F. William Engdahl -- How A Rockefeller Foundation Project Destroyed Our Food

Dear Reader,

I want to share a section from my bestselling book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. It deals with the origins of one of the least-discussed projects, one that has had the greatest consequences for human health and well-being. It is a project financed and sponsored beginning in the 1950’s by a tax exempt US foundation built on a fortune in oil. It gave rise to the transformation of family farming into vertically-integrated, solely-for-profit agriculture. They even gave it a name-- agribusiness.  The results we have today where once rich, productive farms have been turned into contract units of multinational corporations whose main goal is shareholder value not nutrition.

I hope you find it useful and interesting and, if you haven’t, please consider buying the book or making a support contribution via my website PayPal to allow us to maintain free content in a time of growing media suppression of free thought on the internet.

With best regards,

William Engdahl

www.williamengdahl.com

Chapter 7

Rockefeller and Harvard Invent USA “Agribusiness”

A Green Revolution Opens the Door

The Rockefellers’ Green Revolution began in Mexico and was spread across Latin America during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Shortly thereafter, backed by John D. Rockefeller’s networks across Asia, it was introduced in India and elsewhere in Asia. The “revolution” was a veiled effort to gain control over food production in key target countries of the developing world, promoted in the name of free enterprise market efficiency against alleged “communist inefficiency.”

In the aftermath of World War II, with Germany’s I.G. Farben a bombed-out heap of rubble, American chemical companies emerged as the world’s largest. The most prominent companies—DuPont, Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Hercules Powder and others—faced a glut of nitrogen production capacity which they had built up, at US taxpayer expense, to produce bombs and shells for the war effort. An essential chemical for making bombs and explosives, nitrogen was a prime component of TNT and other high explosives. Nitrogen could also form the basis for nitrate fertilizers. The chemical industry developed the idea of creating large new markets for their nitrogen in the form of fertilizers, ammonia nitrate, anhydrous ammonia, for both domestic US agriculture and for export. The nitrogen fertilizer industry was part of the powerful lobby of the Rockefeller Standard Oil circles which, by the end of the War, included DuPont, Dow Chemicals, Monsanto and Hercules Powder among others.

The global marketing of the new agri-chemicals after the war also solved the problem of finding significant new markets for the American petrochemical industry as well as the grain cartel, a group of four to five companies then including Cargill, Continental Grain, Bunge and ADM. The largest grain traders were American and their growth was a product of the development of special hybrid seeds through the spread of the Green Revolution in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Agriculture was in the process of going global and the Rockefeller Foundation was shaping that process of agribusiness globalization.

With a monopoly on the agricultural chemicals and on the hybrid seeds, American agribusiness giants were intent on dominating the global market in agricultural trade. As Kissinger noted in the 1970’s, “If you control the food you control the people.” Governments from the developing sector to the European Economic Community, the Soviet Union and China, soon depended on the powerful grain cartel companies to provide the needed grains and food products to maintain their political stability in times of bad harvest.

True, there was US Government concern to contain communist and nationalist movements in the developing world during the 1960’s by offering food aid in the form of privately sponsored agricultural inputs. However, the combination of US Government aid and the techniques being developed in the name of a Green Revolution would present a golden opportunity for the influential policy-making circles around Rockefeller and their emerging agribusiness groups to turn that concern to their advantage. Nelson Rockefeller worked hand-in-glove on agriculture with his brother, John D. III, who had set up his own Agriculture Development Council in 1953, one year after he had founded the Population Council. The focus of the Agriculture Development Council was Asia, while Nelson concentrated on his familiar turf in Latin America. They shared the common goal of long-term cartelization of world agriculture and food supplies under their corporate hegemony.

When the Rockefeller Foundation’s Norman Borlaug came into Mexico in the 1950’s, he worked on hybrid forms of rust-resistant wheat and hybrid corn types, not yet the genetically engineered projects to come several decades later. Behind the façade of agricultural and biological science, however, the Rockefeller group was pursuing a calculated strategy through its Green Revolution during the 1950’s and 1960’s.

The heart of its strategy was to introduce “modern” agriculture methods to increase crop yields and, so went the argument, thereby to reduce hunger and lessen the threat of potential communist subversion of hungry, unruly nations. It was the same seducing argument used years later to sell its Gene Revolution. The Green Revolution was the beginning of global control over food production, a process made complete with the Gene Revolution several decades later. The same companies, not surprisingly, were involved in both, as were the Rockefeller and other powerful US foundations.

In 1966, the Rockefeller Foundation was joined by the considerable financial resources of the Ford Foundation, another US private tax-exempt foundation which enjoyed intimate ties to the US Government, US intelligence and foreign policy establishment. Together with the Ford Foundation resources, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Green Revolution went into high gear.

That year of 1966, the Government of Mexico along with the Rockefeller Foundation set up the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). The center focused its work on a wheat program, which originated from breeding studies begun in Mexico in the 1940s by the Rockefeller Foundation.[1]

Their efforts in food and agriculture received a boost that same year when US President Lyndon Johnson announced a drastic shift in US food aid to developing countries under P.L. 480, namely that no food aid would be sent unless a recipient country had agreed to preconditions which included agreeing to the Rockefeller agenda for agriculture development, stepping up their population control programs and opening their doors to interested American investors.[2]

In 1970, the Rockefeller’s Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Prize. Interestingly enough, it was not for biology but for peace, the same prize Henry Kissinger was to receive several years later. Both men were also protégé’s of the influential Rockefeller circles.

In reality, the Green Revolution introduced US agribusiness into key developing countries under the cover of promoting crop science and modern techniques. The new wheat hybrids in Mexico required modern chemical fertilizers, mechanized tractors and other farm equipment, and above all, they required irrigation, which meant pumps driven by oil or gas energy.

The Green Revolution methods were suitable only in the richest crop areas, and it was deliberately aimed at the richest farmers, reinforcing old semi-feudal Latifundist divisions between wealthy landowners and poor peasant farmers. In Mexico, the new wheat hybrids were all planted in the rich, newly-irrigated farm areas of the Northeast. All inputs, from fertilizers to tractors and irrigation, required petroleum and other inputs from advanced industrial suppliers in the United States. Oil and agriculture joined forces under the Rockefeller aegis.

In India, the Green Revolution was limited to 20 percent of land in the irrigated North and Northwest. It ignored the huge disparity of wealth between large feudal landowners in such areas and the majority of poor, landless peasants. Instead, it created pockets of modern agribusiness tied to large export giants such as Cargill.

The regions where the vast majority of poorer peasants worked remained poor. The introduction of the Green Revolution did nothing to change the gap between rich feudal landowners and poor peasants, but overall statistics showed significant rises in Indian wheat production.

…

Rockefeller Finances the Creation of Agribusiness

While the Rockefeller brothers were expanding their global business reach from oil to agriculture in the developing world through their Green Revolution scheme, they were financing a little-noticed project at Harvard University, which would form the infrastructure to globalize world food production under the central control of a handful of private corporations. Its creators gave it the name “agribusiness,” in order to differentiate it from traditional family-farmer-based agriculture.

Agribusiness and the 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 manipulation and patenting of plants 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.[3] Today we have agribusiness and “cumbersome government programs,” but the funds go to agribusiness not family farmers.

Davis, together with another Harvard Business School professor, Ray Goldberg, formed a Harvard team with the Russian-born economist, Wassily Leontief, who was then mapping the entire US economy, in a project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. During the war, the US Government had hired Leontief to develop a method of inter-sectoral analysis of the total economy which he referred to as input-output analysis. Leontief worked for the US Labor Department as well as for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the CIA.[4]

In 1948, Leontief got a major four-year $100,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up the Harvard “Economic Research Project on the Structure of the American Economy.” A year later, the US Air Force joined the Harvard project, a curious engagement for one of the prime US military branches. The transistor and electronic computers had just been developed along with methods of linear programming that would allow vast amounts of statistical data on the economy to be processed. Soon the Ford Foundation joined in the Harvard funding.

The Harvard project and its agribusiness component were part of a major attempt to plan a revolution in US food production. It was to take four decades before it dominated the food industry. Goldberg later referred to the agribusiness revolution and the development of gene-modified agribusiness as “changing our global economy and society more dramatically than any other single event in the history of mankind.”

Monopoly and Vertical Integration Return with a Vengeance

As Ray Goldberg boasted years later, the core idea driving the agribusiness project was the re-introduction of “vertical integration” into US food production. By the 1970’s, few Americans were aware that bitter battles had been fought decades earlier to get Congress to outlaw vertical integration by giant conglomerates or trusts such as Standard Oil, in order to prevent them from monopolizing whole sectors of vital industries.

It wasn’t until the David Rockefeller-backed Presidency of Jimmy Carter in the late 1970’s that the US multinational business establishment was able to begin the rollback of decades of carefully constructed US Government regulations of health, food safety and consumer protection laws, and open the doors to a new wave of vertical integration. The vertical integration process was sold to unaware citizens under the banner of “economic efficiency” and “economy of scale.”

A return to vertical integration and the accompanying agribusiness were introduced amid a public campaign in prominent media claiming that government had encroached far too much into the daily lives of its citizens and had to be cut back to give ordinary Americans “freedom.” The war cry of the campaigners was “deregulation.” What they carefully left out of their propaganda was that deregulation by government merely opened the door to de facto private regulation by the largest and most powerful corporate groups in a given industry.

The person who first called openly for deregulation of government controls and privatization, well before Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, was John D. Rockefeller III. In 1973, he published The Second American Revolution. In the book and in numerous public addresses, Rockefeller called for a “deliberate, consistent, long-term policy to decentralize and privatize many government functions … to diffuse power throughout the society.”[5]

Well before that, however, Davis and Goldberg had begun to industrialize specific sectors of American agriculture into agribusiness through vertical integration, ignoring anti-trust laws, and using Leontief ’s input-output approach to identify the entire production and distribution chain.

The first result of the collaboration between Davis, Goldberg and Leontief was a project to industrialize the Florida citrus industry. The control of small citrus farmers soon gave way to large national orange juice processors such as Sunkist, who dominated prices paid to the farmer through control of distribution and processing.[6]

Their next target was to develop a strategy for the industrialization of the US wheat-to-consumer chain as well as the soybean market for animal feed. As the Government, step-by-step, removed regulatory controls on agriculture or on monopoly, the vertical integration of the food industry accelerated.

Significantly, the first American industry to be completely vertically integrated had been oil, under the Rockefeller Standard Oil Trust in 1882. Despite repeated attempts by numerous states to outlaw Rockefeller’s monopolistic control of oil and freight prices, even a Supreme Court decision in 1911 failed to break up the cartel in oil, which went on to dominate the global oil trade for the following century. The Standard Oil model, not surprisingly, was the model for the Harvard Rockefeller Foundation project to create agribusiness from agriculture.

In the 1920’s, a series of laws had been passed by the US Congress to control food monopolies, especially in the meat sector, following the revelation of shocking practices in the US meatpacking and processing industry, by writers such as Upton Sinclair whose book The Jungle described the fetid, unsanitary and often inhuman conditions of the meatpacking industry.

Five major companies—Armour, Swift, Morris, Wilson and Cudahy—were then in a position, as the US Government’s newly founded Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused them, of trying “to monopolize all the nation’s food supply” by the 1920’s. The five had systematically and illegally acquired a near monopoly in meatpacking. [7]

The Big Five then controlled who had access to public stockyards for the cattle. They interfered with the livestock marketing process through monopoly control, controlled wholesale distribution channels, and restricted what retailers could buy. With the invention of the refrigerated railcar and assembly-line continuous meat processing plants, the meat companies vertically integrated. They integrated forward into marketing the beef, and backward into monopolizing supply of raw material—beef cattle and hogs.

An FTC investigation in the early 1920’s found that the five companies had dominated the purchase of livestock by controlling major stockyards, terminal railroads, livestock credit, market news media, and sites for potential rival packing plants.

Furthermore, they had used their domination to force out new competitors and had cartelized the remaining market among themselves illegally. They controlled the retail level by owning refrigerator transport cars, cold storage warehouses and severely reduced competitor market access. Not content with all that, according to the Government investigation, the Big Five meat packers also controlled the market for substitute foods by buying or controlling them.[8]

By the 1970’s, the US food supply was once more going into the hands of a tiny, monopoly of agribusiness producers. This time, aided by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation funding of the Harvard Economic Research Project on the Structure of the American Economy. Under Leontief, Goldberg and Davis were spearheading a new corporate rush into vertical integration and monopoly control of not only American but global food supply. The scale was without precedent.

Goldberg and Davis and their colleagues at Harvard were at the forefront of educating a new generation of corporate managers who would be infected with the prospect of staggering profits in the effort to totally restructure the way Americans grew food to feed themselves and the world.

As US Government regulatory barriers fell under the drumbeat of deregulation, especially during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, agribusiness rushed in to fill the regulation vacuum with its own private industry rules and standards. The standards were not set by all players, but typically rather by the top four or five dominant players.

The process led to a concentration and transformation of American agriculture. Independent family farmers were driven off the land to make way for “more efficient” giant corporate industrial farm businesses, known as Factory Farms or corporate agriculture. Those who stayed on the land were mostly forced to work for the big agribusiness firms as “contract farmers.”

“Where Have all the Farmers Gone?”

As Government regulations, food safety standards and monopoly laws were systematically loosened, especially during the 1980’s Reagan-Bush era, agribusiness began to transform the face of traditional American farming in ways so drastic as to be incomprehensible to ordinary consumers. Most people simply went to their local supermarket, took a nicely packed cut of beef or pork from the meat counter and thought they were still buying the product of the family farm.

What began to take place instead was the wholesale merger and consolidation, one-by-one, of American food production, out of the hands of family farmers and into giant corporate global concentrations. The farmer gradually became a contract employee responsible only for feeding and maintaining concentrations of thousands of animals in giant pens. He no longer owned the animals or the farm. He was effectively becoming like a feudal serf, indentured through huge debts, not to a Lord of the manor, but to a global multinational corporation such as Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Smithfield Foods or ConAgra.

For the new corporate agribusiness giants, the transformation was quite profitable. Family farmers’ income for the vast majority of farm families plunged as they lost control of their market entirely to the agribusiness giants by the end of the 1990’s. Their returns on equity had fallen from an average of 10% in the mid-1970’s to only 2% a year, according to a study by the Senate Agriculture Committee. At the same time, the average annual return on stockholder equity for the industrialized food processing sector rose to 23% by 1999 from 13% in 1993.[9]

Hundreds of thousands of independent family farmers were forced out of business with the spread of agribusiness and its large operations. They simply couldn’t compete. Traditional farming was by its nature labor intensive, while factory farming was capital intensive. Farmers who did manage to raise the money for animal confinement systems quickly discovered that the small savings in labor costs were not enough to cover the increasing costs of facilities, energy, caging, and antibiotic and other drugs.

The increase in factory farms led to a decrease in the price independent farmers got for their animals, forcing thousands out of business and transformation of Iowa into the largest pig production center in America under factory farming. “Take take a trip to hog heaven,” they wrote. “This ten-mile stretch of countryside north of Ames, Iowa, produces almost a tenth of America’s pork. But there is not an animal in sight. In massive metal sheds, up to 4,000 sows at a time are reared for slaughter, their diets carefully monitored, their waste regularly siphoned away, their keepers showered and begowned, like surgeons, to avoid infecting the herd.”[10]

OMB Watch, an organization monitoring the role of US Government regulators in the area, reported the effects of the drastic reduction in Government rules on pollution and animal waste contamination from giant factory farm installations, beginning during the Carter Presidency in the seventies.

Under the George W. Bush Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, at the request of agribusiness, repealed a rule that held corporate livestock owners liable for damage caused by animal waste pollution. They noted that the factory farm owners often evaded responsibility by hiring contractors to raise their animals. The EPA also dropped a requirement that would have forced facilities to monitor groundwater for potential contamination by animal waste, which often seeped into the earth, leaving communities vulnerable to potentially dangerous drinking water supplies.[11]

Because of the huge scale of the CAFOs or Factory Farms, animal waste and pollution of ground water was no minor affair. The huge animal farms housed tens of thousands of cattle, pigs or chickens in small concentrations, hence the name, CAFO. It was estimated that the factory farms produced more than 130 times the waste that humans did, or some 2.7 trillion pounds of animal waste a year.28 That waste would then be channelled into enormous “lagoons” that often leaked, ruptured or overflowed—killing fish and other marine life, spreading disease and contaminating community drinking water supplies. The CAFO farms also routinely over-applied liquid waste to land areas, known as “sprayfields,” causing it to run into waterways.

Because of the huge scale of the CAFOs or Factory Farms, animal waste and pollution of ground water was no minor affair. The huge animal farms housed tens of thousands of cattle, pigs or chickens in small concentrations, hence the name, CAFO: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. It was estimated that the factory farms produced more than 130 times the waste that humans did, or some 2.7 trillion pounds of animal waste a year.[12]

That waste would then be channeled into enormous “lagoons” that often leaked, ruptured or overflowed—killing fish and other marine life, spreading disease and contaminating community drinking water supplies. The CAFO farms also routinely over-applied liquid waste to land areas, known as “sprayfields,” causing it to run into waterways. “Water contaminated by animal manure contributes to human diseases such as acute gastroenteritis, fever, kidney failure, and even death,” according to a 2005 study by NRDC.[13]

Among the findings documented by the NRDC study were some alarming consequences to the cartelization of US agribusiness. They documented that in 1996 the US Government’s Centers for Disease Control established a link between spontaneous abortions and high nitrate levels in Indiana drinking water wells located close to animal feedlots. As well, the high levels of nitrates in drinking water also increase the risk of methemoglobinemia, or “blue-baby syndrome,” which can kill infants. Further, animal waste contains disease-causing pathogens, such as Salmonella, E. coli, Cryptosporidium, and fecal coliform, which can be 10 to 100 times more concentrated than in human waste. More than 40 diseases can be transferred to humans through animal manure.[14]

Typically, the corporations running the CAFOs would hire illegal immigrants at dirt low wages to deal with the huge waste concentrations, channeling it into vast “lagoons” which often ruptured or overflowed, killing fish and contaminating drinking water supplies.[15]

By the end of the 1990’s, factory farming had made agriculture into the United States’ largest general source of water pollution. One study showed that a growing hog produced two to four times as much waste as a human and a milk cow the waste of 24 people. Spread over large fields in a traditional family farm, such waste had never been a serious ecological problem. Concentrated into industrial centers of maximum animal density per square foot, it created staggering new environmental and health hazards. Because of the financial muscle of the giant corporate agribusiness farms, the Government catered to their needs to maximize profits, ignoring their legislative mandate to guard public health.

…

(end of excerpt)

Endnotes:

[1] UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Mobilizing Science for Global Food Security, Fourth External Review of CIMMYT, (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research—CGIAR, Rome)—SDR/TAC:IAR/97/9. Also CGIAR, The Origins of the CGIAR, http://www.cgiar.org/who/history/origins.html, details the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in creation of both CIMMYT and later CGIAR as the larger global agriculture research body to advance the Rockefeller Foundation’s growing agribusiness agenda. See also Robert Anderson, American Foundations, the Green Revolution and the CGIAR: Intentions, Implementation and Contingencies, Simon Fraser University,November 2003, http://les.man.ac.uk/government/publications/working_papers_docs/Globalisation/Foundations%20papers%20Anderson.pdf. One of the most detailed critiques of Rockefeller’s Green Revolution is made in Harry Cleaver, The Contradictions of the Green Revolution, http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/cleavercontradictions.pdf.

[2] Harry Cleaver, op. cit., p. 3.

[3][3] John H. Davis, Harvard Business Review, 1956, cited in Geoffrey Lawrence, “Agribusiness”, Capitalism and the Countryside, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1987. See also Harvard Business School, The Evolution of an Industry and a Seminar:

Agribusiness Seminar, http://www.exed.hbs.edu/programs/agb/seminar.html.

[4] Martin Kohli, “Leontief and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1941-54: Developing a Framework for Measurement,” History of Political Economy, Vol. 33, Annual Supplement, 2001, pp. 190-191.

[5] John D. Rockefeller III, The Second American Revolution, Harper & Row, New York, 1973, p. 108.

[6] Current Biography, 1967,W. Leontief and Ray Goldberg, “The Evolution of Agribusiness”, Harvard Business School Executive Education Faculty Interviews, http://www.exed.hbs.edu/faculty/rgoldberg.html. W. Leontief, Studies in the

Structure of the American Economy, International Science Press Inc., White Plains, New York, 1953. In its 1956 Annual Report, the Ford Foundation noted the following grant: “Harvard Economic Research Project”. In addition to these overall

programs, a grant of $240,000 was made to support the activities of the Harvard Economic Research Project over a six-year period. This center, under the direction of Professor Wassily Leontief, was engaged in a series of quantitative studies of the structure of the American economy, focusing mainly on inter-industry relationships and the interconnections between industry and other sectors of the economy. Equal support was contributed by the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Annual Report, New York, 1956. A fascinating and controversial report of the implementation of the Leontief Harvard Economic Research Project on the Structure of the American Economy is a document titled, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. Its authorship is disputed, with attribution to Hartford Van Dyke and to William Cooper, and much speculation exists as to whether it is fact or fiction. The discussion in the report of aspects of the Leontief research, its Rockefeller funding and how it was linked actively with the work of Ray Goldberg and John H. Davis in creating the model of corporate agribusiness is too incisive to dismiss the full report completely. The document for this reason alone is worth reading. http://www.universalway.org/Foreign/silentweapons.html.

[7] Roert M Aduddell, and Louis P. Cain, “Public Policy Toward The Greatest Trust in the World”, Business History Review, Summer 1981, Harvard College, Cambridge, p. 217.

[8] Ibid., p. 218.

[9] . James MacDonald et al., Growing Farm Size and the Distribution of Farm Payments, United States Departent of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Economic Brief No. 6,Washington, D.C.March, 2006, p. 2.

[10] The Economist,“Growing Pains,” The Economist, US Edition, 25 March 2000.

[11] OMB Watch, OMB Waters Down Standards on Factory-Farm Runoff, 28 May 2003, http://www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/1540. See also Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Facts about Pollution from Livestock Farms, Washington, D.C., 15 July 2005.

[12] OMB Watch, op. cit.

[13] NRDC, op. cit.

[14] NRDC, op. cit.

[15] Ibid.