• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • 1
    CommentGo Back
Download
 
interview
 The Seed Barons
How Big Ag, Big Oil & Big GovernmentAre Hijacking the World’s Food Supply
ACRES U.S.A.
What is your background,and how did it lead you to where you aretoday?
F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL.
I’ve been work-ing as an economic researcher, historianand freelance journalist for some 35 years,initially in New York, then in Europe for agood part of the last five years or so. Backin the 1970s when the United States wasgoing through the so-called energy crisiswith the first oil shock in 1973-74 and thenthe second one in the end of the 1970s, I gotinterested in the power of Big Oil and begandoing research on the networks of influencearound the Seven Sisters oil companies.I got quite involved with that and wentrather often to Texas, and was invited by independent oil associations throughout theSouthwest because of my writings about theissues affecting independent oil versus themultinational companies. That led me intoan approach to understanding these prob-lems through history. I was asked back inthe early 1990s by a small German publisherif I would consider writing a book on thehistory of oil. This was actually during thefirst Iraq war, in 1991. I blocked out sometime and began researching a book that laterbecame
 A Century of War.
I ended up goingway back into the 1880s and the origin of the British oil-fired naval fleet — the RoyalNavy, which was a project instituted by Winston Churchill when he was First Lordof the Admiralty.
 A Century of War 
tracedwhat I call a thin red line that connectssome of the major events in the history of the last hundred or more years, right downto the present, including the United Statesand Iraq and the threats against Iran, thetensions between China and the UnitedStates over Sudan, Darfur, and so forth. Thecontrol of oil became a centerpiece of U.S.power projection in the world, especially after World War II. There’s a quote fromHenry Kissinger in the mid-1970s — hesaid if you control oil you are able to controlwhole nations, and if you control food youare able to control the people.
ACRES U.S.A.
How did you cross over intothe biotech issue?
ENGDAHL.
Around the mid-1980s my jour-nalistic assignments brought me to the wholequestion of the Global Agreement on Tariffsand Trade. I spent a lot of time going backand forth to Brussels, where the Europeanfarm organizations are headquartered andalso the European Economic Community, asit was called in the 1980s, now the EuropeanUnion. As I had done with oil, I investigated
F. William Engdahl is an American based in Germany who is now doing some of the most aggres-sive writing and reporting on genetically modified food. As he explains in the conversation that fol-lows, he came to the topic after many years of delving into the history, science and politics of energy,specifically multinational oil companies. His 2004 book,
A Century of War: Anglo-AmericanPolitics and the New World Order,
was a bestseller, and Engdahl contributes articles to
AsiaTimes, FinancialSense.com, Asia Inc., GlobalResearch.com, 321Gold.com,
Japan’s
Nihon KeizaiShimbun
and
Foresight
magazine, among others. Engdahl’s energy expertise turns out be ideal  preparation for the biotech wars, another realm governed by huge, shadowy transnational entitieswith the power to affect millions of lives. Working at a distance from the American activist/liberal community, Engdahl speaks with a refreshing lack of received opinion. He does not, for example,subscribe to the global warming consensus; a topic we elected to take up at another time, the better to concentrate on genetic engineering and the price of oil.
F. WilliamEngdahl 
Reprinted from June 2008 • Vol. 38, No. 6
 
interview
how the grain markets worked. I found,quite to my surprise and fascination, thatthe international grain market and theagricultural policies in Brussels, suppos-edly an autonomous entity represent-ing the interests of European farmersand consumers, were controlled by 
thesame people who controlled U.S. foreign policy 
. And that was the so-called graincartel, the four or five largest companies— Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (inthose days you had Continental Grain)— and they had enormous lobbyinginfluence in Brussels to dictate crucialfarm policies that were favorable to theirinterests. I had been looking at the ques-tion of the GATT Uruguay Round andthe emergence of agribusiness. Aboutfive or six years ago I began going backto that work I’d done in the 1980s. Ibegan looking into the whole questionof genetically modified organisms andthe patenting of plants. Without really having gone into the biology and thebackground of it at that point, whatalarmed me in a gut way was the fact thatthe decisive patents — a monopoly overcrucial feed grains, soybeans, corn and soforth — were at that time held by threeor four global multinational corpora-tions — Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, andthe fourth would probably be Syngentaof Basel, Switzerland, which is really amerger of Swiss, Swedish and ultimately British biochemical entities. Those threeor four corporations, as I saw the trendsfive or six years ago, were in a positionto literally patent and potentially controlthe seedstock of the entire human racewithin a decade or so at the rate they were going. Three of the four companiesthat could amass such power, DuPont,Dow Chemical and Monsanto, had atro-cious histories concerning public safety going back to Vietnam War — AgentOrange and dioxin contamination of their own employees in documentedcases over decades, for example, and thehiding of those facts. The fact that they had such influence on U.S. policy con-cerning genetic manipulation of plantswas really an alarm signal that motivatedme to begin the research that emergedin my book
Seeds of Destruction: TheHidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
,which was recently been released by Global Research in Canada and is avail-able in the United States as well.
ACRES U.S.A.
Where do we stand nowwith Monsanto and DuPont’s efforts tocontrol the global market? Where did your book end up, and what’s happenedsince you finished work on it?
ENGDAHL.
I would say the most dra-matic event since then is the recentopening of what the BBC called theDoomsday Seed Vault in Spitsbergen,almost to the Arctic Circle, in a chunkof rock that’s claimed by the Norwegiangovernment. They have created a globalseed bank which is to have samplesof every seed variety on the face of the earth stored away in a vault deepinside this mountain that is supposed tobe invulnerable or impenetrable to any kind of catastrophe, including nuclearattack. The curious thing about this seedvault is that it is being sponsored by whatI call the gene giants or the four horse-men of apocalypse, these corporationsthat are promoting the patenting of lifeforms through GMOs, and I suspect thatcannot be an innocent venture. We haveseed banks that preserve seed varieties
insitu
in crucial places around the world.We used to have one in Abu Ghraib inIraq, but after the U.S. occupation itsimply disappeared. Nobody in Iraq wasable to trace what happened to it. It wasprobably bombed into extinction. Butthere are those seed banks in crucialplaces. There’s one in Syria for wheatvarieties that are essential to the world,and there are seed banks for corn ormaize varieties in Mexico in the Oaxacaarea. As the book was being finishedand put into print in 2006, I updated itwith the dramatic move by Monsanto toacquire a small, relatively unknown com-pany in Mississippi, Delta & Pine Land.Along with D&PL, they acquired world-wide patent rights to something that’scalled in the popular press “Terminatortechnology,” which, crudely put, causes asuicide in the seed of a plant containingthis technology within one harvest year.You have one harvest and then the plantis unable to reproduce, so farmers can’tsave seeds for the next harvest as they’vedone for thousands of years, meaningthat farmers who lock into these patent-ed corn or soybean or other Monsantoseeds will be permanently indentured tothe company and have to pay license feesto get new seeds and plant anything.
ACRES U.S.A.
But Monsanto has saidthey won’t use that technology, haven’tthey?
ENGDAHL.
Monsanto was very decep-tive in claiming they would not commer-cialize Terminator technology. Delta &Pine Land held the patent to Terminator,but what’s even more alarming is theco-patent holder for the technology was none other than the United StatesDepartment of Agriculture — the U.S.government! And while Monsanto heldthis pious press conference in an earlierattempt to acquire D&PL in 1999 andannounced they were not going to com-mercialize Terminator, the Departmentof Agriculture defiantly said, “Well, we’regoing ahead with our research and goingto work with Delta & Pine Land fullsteam ahead,” which they did. That leadsone to question what the motives of the U.S. government have been, at leastin the period since 2000 up until the
“The curious thing about this seed vault is that itis being sponsored by what I call the gene giants orthe our horsemen o apocalypse, these corporationsthat are promoting the patenting o lie ormsthrough GMOs, and I suspect that cannot be aninnocent venture.”
Reprinted from June 2008 • Vol. 38, No. 6
 
interview
present, because the USDA is still actively engaged in research projects supportingTerminator.
ACRES U.S.A.
And what
are
themotives?
ENGDAHL.
Some people, myself includ-ed, think that there’s a much more sinis-ter agenda to this genetically modifiedexpansion of seeds around the world.Going back to the Kissinger statementfrom the 1970s, it means the ability tocontrol vital elements of the human foodchain. Soybeans are essential to feed-stock these days for mainstream cattleand most animal husbandry, corn aswell, rice — there are several strains of rice that have been genetically modifiedand patented, and of course rice is thefeedstock for about 40 percent of theworld’s population, mainly in Asia. Themove to control these essential seeds thatare vital to the food chain is somethingin itself, but then if you combine it withthe fact that the U.S. government, since1992 when George H.W. Bush met withMonsanto in a private meeting in theWhite House and afterwards signed adirective saying that genetically modi-fied plants are substantially equivalentto standard plants. This was the infa-mous
substantial equivalence doctrine
,that GMOs were substantially equivalentto normal corn or soybeans or cotton,therefore we need no special govern-ment safety oversight or independenttesting of genetically modified plants.To my mind this was one of the mostlunatic and dangerous steps by any gov-ernment official perhaps in the entirehistory of the United States. If you thinkabout it for a minute, at the same timeMonsanto, et al., were claiming that theirpatented corn or patented soybeans ortheir rBGH hormone for milk produc-tion were unique because they had shotthem with some bacillus or some fungusor lord knows what, and changed theDNA of the plant in question. Thereforethey’re claiming their gene cannons hadmade the resulting product
unique,
andat the same time they’re saying that it’s
not 
unique, it’s just like other corn orsoybeans or whatever. Within this con-tradiction, there is a very, very, very ugly history of Monsanto and governmentin collusion to simply have no effectiveregulation or oversight to this day of what goes into the human food chain interms of genetically modified products.
ACRES U.S.A.
Has the Bush era givenbiotech corporations the window they needed to disarm regulatory authority?
ENGDAHL.
There virtually are no con-trols. There have been since 1992 nogovernment controls, not from the Foodand Drug Administration, not from theUSDA. None of the government agenciesthat ought to be monitoring these thingsand conducting completely independenttests are doing so. Monsanto sends itstop people in to become the key pointperson in the FDA or relevant agen-cies and then they go back out of thegovernment service after they’ve donewhat Monsanto would like to have themdo and go right back into Monsanto.Mickey Kantor, Bill Clinton’s U.S. TradeRepresentative, did many, many nicefavors for Monsanto in terms of globaltrade negotiations, and then left govern-ment and went right into the Board of Directors of Monsanto.
ACRES U.S.A.
Did their major accom-plishment during this administrationconsist of reinforcing the status quo of no regulation, heading it off?
ENGDAHL.
Well, there is no regulation.What’s more, the present administra-tion has gone out of its way to pushGMO on countries — Iraq, for example.Monsanto wrote what is called Order81 when Paul Bremer was what somepeople called the proconsul in Baghdadafter 2003. The U.S. government gener-ously gave the Iraqis a hundred ordersand they were
orders
— this is what you’ll do. Order 81, in violation of theIraqi constitution, insisted that patentedplants be recognized under Iraqi law andthat if someone decided to get a hold of Monsanto GMO seeds and plant them,he could be forced to pay license fees toMonsanto. The recognition under Iraqilaw of genetically modified seeds wasbrought in by the United States back in2004.
ACRES U.S.A.
What does the creationof this Arctic seed vault tell us about thegeopolitical ambitions of the major graincompanies, the major food powers?
ENGDAHL.
I think the Doomsday Vaultis a useful way to focus people’s attentionon what’s going on with these things.To spend millions of dollars on such aremote and ostensibly useless projectreally brings into question what the BillGates Foundation is doing together withthe Rockefeller Foundation, togetherwith the Norwegian government andSyngenta Foundation and Monsanto upin the Arctic Circle? What are they sav-ing these seeds for? Some people thinkthey’re storing them away either to allowthe GMO companies to get their hands
“It’s against the law to label your ood product ascontaining GMOs, so most Americans have no ideathat about 60 or 70 percent o their daily diet isgenetically modifed.”“They’re claiming their gene cannons made theresulting product
unique,
and at the same timethey’re saying that it’s
 not 
unique, it’s just like othercorn or soybeans or whatever.”
Reprinted from June 2008 • Vol. 38, No. 6
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...