper has remained as Chair of
EFSA's GMO Panel since 2003, and that he is still Chair in spite of
the massive criticism directed at the Panel from NGOs and even from
the Commission and EU member states." [18]
The
brazen conflicts of interest between Monsanto and the agribusiness
lobby and the EFSA went further. In May 2012 Professor Diána Bánáti
was forced to resign as Chairman of the EFSA Management Board when it
was learned she planned to take up a professional position at the
Monsanto-backed International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) in
Washington. The same Diána Bánáti had been forced to resign, not
as EFSA chairman but as a simultaneous Board Member of ILSI in 2010.
Public interest groups made calls for her to resign from EFSA but to
no avail. [19] At
ILSI
she
would be able to use expertise and contacts gained from working for
the EFSA to help GMO companies like Monsanto and other food industry
companies influence policy across the world.
In
sum, it came as no surprise to those familiar with the notorious
“revolving door” in Brussels between the GMO industry and the
regulatory body entrusted with making independent decisions on the
risks of GMO in the EU, that EFSA condemned the Seralini study
results. Most telling however of the brazen pro-GMO industry bias of
EFSA’s GMO Panel members was the fact that the final ruling
statement by the EFSA GMO Panel reviewing Seralini’s results
announced, “Serious defects in the design and methodology of a
paper by Séralini et al. mean it does not meet acceptable scientific
standards and there is no need to re-examine previous safety
evaluations of genetically modified maize NK603.” [20]
The
EFSA was not the only source of blatant and reckless pro-GMO
sentiment in Brussels. Some weeks before release of the embarrassing
Seralini study, Anne Glover, chief scientific adviser of the EU
Commission, said in an interview on 24 July, 2012, "There is no
substantiated case of any adverse impact on human health, animal
health or environmental health, so that’s pretty robust evidence,
and I would be confident in saying that there is no more risk in
eating GMO food than eating conventionally farmed food." She
added that the precautionary principle also “no longer applies,”
which means the EU should not err on the side of caution on the
approval of GMOs—equivalent of a “damn the torpedoes, full speed
ahead with GMO” stance despite polls showing some 60% to 80% of EU
citizens opposed to GMO.[21]
Were
there any pretense of scientific responsibility in the clearly
corrupt EFSA panel, or Professor Glover’s office, they would have
immediately called for multiple, independent similar long-term rat
studies to confirm or disprove the Seralini results. They and the
Monsanto GMO lobby influencing them clearly had no desire to do
anything but try to slander the Seralini group with vague accusations
and hope the obedient international media would take the headline and
close the embarrassing story. It was typical of the entire history of
the spread of patented GMO seeds and paired toxic herbicides like
Roundup.
Pushing
GMO on Africans
Some
years before the EFSA scandalous ruling, Monsanto had launched a
major project to push its patented GMO seeds and chemicals on unwary
or corruptible African governments. It was called the Alliance for a
Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). The Rockefeller and Bill Gates
foundations backing the scheme managed to get former UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan, a man with a known bent to corruption, to become
the head of the AGRA.[22] A
black African was reportedly chosen to overcome criticism among
African states that AGRA was a white man’s neo-colonial effort. It
was, but now with a face from a black African.
In
2006, the Rockefeller Foundation put up $50 million of initial
funding toward the project and the Gates Foundation put up $150
million, the largest single grant of the Gates foundation worldwide
that year. The stated focus of AGRA was to increase crop production,
which involved the same harmful industrialized farming practices
including heavy pesticide use, planting of GMO crops, and training of
African scientists and farmers to spread that model throughout the
continent.
AGRA,
as it called itself, was an alliance again with the same Rockefeller
Foundation which created the “Gene Revolution.” A look at the
AGRA Board of Directors confirmed the fact. In addition to former UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan as chairman, the board numbered almost
exclusively people from the Rockefeller or Gates foundations such as
South African, Strive Masiyiwa, a Trustee of the Rockefeller
Foundation, Sylvia M. Mathews of the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation; Rajiv J. Shah of the Gates Foundation; Nadya K.
Shmavonian of the Rockefeller Foundation; Roy Steiner of the Gates
Foundation; Gary Toenniessen the Managing Director of the Rockefeller
Foundation and Akinwumi Adesina, Associate Director, Rockefeller
Foundation.
The
new Africa Green Revolution was clearly a high priority of the
Rockefeller Foundation. [23]How
that fit the decades-long eugenics strategy of the same Rockefeller
Foundation will become clearer during the course of this book.
While
they tried hard to keep a low profile, Monsanto and the major GMO
agribusiness giants were accused by researchers of using 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 was 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
was the next target after the EU in a US-government campaign to
spread GMO worldwide. Its rich soils made it an ideal candidate. Not
surprisingly many African governments suspected the worst from the
GMO sponsors as a multitude of genetic engineering and biosafety
projects had been initiated in Africa, with the aim of introducing
GMOs into Africa’s agricultural systems. They included 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 had been working for years to promote, largely
without success, projects to introduce GMOs into the fields of
Africa. They backed research that supports the applicability of GMO
cotton in the Makhathini Flats in South Africa.
Green
Revolution?
The
decision by the Rockefeller Foundation to name their project Alliance
for a Green Revolution in Africa was both calculated Public Relations
and revealing. The original mis-named Green Revolution, developing
hybrid sorts of dwarf wheat in Mexico and later India during the
1960’s had also been a Rockefeller Foundation project. Norman
Borlaug came from his post as a research scientist with the
Rockefeller University to Mexico to develop his wheat varieties. For
the Rockefeller’s the original Green Revolution was an attempt to
organize a global agribusiness monopoly structure based on their
experience with oil. Along with Borlaug’s wonder wheat strains came
large-scale mechanization of the land in Mexico, introduction of
chemical fertilizers and pesticides and a linking of Mexican
agriculture with a global grain market controlled by Archer Daniels
Midland, Cargill and other grain cartel giants close to the
Rockefellers. [24]
Now
the same Rockefeller circles wanted to globalize into their worldwide
agribusiness food chain the incredibly rich land and food potentials
of Africa and use the project to spread their patented GMO seeds via
the back door. AGRA was being used to create networks of
“agro-dealers” across Africa, at first with no mention of GMO
seeds or herbicides, in order to have the infrastructure in place to
massively introduce GMO later.[25]
Monsanto,
which had a strong foothold in South Africa’s seed industry, both
GMO and hybrid, conceived of an ingenious smallholders’ program
known as the ‘Seeds of Hope’ Campaign, introducing a green
revolution package to small scale poor farmers, followed, of course,
by Monsanto’s patented GMO seeds. Syngenta AG of Switzerland,
one of the ‘Four Horsemen of the GMO Apocalypse’ was pouring
millions of dollars into a new greenhouse facility in Nairobi, to
develop GMO insect resistant maize. [26]
The
collusion of the Gates Foundation with Monsanto Corporation was no
accident. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation itself was one of the
largest owners of stock shares in Monsanto and AGRA itself also
purchased 500,000 stock shares in Monsanto stocks, proof of that
close relationship. [27]
Despite
many words by Gates officials since the inception of the AGRA agenda
denying that GMO seeds would be used as part of AGRA, their close
relationship with Monsanto had been uncovered as a key element in
their agronomic “new green revolution” strategy, more
appropriately called Alliance for a GMO Revolution in Africa. The
Gates Foundation gave at least $264 million as of 2011 in grants to
AGRA and hired Dr. Robert Horsch, a former Monsanto executive who
developed Roundup, to head up AGRA.[28]
Gates
Family Eugenics Agenda
Bill
Gates and his Gates Foundation, contrary to their well-cultivated
public image as philanthropic, had an evident and clear eugenics
agenda for Africa, and it evidently included a large role for
Monsanto’s patented seeds.
Gates,
along with billionaire banker David Rockefeller and a handful of
other billionaires created something they called the “Good Club”
at the home of the President of the Rockefeller University in New
York in May 2009. Its aim, according to press reports was to impose a
global series of programs to reduce population—in other words
eugenics.[29]
Moreover,
the chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill’s
father, William H. Gates Sr., had been head of the
Rockefeller-financed eugenics group Planned Parenthood, an
organization spawned from the American Eugenics Society.[30]
In
a 2010 Long Beach California TED conference, Bill Gates himself spoke
enthusiastically of new vaccines that would reduce the planet’s
birth rate. In his titled, “Innovating to Zero!,” along with his
scientifically absurd proposition of reducing manmade CO2 emissions
worldwide to zero by 2050, approximately four and a half minutes into
the talk, Gates declared, ‘First we got population. The world today
has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about 9 billion. Now if
we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive
health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.’ [31]
As
one critic described the Monsanto and Gates focus on Africa through
AGRA, “African governments are much weaker and easier to persuade
than the governments of Europe to allow for GMO crops to be
introduced into their countries. Public awareness of the threats of
GMOs has been slower to develop in Africa, and the democratic
processes of citizen advocacy weaker.” [32]
Africa
was also the focus for a great global land grab by private companies
from the USA to China in search of some of the planet’s richest
fertile soil. It has been estimated that were proper farming
techniques using purely organic methods, without chemicals introduced
across Africa the Continent could feed ten billion people. Were
Africa to fall to the spread of patented GMO seeds as USA and
Argentina had done, the powerful interests behind the creation of GMO
would have reached a major advance in their global agenda to control
the seeds of life on the planet.
Patrick
Mulvany the head of a UK watchdog organization, UK Food Group,
identified the strong interest of Monsanto and US-dominated
agribusiness in Africa: “Agribusiness corporations see smallholder
farmers of the developing world as only representing an opportunity
for securing supplies of food at relatively cheap prices, using cheap
labor and, most importantly, as representing a burgeoning market for
proprietary agrochemicals, compliant GMO seeds and fertilisers."
Mulvany added, "There are opportunities for smallholders to
sustain a strong and vibrant bio-diverse food system using
agro-ecological approaches … yet the only value for agribusiness
are the chains which bind the food serfs to the food barons."[33]
Monsanto’s
‘Terminator’ Project
The
United States Government had been financing research since 1983 on a
genetic engineering technology which, when commercialized, would give
its owners the power to control the food seed of entire nations or
regions. Research grants from the US Department of Agriculture went
to a tiny company in Mississippi, Delta & Pine Land. In 2007
Monsanto completed a successful takeover of Delta and Pine Land in a
move that confirmed there was truly a darker agenda behind Monsanto’s
GMO engagement than “feeding the world’s hungry.”
The
takeover of the small Mississippi company in 2007 by Monsanto was
significant because Delta and Pine Land, together with the US
Government, jointly held the patent on what popularly was called
“Terminator” technology, or by its scientific name, Genetic Use
Restriction Technology (GURT).
For
almost a quarter century, since 1983, the US Government had quietly
been working to perfect a genetically engineered technique whereby
farmers would be forced to turn to their seed supplier each harvest
to get new seeds. The seeds would only produce one harvest. After
that the seeds from that harvest would commit ‘suicide’ and be
unusable—a high-tech new serfdom.
The
patented Monsanto ‘suicide’ seeds, officially termed GURTs
(Genetic Use Restriction Technologies), represented an unprecedented
threat to poor farmers in developing countries like India, Nigeria or
Brazil, who traditionally saved their own seeds for the next
planting. In fact, GURTs, more popularly referred to as Terminator
seeds for the brutal manner in which they kill off plant reproduction
possibilities, was a threat to the food security as well of North
America, Western Europe, Japan and anywhere Monsanto and its elite
cartel of GMO agribusiness partners enters a market.
In
March 1998 the US Patent Office granted Patent No. 5,723,765 to Delta
& Pine Land for a patent titled, Control of Plant Gene
Expression. The patent was owned jointly, according to Delta &
Pine’s Security & Exchange Commission 10K filing, ‘by D&PL
and the United States of America, as represented by the Secretary of
Agriculture.’ To quote further from the official D&PL SEC
filing, ‘The patent broadly covers all species of plant and seed,
both transgenic (GMO-ed) and conventional, for a system designed to
allow control of progeny seed viability without harming the
crop’(sic).’ [34]
D&PL
claimed, ‘One application of the technology could be to control
unauthorized planting of seed of proprietary varieties…by making
such a practice non-economic since non-authorized saved seed will not
germinate, and, therefore, would be useless for planting.’ D&PL
calls the thousand-year-old tradition of farmer-saved seed by the
pejorative term, ‘brown bagging’ as though it is something dirty
and corrupt.
Translated
into lay language, D&PL declared the purpose of its Patent
No. 5,723,765, Control of Plant Gene Expression, was to prevent
farmers who once get trapped into buying GMO seeds from Monsanto from
‘brown bagging’ or being able to break free of control of their
future crops by Monsanto and friends. As D&PL puts it, their
patent gives them ‘the prospect of opening significant worldwide
seed markets to the sale of transgenic (GMO-w.e.) technology in
varietal crops in which crop seed currently is saved and used in
subsequent seasons as planting seed.’[35]
Terminator
was the answer to the agribusiness dream of controlling world food
production. No longer would Monsanto need to hire expensive
detectives to spy on whether farmers were re-using Monsanto or other
GMO patented seed. Terminator corn or soybeans or cotton seeds could
be genetically modified to ‘commit suicide’ after one harvest
season. The technology would be a means of enforcing Monsanto or
other GMO patent rights, and forcing payment of farmer use fees not
only in developing economies, where patent rights were,
understandably, little respected, but also in industrial OECD
countries.
With
Terminator patent rights, once a country such as Argentina or Brazil
or Iraq or the USA or Canada opened its doors to the spread of GMO
patented seeds among its farmers, their food security would be
hostage to a private multinational company which, for whatever
reasons, especially given its intimate ties to the US Government,
might decide to use ‘food as a weapon’ to compel a US-friendly
policy from that country or group of countries.
If
it sounded implausible that the US Government would back such a
private and dangerous seed technology, one needed only go back to
what Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did in countries like
Allende’s Chile to force a regime change to a ‘US-friendly’
Pinochet dictatorship by withholding USAID and private food exports
to Chile. Kissinger dubbed it ‘food as a weapon.’ Terminator was
merely the logical next step in food weapon technology.
The
role of the US Government in backing and financing Delta & Pine
Land’s decades of Terminator research is even more revealing. As
Kissinger said back in the 1970’s, ‘Control the oil and you can
control entire Continents. Control food and you control people…’
In
a June 1998 interview, USDA spokesman, Willard Phelps, defined the US
Government policy on Terminator seeds. He explained that USDA wanted
the technology to be ‘widely licensed and made expeditiously
available to many seed companies.’ He meant agribusiness GMO giants
like Monsanto, DuPont or Dow. The USDA was open about their reasons:
They wanted to get Terminator seeds into the developing world where
the Rockefeller Foundation had made eventual proliferation of
genetically engineered crops the heart of its GMO strategy from the
beginnings of its rice genome project in 1984.
USDA’s
Phelps stated that the US Government’s goal in fostering the widest
possible development of Terminator technology was ‘to increase the
value of proprietary seed owned by US seed companies and to open up
new markets in Second and Third World countries.’ [36]
Under
WTO rules on free trade in agriculture, countries are forbidden to
impose their own national health restrictions on GMO imports if it is
deemed to be an ‘unfair trade barrier.’ It begins to become clear
why it was the US Government and US agribusiness which during the
late 1980’s pushed at the GATT Uruguay Round for creation of a
World Trade Organization, with its supranational arbitrary powers
over world agriculture trade. It all fits into a neat picture of
patented seeds, forced on reluctant WTO member nations, under threat
of WTO sanctions, and now of Terminator or suicide seeds.
Monsanto
Terminator deception
What
was so attractive about Delta & Pine Land that Monsanto made a
second bid to add it to its global genetically-engineered seeds
empire?
It
was the patent that Delta & Pine Land, together with the US
Government, held Patent No. 5,723,765, titled, Control of Plant Gene
Expression. The USDA through its Agricultural Research Service
(USDA-ARS) worked with Delta & Pine Land since 1983 to perfect
Terminator GMO technology. Patent No. 5,723,765 was the patent for
Terminator technology.
In
early 1999 Monsanto, the largest producer of GMO seeds and related
agri-chemicals, announced it was acquiring Delta & Pine Land
along with Delta’s Terminator patents.
In
October 1999, however, following a worldwide storm of protest against
Terminator seeds that threatened the very future of the Rockefeller
Foundation’s ‘Gene Revolution’ Dr. Gordon Conway, President of
the Rockefeller Foundation, met privately with the Board of Directors
of Monsanto. Conway convinced Monsanto that for the long-term future
of their GMO Project, they must go public to indicate to a worried
world that it would not ‘commercialize’ Terminator.
The
Anglo-Swiss Syngenta joined with Monsanto in declaring solemnly that
they would also not “commercialize” their work on GURTS or
Terminator suicide seed technology.
That
1999 announcement took enormous pressure off of Monsanto and the
agribusiness GMO giants, allowing them to advance the proliferation
of their patented GMO seeds globally. Terminator would come later,
once farmers and entire national agriculture areas like North America
or Argentina or India had been taken over by GMO crops. Then, of
course, it would be too late. Despite the Monsanto declaration of a
moratorium on Terminator development, the US Government and Delta &
Pine Land refused to drop their Terminator development.
In
2000, a year after the Monsanto Terminator moratorium announcement,
the Clinton Administration’s USDA Secretary, Dan Glickman, refused
repeated efforts by various agriculture and NGO organizations to drop
the Government’s support for Terminator or GURTs. His Department’s
excuse for not dropping support for the work with Delta & Pine
Land was that it allowed the US Government to put ‘leverage’ on
D&PL to ‘protect the public interest.’
Delta
Vice President, Harry Collins, declared at the time in a press
interview in the Agra/Industrial Biotechnology Legal Letter, ‘We’ve
continued right on with work on the Technology Protection System (TPS
or Terminator). We never really slowed down. We’re on target,
moving ahead to commercialize it. We never really backed off.’ [37]
Nor
did their partner, the United States Department of Agriculture, back
down on Terminator after 1999. In 2001 the USDA Agricultural Research
Service (ARS) website announced: ‘USDA has no plans to introduce
TPS into any germplasm…Our involvement has been to help develop the
technology, not to assist companies to use it.’ They went on to say
the USDA was, ‘committed to making the [Terminator] technology as
widely available as possible, so that its benefits will accrue to all
segments of society (sic)…ARS intends to do research on other
applications of this unique gene control discovery…When new
applications are at the appropriate stage of development, this
technology will also be transferred to the private sector for
commercial application.’[38]
In
2001, the USDA and Delta & Pine executed a Commercialization
Agreement for Terminator, its infamous Patent No. 5,723,765. The
Government and Delta & Pine Land were not at all concerned about
worldwide outcry against Terminator.
The
key scientific member of the Delta & Pine Land board since 1993,
Dr. Nam-Hai Chua was also head of the Rockefeller University Plant
Molecular Biology Laboratory in New York, and had been for over 25
years, the labs which are at the heart of the Rockefeller
Foundation’s decades-long development, and spending of more than
$100 millions of its own research grants to create their GMO
Revolution. Until 1995, Chua was also a scientific consultant to
Monsanto Corporation, as well as to DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred
International. Chua was at the heart of Rockefeller’s Gene
Revolution. And their development of Terminator was in the center of
that work. [39]
This
vast global network combined with Monsanto’s dominant position in
the GMO seeds and agri-chemicals market along with the unique DP&L
Patent No. 5,723,765, Control of Plant Gene Expression, now gave
Monsanto and its close friends in Washington an enormous advance in
their plans to dominate world food and plant seed use. It was an
ominous goal and the US Government implemented it ruthlessly as the
2003 military occupation of Iraq was to prove.[40]
[1] Seralini
et al., Op. Cit.
[5] Gilles-Eric
Seralini et al, Genetically
modified crops safety assessments: present limits and possible
improvements,
Environmental Sciences Europe 2011, 23:10, accessed
inhttp://www.enveurope.com/content/23/1/10.
[7] Aris,
A., Leblanc, S., Maternal
and fetal exposure to pesticides associated to genetically modified
foods in Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada,
Reproductive Toxicology, 2011 May;31(4):528-33. Epub 2011 Feb 18.
[8] European
Food Safety Authority (EFSA), Scientific
Opinion of the Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms on
applications (EFSA-GMO-NL-2005-22 and EFSA-GMO-RX-NK603) for the
placing on the market of the genetically modified glyphosate
tolerant maize NK603 for cultivation, food and feed uses and import
and processing, and for renewal of the authorisation of maize NK603
as existing product, The
EFSA Journal (2009) 1137, 1-50.
[14] Corporate
Europe Observatory, Op. Cit.
[24] Cf.
Kapitel 9, pp. 172-187.
[29] F.
William Engdahl, Secret
Good Club holds first meeting in New York,
2 June 2009.
[30] PBS, Transcript
Bill Moyers Interviews Bill Gates,
May 9, 2003, accessed in
Hier het boek dat Engdahl over deze zaak schreef:
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