Putting Profits Before Populations
by Ellen Brown
The Web of Debt Blog (November 26 2013)
“Control oil and you control nations”, said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. “Control food and you control the people”.
Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.
Profits Before Populations
Genetic engineering has made proprietary control possible over the seeds on which the world’s food supply depends. According to an Acres USA interview {1} of plant pathologist Don Huber, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, two modified traits account for practically all of the genetically modified crops grown in the world today. One involves insect resistance. The other, more disturbing modification involves insensitivity to glyphosate-based herbicides (plant-killing chemicals). Often known as Roundup after the best-selling Monsanto product of that name, glyphosate poisons everything in its path except plants genetically modified to resist it.
Glyphosate-based herbicides are now the most commonly used herbicides in the world. Glyphosate is an essential partner to the GMOs that are the principal business of the burgeoning biotech industry. Glyphosate is a “broad-spectrum” herbicide that destroys indiscriminately, not by killing unwanted plants directly but by tying up access to critical nutrients.
Because of the insidious way in which it works, it has been sold as a relatively benign replacement for the devastating earlier dioxin-based herbicides. But a barrage of experimental data has now shown glyphosate and the GMO foods incorporating it to pose serious dangers to health. Compounding the risk is the toxicity of “inert” ingredients used to make glyphosate more potent. Researchers have found, for example, that the surfactant POEA can kill human cells {2}, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells. But these risks have been conveniently ignored.
The widespread use of GMO foods and glyphosate herbicides helps explain the anomaly that the US spends over twice as much per capita on healthcare {3} as the average developed country, yet it is rated far down the scale of the world’s healthiest populations. The World Health Organization has ranked {4} the US LAST out of seventeen developed nations for overall health.
Sixty to seventy percent of the foods in US supermarkets {5} are now genetically modified. By contrast, in at least 26 other countries – including Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, Mexico and Russia – GMOs are totally or partially banned {6}; and significant restrictions on GMOs exist in about sixty other countries.
A ban on GMO and glyphosate use might go far toward improving the health of Americans. But the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a global trade agreement for which the Obama Administration has sought Fast Track status, would block that sort of cause-focused approach to the healthcare crisis.
Roundup’s Insidious Effects
Roundup-resistant crops escape being killed by glyphosate, but they do not avoid absorbing it into their tissues. Herbicide-tolerant crops have substantially higher levels of herbicide residues than other crops. In fact, many countries have had to increase their legally allowable levels – by up to fifty times – in order to accommodate the introduction of GM crops. In the European Union, residues in food are set to rise 100 to 150 times {7} if a new proposal by Monsanto is approved. Meanwhile, herbicide-tolerant “super-weeds” have adapted to the chemical {8}, requiring even more toxic doses and new toxic chemicals to kill the plant.
Human enzymes are affected by glyphosate just as plant enzymes are: the chemical blocks the uptake of manganese and other essential minerals. Without those minerals, we cannot properly metabolize our food. That helps explain the rampant epidemic of obesity in the United States. People eat and eat in an attempt to acquire the nutrients that are simply not available in their food.
According to researchers Samsell and Seneff {9} in Biosemiotic Entropy: Disorder, Disease, and Mortality {10} (Entropy, April 2013):
Glyphosate’s inhibition of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes is an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals. CYP enzymes play crucial roles in biology … Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body. Consequences are most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
More than forty diseases have been linked to glyphosate use, and more keep appearing. In September 2013, the National University of Rio Cuarto, Argentina, published research {11} finding that glyphosate enhances the growth of fungi that produce aflatoxin B1, one of the most carcinogenic of substances. A doctor from Chaco, Argentina, told Associated Press, “We’ve gone from a pretty healthy population to one with a high rate of cancer, birth defects and illnesses seldom seen before”. Fungi growths have increased significantly in US corn crops.
Glyphosate has also done serious damage to the environment. According to an October 2012 report by the Institute of Science in Society {12}:
Agribusiness claims that glyphosate and glyphosate-tolerant crops will improve crop yields, increase farmers’ profits and benefit the environment by reducing pesticide use. Exactly the opposite is the case … [T]he evidence indicates that glyphosate herbicides and glyphosate-tolerant crops have had wide-ranging detrimental effects, including glyphosate resistant super weeds, virulent plant (and new livestock) pathogens, reduced crop health and yield, harm to off-target species from insects to amphibians and livestock, as well as reduced soil fertility.
Politics Trumps Science
In light of these adverse findings, why have Washington and the European Commission continued to endorse glyphosate as safe? Critics point to lax regulations, heavy influence from corporate lobbyists, and a political agenda that has more to do with power and control than protecting the health of the people.
In the ground-breaking 2007 book Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation {13}, William Engdahl states that global food control and depopulation became US strategic policy under Rockefeller protege Henry Kissinger. Along with oil geopolitics, they were to be the new “solution” to the threats to US global power and continued US access to cheap raw materials from the developing world. In line with that agenda, the government has shown extreme partisanship in favor of the biotech agribusiness industry, opting for a system in which the industry “voluntarily” polices itself. Bio-engineered foods are treated as “natural food additives”, not needing any special testing.
Jeffrey M Smith, Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, confirms {14} that US Food and Drug Administration policy allows biotech companies to determine if their own foods are safe. Submission of data is completely voluntary. He concludes:
In the critical arena of food safety research, the biotech industry is without accountability, standards, or peer-review. They’ve got bad science down to a science.
Whether or not depopulation is an intentional part of the agenda, widespread use of GMO and glyphosate is having that result {15}. The endocrine-disrupting properties of glyphosate have been linked to infertility, miscarriage, birth defects and arrested sexual development. In Russian experiments, animals fed GM soy were sterile by the third generation. Vast amounts of farmland soil are also being systematically ruined by the killing of beneficial microorganisms that allow plant roots to uptake soil nutrients.
In Gary Null’s eye-opening documentary Seeds of Death: Unveiling the Lies of GMOs {16} (2012), Dr Bruce Lipton warns,
We are leading the world into the sixth mass extinction of life on this planet … Human behavior is undermining the web of life.
The TPP and International Corporate Control
As the devastating conclusions of these and other researchers awaken people globally to the dangers of Roundup and GMO foods, transnational corporations are working feverishly with the Obama administration to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that would strip governments of the power to regulate transnational corporate activities. Negotiations have been kept secret from Congress but not from corporate advisors, 600 of whom have been consulted and know the details. According to Barbara Chicherio {17} in Nation of Change:
The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has the potential to become the biggest regional Free Trade Agreement in history …
The chief agricultural negotiator for the US is the former Monsanto lobbyist, Islam Siddique. If ratified the TPP would impose punishing regulations that give multinational corporations unprecedented right to demand taxpayer compensation for policies that corporations deem a barrier to their profits.
… They are carefully crafting the TPP to insure that citizens of the involved countries have no control over food safety, what they will be eating, where it is grown, the conditions under which food is grown and the use of herbicides and pesticides.
Food safety is only one of many rights and protections liable to fall to this super-weapon of international corporate control. In an April 2013 interview on The Real News Network {18}, Kevin Zeese called the TPP “NAFTA on steroids” and “a global corporate coup”. He warned:
No matter what issue you care about – whether its wages, jobs, protecting the environment … this issue is going to adversely affect it …
If a country takes a step to try to regulate the financial industry or set up a public bank to represent the public interest, it can be sued …
Return to Nature: Not Too Late
There is a safer, saner, more earth-friendly way to feed nations. While Monsanto and US regulators are forcing GM crops on American families, Russian families are showing what can be done with permaculture methods on simple garden plots. In 2011, forty percent of Russia’s food was grown on dachas {19} (cottage gardens or allotments). Dacha gardens produced over eighty percent of the country’s fruit and berries, over 66% of the vegetables, almost eighty percent of the potatoes and nearly fifty percent of the nation’s milk, much of it consumed raw. According to Vladimir Megre {20}, author of the best-selling Ringing Cedars Series (2008):
Essentially, what Russian gardeners do is demonstrate that gardeners can feed the world – and you do not need any GMOs, industrial farms, or any other technological gimmicks to guarantee everybody’s got enough food to eat. Bear in mind that Russia only has 110 days of growing season per year – so in the US, for example, gardeners’ output could be substantially greater. Today, however, the area taken up by lawns in the US is two times greater than that of Russia’s gardens – and it produces nothing but a multi-billion-dollar lawn care industry.
In the US, only about 0.6 percent {21} of the total agricultural area is devoted to organic farming. This area needs to be vastly expanded if we are to avoid “the sixth mass extinction”. But first, we need to urge our representatives to stop Fast Track, vote no on the TPP, and pursue a global phase-out of glyphosate-based herbicides and GMO foods. Our health, our finances and our environment are at stake.
Links:
{1} http://www.organicconsumers.org/artman2/uploads/1/May2011_Huber.pdf
{3} http://pgpf.org/Chart-Archive/0006_health-care-oecd
{5} http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/08/what-are-gmos-and-why-should-i-care
{6} http://www.thenation.com/blog/176863/twenty-six-countries-ban-gmos-why-wont-us
{7} http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Why_Glyphosate_Should_be_Banned.php
{9} http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1416
{10} http://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/special_issues/biosemiotic_entropy
{11} http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11150351
{12} http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Why_Glyphosate_Should_Be_Banned_PDF.php
{13} https://store.globalresearch.ca/store/seeds-of-destruction/
{16} http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6OxbpLwEjQ
{17} http://www.nationofchange.org/trans-pacific-partnership-and-monsanto-1372074730
{18} http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=9985
{19} http://naturalhomes.org/naturalliving/russian-dacha.htm
{21} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_farming_by_country
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Ellen Brown is an attorney, president of the Public Banking Institute (http://publicbankinginstitute.org/), and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt (2007). In The Public Bank Solution (2013), her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 200-plus blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.
Henry Kissinger made his statement about controlling the world using food in the 1970s. George Bush 1, actual President since Reagan was shot with a razor disk that missed his heart deflected off a rib, become George Bush1, finally elected, enthusiastically hailed the gene manipulated Round Up linked GMO seeds of Monsanto ensuring that the corporation’s wish list of criminalising any double blind scientific tests on the safety of the seeds or the produce from them was written into US law.
TPP would write that criminality into International law. Even Manuel Borosso has stated that the new world order includes a reduction of the world population by 60% restating Kissinger’s statement as in active planning and implementation.
Since 70% of all foods in US supermarkets are GMO foods and are legally not labeled as such, the resulting illnesses and deaths cannot be attributed to the reason, GMO produce.
Since the US national court cases including those from the Supreme Court overturned safety standard cases, and instead protected the predatory contractual selling practices that destroy all rights of property and health, national food safety policy no longer has any force of law. The sudden post 9/11 anti-terrorism laws have been used to overturn all of the safety laws. The Bush 11 bloody coup of 9/11.
America sells as disease free meat raised on chemicals, drugs and hormones. Meat from it’s slaughter houses is neither disease free nor safely healthy. The animals have become abnormal. It sells as natural fish, such as the prized Salmon, fish raised on GMO produce selling it by the ton to the European Union.This fish passes on it’s abnormal genes ingested from it’s feed to the humans who eat it who will pass their own altered DNA to their children. In short the alterations are permanent and genocidal.
The suggested 60% reduction of the world population seems right on track as the European Union is not challenging the United States war empire systematic erasure of at least 60% of all liveable life, in any form. Bees included.
Retired George Bush 1 kept his name in the popular news well into his 80 years of age. He would jump out of a plane and parachute down after taking an exorbitant amount of money from wealthy, wanna-be, connected, friends. His wife Barbara would squeal in televised delight at the amount they would amass. No-one in media that I read or watched ever connected these well advertised jumps of a media savvy octogenarian, inextricably linked as a pupil of, then more powerful than, Kissinger, to the previous deal with Monsanto.
George Bush 1 would have had and still does, the exact numbers of cropland acres in the US controlled by Monsanto through forced contracts as well as the names of all the crops, soy, corn, beets, wheat, etc., being GMO altered to 70% then 90% of all American produce. For instance all chips manufactured in the US are made with only GMO altered flours. All the trillions of US chips that are sold overseas are these chips. There is no warning on them, thanks to George Bush 1. And probably thanks to the Israeli Lobby both Houses of government are slavishly subservient to. As Joe Biden the Vice President proclaims:”We are joined at the hip.”
Has there long been a cabal of the powerful who have wanted to control the world through eliminating more than half the globe’s population? Insanity is part and parcel of the human condition. Law attempts to protect humanity from itself by according human rights, the “droit” from the French revolution.
The forced human testing done on Holocaust prisoners it is still going on. Under the colour of law because normal law is removed by following criminal law instead. A careful misreading: removal of law is lawlessness, barbarism, chaos. Carefully injected into all the Middle East, begun by AFRICOM US troops, in all Africa after Libya, the king-pin of the continent was quickly destroyed by brutalisation and enriched Uranium UK NATO bombs…
The Plan, the Final Solution, sheds it wrappings. Suzanne
Ellen Brown’s study or Monsanto GMO produce actual effects is excellent.