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SOWING THE SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION SOWING SEEDS THE DESTRUCTION The Gene Revolution, spurred on by a handful of biotechnology transnationals and aided by Rockefeller funding, has created a world where feeding the hungry is akin to an act of genocide. Part 2 of 2 F. William (Bill) Engdahl is a leading researcher, economist and analyst of the New World Order who has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for over 30 years. He is also a frequent speaker at international conferences and is a distinguished research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization, where he's a regular contributor. He is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press, 2004) and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (Global Research, 2007; see http://globalresearch.ca/books/SoD.html), which is the subject of this review article. He can be contacted by email at info@engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net. — Stephen Lendman Merging Big Pharma with Big Food t the dawn of a new century, family farming was decimated by corporate agribusiness's vertically integrated powers that surpassed their earlier 1920s heyday dominance. The industry was now the second-most-profitable national one after pharmaceuticals, with domestic annual sales exceeding US$400 billion. The next aim was merging Big Pharma with Big Food-producing giants. The Pentagon's National Defense University took note in a 2003-issued paper: "Agribusiness [now] is to the United States what oil is to the Middle East". It's now considered a "strategic weapon in the arsenal of the world's only superpower", but at a huge cost to consumers everywhere. Agribusiness was on a roll, the US government supporting it with tens of billions of dollars in annual subsidies. The 1996 Farm Bill suspended the US Secretary of Agriculture's power to balance supply and demand, henceforth allowing unrestricted production. Food-producing giants took full advantage to control market forces. They crushed family farmers by overproducing and forcing down prices. They also pressured land values as small operators failed, and thus created opportunities for land acquisition on the cheap for greater concentration and dominance. Next came integrating the Gene Revolution into agribusiness, the way Harvard's Ray Goldberg saw it coming. Entire new sectors were to be created from genetic engineering, including genetically engineered/modified drugs from GE/GM plants in a new “agri- ceutical system". Goldberg predicted a "genetic revolution [through] an industrial convergence of food, health, medicine, fibre and energy businesses" in a totally unregulated marketplace. Unmentioned was a threatening consumer nightmare hidden from view. by Stephen Lendman © January 2008 A Review of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation by F. William Engdahl Email: lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net Blogsite: http://www.sjlendman.blogspot.com by Stephen Lendman © January 2008 Food is Power Rockefeller Foundation funding was the Gene Revolution's catalyst in 1985, with big aims: to learn if GM plants were commercially feasible and, if so, to spread them everywhere. It was the "new eugenics", says Engdahl, and the culmination of earlier research from the 1930s. It was also based on the idea that human problems can be "solved by genetic and chemical manipulations...as the ultimate means of social control and social engineering". Foundation scientists sought ways to do this by reducing life's infinite complexities to "simple, deterministic and predictive models" under their diabolical scheme—mapping gene structures to "correct social and moral problems including crime, poverty, hunger and political instability". With the development of essential genetic engineering techniques in 1973, they were on their way. APRIL — MAY 2008 NEXUS = 21 www.nexusmagazine.com