If you haven’t yet heard the news, you will. Yesterday the President’s Cancer Panel released a report that is nothing less than monumental for the organic food movement. It urges consumers to choose food grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers, antibiotics and growth hormones to decrease their exposure to chemicals that can increase their risk of developing cancer.

This landmark report by a prestigious mainstream scientific panel is recognition at the highest level that the chemicals present in our environment have direct and serious consequences for human health — especially for children, who are far more susceptible to damage from environmental chemical exposures than adults. It was submitted to President Obama by Dr. LaSalle Leffall, Jr., an oncologist and professor of surgery at Howard University, and Dr. Margaret L. Kripke, an immunologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Established in 1971, the President’s Cancer Panel is a respected, conservative panel of three experts from the mainstream of scientific and medical thinking. One seat is currently vacant; both panel members who submitted the report were originally appointed by former President George W. Bush. “We wanted to let people know that we’re concerned, and that they should be concerned,” Professor Leffall told the New York Times.

It’s likely that industry interests will come out harshly against the report, and that there will be loud political wrangling over what to do about it. But with statistics showing that 41% of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and that some cancers are actually becoming more common — especially in children — it would seem that the report’s recommendation of immediate action coupled with future prudence in the approval and use of environmental chemicals would be an easy middle road to take.

Why choose organic? You’ve heard it from us before, and we’ll keep saying it: When you buy organic produce, you’re choosing food grown without synthetic chemicals, using sustainable farming methods that protect the environment. Eating organic helps reduce your dietary exposure to pesticide residues — which is especially important for children, whose developing bodies are particularly vulnerable.

View the the full 240-page report.

Reprinted from Earthbound Farm.

Photos: BPA bottle by David McNew/Getty Images; Garbage patch courtesy NOAA; Bee courtesy Wikimedia Commons; Water drop by Emrank/Flickr; Michael Pollan by Zuma Press; Bat by Furryscaly/Flickr

Here, as the year draws to a close, is my list of the top 9 environmental stories in 2009 that had absolutely nothing to do with climate change.

2. Carping about Asian carp: What is it about marine species from Asia that makes them such an exotic threat in North America waters? Zebra muscles. Walking snakehead. And, now, the Asian carp is about to take over the Great Lakes. Each invader deserves a science fiction movie. In the carp’s case, you’ve got the marine scientist/hero who discovered DNA from Asian carp in water samples taken from streams that flow into the Lake Michigan. You’ve got the government agency (Army Corps of Engineers) that reluctantly acknowledged the problem in November. And you’ve got posturing politicians raising the temperature for everyone by threatening lawsuits. “I am determined to take appropriate action to ensure that the integrity of Lake Michigan is not harmed by the introduction of these carp,” the attorney general of Wisconsin warned just the other day. Most of all, you’ve got the carp itself — a preferred food in East Asia that undermines the fish-eat-fish food chain from one end to the other. The story would only be better if Asian carp ate people; their main food source turns out to be plankton, which seems a lot less dramatic.

Written by Ken Edelstein; reprinted from Mother Nature Network

Doomsday Seed Vault

One thing Microsoft founder Bill Gates can’t be accused of is sloth. He was already programming at 14, founded Microsoft at age 20 while still a student at Harvard. By 1995 he had been listed by Forbes as the world’s richest man from being the largest shareholder in his Microsoft, a company which his relentless drive built into a de facto monopoly in software systems for personal computers.

In 2006 when most people in such a situation might think of retiring to a quiet Pacific island, Bill Gates decided to devote his energies to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest ‘transparent’ private foundation as it says, with a whopping $34.6 billion endowment and a legal necessity to spend $1.5 billion a year on charitable projects around the world to maintain its tax free charitable status. A gift from friend and business associate, mega-investor Warren Buffett in 2006, of some $30 billion worth of shares in Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway put the Gates’ foundation into the league where it spends almost the amount of the entire annual budget of the United Nations’ World Health Organization.

So when Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some $30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth looking at.

No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world’s most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see map).

Map of Svalbard, Norway

On this God-forsaken island Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what is called the ‘doomsday seed bank.’ Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group.

The seed bank is being built inside a mountain on Spitsbergen Island near the small village of Longyearbyen. It’s almost ready for ‘business’ according to their releases. The bank will have dual blast-proof doors with motion sensors, two airlocks, and walls of steel-reinforced concrete one meter thick. It will contain up to three million different varieties of seeds from the entire world, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future,’ according to the Norwegian government. Seeds will be specially wrapped to exclude moisture. There will be no full-time staff, but the vault’s relative inaccessibility will facilitate monitoring any possible human activity.

Did we miss something here? Their press release stated, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future.’ What future do the seed bank’s sponsors foresee, that would threaten the global availability of current seeds, almost all of which are already well protected in designated seed banks around the world?

Anytime Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto and Syngenta get together on a common project, it’s worth digging a bit deeper behind the rocks on Spitsbergen. When we do we find some fascinating things.

The first notable point is who is sponsoring the doomsday seed vault. Here joining the Norwegians are, as noted, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the US agribusiness giant DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred, one of the world’s largest owners of patented genetically-modified (GMO) plant seeds and related agrichemicals; Syngenta, the Swiss-based major GMO seed and agrichemicals company through its Syngenta Foundation; the Rockefeller Foundation, the private group who created the “gene revolution with over $100 million of seed money since the 1970’s; CGIAR, the global network created by the Rockefeller Foundation to promote its ideal of genetic purity through agriculture change.

CGIAR and ‘The Project’

As I detailled in the book, Seeds of Destruction, in 1960 the Rockefeller Foundation, John D. Rockefeller III’s Agriculture Development Council and the Ford Foundation joined forces to create the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, the Philippines.1 By 1971, the Rockefeller Foundation’s IRRI, along with their Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and two other Rockefeller and Ford Foundation-created international research centers, the IITA for tropical agriculture, Nigeria, and IRRI for rice, Philippines, combined to form a global Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR).

CGIAR was shaped at a series of private conferences held at the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference center in Bellagio, Italy. Key participants at the Bellagio talks were the Rockefeller Foundation’s George Harrar, Ford Foundation’s Forrest Hill, Robert McNamara of the World Bank and Maurice Strong, the Rockefeller family’s international environmental organizer, who, as a Rockefeller Foundation Trustee, organized the UN Earth Summit in Stockholm in 1972. It was part of the foundation’s decades long focus to turn science to the service of eugenics, a hideous version of racial purity, what has been called The Project.

To ensure maximum impact, CGIAR drew in the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Development Program and the World Bank. Thus, through a carefully-planned leverage of its initial funds, the Rockefeller Foundation by the beginning of the 1970’s was in a position to shape global agriculture policy. And shape it did.

Financed by generous Rockefeller and Ford Foundation study grants, CGIAR saw to it that leading Third World agriculture scientists and agronomists were brought to the US to ‘master’ the concepts of modern agribusiness production, in order to carry it back to their homeland. In the process they created an invaluable network of influence for US agribusiness promotion in those countries, most especially promotion of the GMO ‘Gene Revolution’ in developing countries, all in the name of science and efficient, free market agriculture.

Genetically engineering a master race?

Now the Svalbard Seed Bank begins to become interesting. But it gets better. ‘The Project’ I referred to is the project of the Rockefeller Foundation and powerful financial interests since the 1920’s to use eugenics, later renamed genetics, to justify creation of a genetically-engineered Master Race. Hitler and the Nazis called it the Ayran Master Race.

The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet. Now this is getting really intriguing. The same Rockefeller Foundation created the pseudo-science discipline of molecular biology in their relentless pursuit of reducing human life down to the ‘defining gene sequence’ which, they hoped, could then be modified in order to change human traits at will. Hitler’s eugenics scientists, many of whom were quietly brought to the United States after the War to continue their biological eugenics research, laid much of the groundwork of genetic engineering of various life forms, much of it supported openly until well into the Third Reich by Rockefeller Foundation generous grants.2

The same Rockefeller Foundation created the so-called Green Revolution, out of a trip to Mexico in 1946 by Nelson Rockefeller and former New Deal Secretary of Agriculture and founder of the Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Company, Henry Wallace.

The Green Revolution purported to solve the world hunger problem to a major degree in Mexico, India and other select countries where Rockefeller worked. Rockefeller Foundation agronomist, Norman Borlaug, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work, hardly something to boast about with the likes of Henry Kissinger sharing the same.

In reality, as it years later emerged, the Green Revolution was a brilliant Rockefeller family scheme to develop a globalized agribusiness which they then could monopolize just as they had done in the world oil industry beginning a half century before. As Henry Kissinger declared in the 1970’s, ‘If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.’

Agribusiness and the Rockefeller 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 engineering of plants and animals 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— a revolution in agriculture production that would concentrate control of the food chain in corporate multinational hands, away from the traditional family farmer.3

A crucial aspect driving the interest of the Rockefeller Foundation and US agribusiness companies was the fact that the Green Revolution was based on proliferation of new hybrid seeds in developing markets. One vital aspect of hybrid seeds was their lack of reproductive capacity. Hybrids had a built in protection against multiplication. Unlike normal open pollinated species whose seed gave yields similar to its parents, the yield of the seed borne by hybrid plants was significantly lower than that of the first generation.

That declining yield characteristic of hybrids meant farmers must normally buy seed every year in order to obtain high yields. Moreover, the lower yield of the second generation eliminated the trade in seed that was often done by seed producers without the breeder’s authorization. It prevented the redistribution of the commercial crop seed by middlemen. If the large multinational seed companies were able to control the parental seed lines in house, no competitor or farmer would be able to produce the hybrid. The global concentration of hybrid seed patents into a handful of giant seed companies, led by DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto’s Dekalb laid the ground for the later GMO seed revolution.4

In effect, the introduction of modern American agricultural technology, chemical fertilizers and commercial hybrid seeds all made local farmers in developing countries, particularly the larger more established ones, dependent on foreign, mostly US agribusiness and petro-chemical company inputs. It was a first step in what was to be a decades-long, carefully planned process.

Under the Green Revolution Agribusiness was making major inroads into markets which were previously of limited access to US exporters. The trend was later dubbed “market-oriented agriculture.” In reality it was agribusiness-controlled agriculture.

Through the Green Revolution, the Rockefeller Foundation and later Ford Foundation worked hand-in-hand shaping and supporting the foreign policy goals of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and of the CIA.

One major effect of the Green Revolution was to depopulate the countryside of peasants who were forced to flee into shantytown slums around the cities in desperate search for work. That was no accident; it was part of the plan to create cheap labor pools for forthcoming US multinational manufactures, the ‘globalization’ of recent years.

When the self-promotion around the Green Revolution died down, the results were quite different from what had been promised. Problems had arisen from indiscriminate use of the new chemical pesticides, often with serious health consequences. The mono-culture cultivation of new hybrid seed varieties decreased soil fertility and yields over time. The first results were impressive: double or even triple yields for some crops such as wheat and later corn in Mexico. That soon faded.

The Green Revolution was typically accompanied by large irrigation projects which often included World Bank loans to construct huge new dams, and flood previously settled areas and fertile farmland in the process. Also, super-wheat produced greater yields by saturating the soil with huge amounts of fertilizer per acre, the fertilizer being the product of nitrates and petroleum, commodities controlled by the Rockefeller-dominated Seven Sisters major oil companies.

Huge quantities of herbicides and pesticides were also used, creating additional markets for the oil and chemical giants. As one analyst put it, in effect, the Green Revolution was merely a chemical revolution. At no point could developing nations pay for the huge amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. They would get the credit courtesy of the World Bank and special loans by Chase Bank and other large New York banks, backed by US Government guarantees.

Applied in a large number of developing countries, those loans went mostly to the large landowners. For the smaller peasants the situation worked differently. Small peasant farmers could not afford the chemical and other modern inputs and had to borrow money.

Initially various government programs tried to provide some loans to farmers so that they could purchase seeds and fertilizers. Farmers who could not participate in this kind of program had to borrow from the private sector. Because of the exorbitant interest rates for informal loans, many small farmers did not even get the benefits of the initial higher yields. After harvest, they had to sell most if not all of their produce to pay off loans and interest. They became dependent on money-lenders and traders and often lost their land. Even with soft loans from government agencies, growing subsistence crops gave way to the production of cash crops.5

Since decades the same interests including the Rockefeller Foundation which backed the initial Green Revolution, have worked to promote a second ‘Gene Revolution’ as Rockefeller Foundation President Gordon Conway termed it several years ago, the spread of industrial agriculture and commercial inputs including GMO patented seeds.

Gates, Rockefeller and a Green Revolution in Africa

With the true background of the 1950’s Rockefeller Foundation Green Revolution clear in mind, it becomes especially curious that the same Rockefeller Foundation along with the Gates Foundation which are now investing millions of dollars in preserving every seed against a possible “doomsday” scenario are also investing millions in a project called The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

AGRA, as it calls itself, is an alliance again with the same Rockefeller Foundation which created the “Gene Revolution.” A look at the AGRA Board of Directors confirms this.

It includes none other than former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as chairman. In his acceptance speech in a World Economic Forum event in Cape Town South Africa in June 2007, Kofi Annan stated, ‘I accept this challenge with gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and all others who support our African campaign.’

In addition the AGRA board numbers a South African, Strive Masiyiwa who is a Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. It includes Sylvia M. Mathews of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Mamphela Ramphele, former Managing Director of the World Bank (2000 – 2006); Rajiv J. Shah of the Gates Foundation; Nadya K. Shmavonian of the Rockefeller Foundation; Roy Steiner of the Gates Foundation. In addition, an Alliance for AGRA includes Gary Toenniessen the Managing Director of the Rockefeller Foundation and Akinwumi Adesina, Associate Director, Rockefeller Foundation.

To fill out the lineup, the Programmes for AGRA includes Peter Matlon, Managing Director, Rockefeller Foundation; Joseph De Vries, Director of the Programme for Africa’s Seed Systems and Associate Director, Rockefeller foundation; Akinwumi Adesina, Associate Director, Rockefeller Foundation. Like the old failed Green Revolution in India and Mexico, the new Africa Green Revolution is clearly a high priority of the Rockefeller Foundation.

While to date they are keeping a low profile, Monsanto and the major GMO agribusiness giants are believed at the heart of using Kofi Annan’s 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 is 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 is the next target in the US-government campaign to spread GMO worldwide. Its rich soils make it an ideal candidate. Not surprisingly many African governments suspect the worst from the GMO sponsors as a multitude of genetic engineering and biosafety projects have been initiated in Africa, with the aim of introducing GMOs into Africa’s agricultural systems. These include 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 has been working for years to promote, largely without success, projects to introduce GMOs into the fields of Africa. They have backed research that supports the applicability of GMO cotton in the Makhathini Flats in South Africa.

Monsanto, who has a strong foothold in South Africa’s seed industry, both GMO and hybrid, has conceived of an ingenious smallholders’ programme known as the ‘Seeds of Hope’ Campaign, which is introducing a green revolution package to small scale poor farmers, followed, of course, by Monsanto’s patented GMO seeds. 6

Syngenta AG of Switzerland, one of the ‘Four Horsemen of the GMO Apocalypse’ is pouring millions of dollars into a new greenhouse facility in Nairobi, to develop GMO insect resistant maize. Syngenta is a part of CGIAR as well.7

Move on to Svalbard

Now is it simply philosophical sloppiness? What leads the Gates and Rockefeller foundations to at one and the same time to back proliferation of patented and soon-to-be Terminator patented seeds across Africa, a process which, as it has in every other place on earth, destroys the plant seed varieties as monoculture industrialized agribusiness is introduced? At the same time they invest tens of millions of dollars to preserve every seed variety known in a bomb-proof doomsday vault near the remote Arctic Circle ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future’ to restate their official release?

It is no accident that the Rockefeller and Gates foundations are teaming up to push a GMO-style Green Revolution in Africa at the same time they are quietly financing the ‘doomsday seed vault’ on Svalbard. The GMO agribusiness giants are up to their ears in the Svalbard project.

Indeed, the entire Svalbard enterprise and the people involved call up the worst catastrophe images of the Michael Crichton bestseller, Andromeda Strain, a sci-fi thriller where a deadly disease of extraterrestrial origin causes rapid, fatal clotting of the blood threatening the entire human species. In Svalbard, the future world’s most secure seed repository will be guarded by the policemen of the GMO Green Revolution–the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, Syngenta, DuPont and CGIAR.

The Svalbard project will be run by an organization called the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT). Who are they to hold such an awesome trust over the planet’s entire seed varieties? The GCDT was founded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Bioversity International (formerly the International Plant Genetic Research Institute), an offshoot of the CGIAR.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is based in Rome. Its Board is chaired by Margaret Catley-Carlson a Canadian also on the advisory board of Group Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, one of the world’s largest private water companies. Catley-Carlson was also president until 1998 of the New York-based Population Council, John D. Rockefeller’s population reduction organization, set up in 1952 to advance the Rockefeller family’s eugenics program under the cover of promoting “family planning,” birth control devices, sterilization and “population control” in developing countries.

Other GCDT board members include former Bank of America executive presently head of the Hollywood DreamWorks Animation, Lewis Coleman. Coleman is also the lead Board Director of Northrup Grumman Corporation, one of America’s largest military industry Pentagon contractors.

Jorio Dauster (Brazil) is also Board Chairman of Brasil Ecodiesel. He is a former Ambassador of Brazil to the European Union, and Chief Negotiator of Brazil’s foreign debt for the Ministry of Finance. Dauster has also served as President of the Brazilian Coffee Institute and as Coordinator of the Project for the Modernization of Brazil’s Patent System, which involves legalizing patents on seeds which are genetically modified, something until recently forbidden by Brazil’s laws.

Cary Fowler is the Trust’s Executive Director. Fowler was Professor and Director of Research in the Department for International Environment & Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He was also a Senior Advisor to the Director General of Bioversity International. There he represented the Future Harvest Centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in negotiations on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources. In the 1990s, he headed the International Program on Plant Genetic Resources at the FAO. He drafted and supervised negotiations of FAO’s Global Plan of Action for Plant Genetic Resources, adopted by 150 countries in 1996. He is a past-member of the National Plant Genetic Resources Board of the US and the Board of Trustees of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, another Rockefeller Foundation and CGIAR project.

GCDT board member Dr. Mangala Rai of India is the Secretary of India’s Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE), and Director General of the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR). He is also a Board Member of the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), which promoted the world’s first major GMO experiment, the much-hyped ‘Golden Rice’ which proved a failure. Rai has served as Board Member for CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), and a Member of the Executive Council of the CGIAR.

Global Crop Diversity Trust Donors or financial angels include as well, in the words of the Humphrey Bogart Casablanca classic, ‘all the usual suspects.’ As well as the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, the Donors include GMO giants DuPont-Pioneer Hi-Bred, Syngenta of Basle Switzerland, CGIAR and the State Department’s energetically pro-GMO agency for development aid, USAID. Indeed it seems we have the GMO and population reduction foxes guarding the hen-house of mankind, the global seed diversity store in Svalbard. 8

Why now Svalbard?

We can legitimately ask why Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation along with the major genetic engineering agribusiness giants such as DuPont and Syngenta, along with CGIAR are building the Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic.

Who uses such a seed bank in the first place? Plant breeders and researchers are the major users of gene banks. Today’s largest plant breeders are Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and Dow Chemical, the global plant-patenting GMO giants. Since early in 2007 Monsanto holds world patent rights together with the United States Government for plant so-called ‘Terminator’ or Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT). Terminator is an ominous technology by which a patented commercial seed commits ‘suicide’ after one harvest. Control by private seed companies is total. Such control and power over the food chain has never before in the history of mankind existed.

This clever genetically engineered terminator trait forces farmers to return every year to Monsanto or other GMO seed suppliers to get new seeds for rice, soybeans, corn, wheat whatever major crops they need to feed their population. If broadly introduced around the world, it could within perhaps a decade or so make the world’s majority of food producers new feudal serfs in bondage to three or four giant seed companies such as Monsanto or DuPont or Dow Chemical.

That, of course, could also open the door to have those private companies, perhaps under orders from their host government, Washington, deny seeds to one or another developing country whose politics happened to go against Washington’s. Those who say ‘It can’t happen here’ should look more closely at current global events. The mere existence of that concentration of power in three or four private US-based agribusiness giants is grounds for legally banning all GMO crops even were their harvest gains real, which they manifestly are not.

These private companies, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical hardly have an unsullied record in terms of stewardship of human life. They developed and proliferated such innovations as dioxin, PCBs, Agent Orange. They covered up for decades clear evidence of carcinogenic and other severe human health consequences of use of the toxic chemicals. They have buried serious scientific reports that the world’s most widespread herbicide, glyphosate, the essential ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide that is tied to purchase of most Monsanto genetically engineered seeds, is toxic when it seeps into drinking water.9 Denmark banned glyphosate in 2003 when it confirmed it has contaminated the country’s groundwater.10

The diversity stored in seed gene banks is the raw material for plant breeding and for a great deal of basic biological research. Several hundred thousand samples are distributed annually for such purposes. The UN’s FAO lists some 1400 seed banks around the world, the largest being held by the United States Government. Other large banks are held by China, Russia, Japan, India, South Korea, Germany and Canada in descending order of size. In addition, CGIAR operates a chain of seed banks in select centers around the world.

CGIAR, set up in 1972 by the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation to spread their Green Revolution agribusiness model, controls most of the private seed banks from the Philippines to Syria to Kenya. In all these present seed banks hold more than six and a half million seed varieties, almost two million of which are ‘distinct.’ Svalbard’s Doomsday Vault will have a capacity to house four and a half million different seeds.

GMO as a weapon of biowarfare?

Now we come to the heart of the danger and the potential for misuse inherent in the Svalbard project of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller foundation. Can the development of patented seeds for most of the world’s major sustenance crops such as rice, corn, wheat, and feed grains such as soybeans ultimately be used in a horrible form of biological warfare?

The explicit aim of the eugenics lobby funded by wealthy elite families such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and others since the 1920’s, has embodied what they termed ‘negative eugenics,’ the systematic killing off of undesired bloodlines. Margaret Sanger, a rapid eugenicist, the founder of Planned Parenthood International and an intimate of the Rockefeller family, created something called The Negro Project in 1939, based in Harlem, which as she confided in a letter to a friend, was all about the fact that, as she put it, ‘we want to exterminate the Negro population.’ 11

A small California biotech company, Epicyte, in 2001 announced the development of genetically engineered corn which contained a spermicide which made the semen of men who ate it sterile. At the time Epicyte had a joint venture agreement to spread its technology with DuPont and Syngenta, two of the sponsors of the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault. Epicyte was since acquired by a North Carolina biotech company. Astonishing to learn was that Epicyte had developed its spermicidal GMO corn with research funds from the US Department of Agriculture, the same USDA which, despite worldwide opposition, continued to finance the development of Terminator technology, now held by Monsanto.

In the 1990’s the UN’s World Health Organization launched a campaign to vaccinate millions of women in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines between the ages of 15 and 45, allegedly against Tentanus, a sickness arising from such things as stepping on a rusty nail. The vaccine was not given to men or boys, despite the fact they are presumably equally liable to step on rusty nails as women.

Because of that curious anomaly, Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization became suspicious and had vaccine samples tested. The tests revealed that the Tetanus vaccine being spread by the WHO only to women of child-bearing age contained human Chorionic Gonadotrophin or hCG, a natural hormone which when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier stimulated antibodies rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. None of the women vaccinated were told.

It later came out that the Rockefeller Foundation along with the Rockefeller’s Population Council, the World Bank (home to CGIAR), and the United States’ National Institutes of Health had been involved in a 20-year-long project begun in 1972 to develop the concealed abortion vaccine with a tetanus carrier for WHO. In addition, the Government of Norway, the host to the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault, donated $41 million to develop the special abortive Tetanus vaccine. 12

Is it a coincidence that these same organizations, from Norway to the Rockefeller Foundation to the World Bank are also involved in the Svalbard seed bank project? According to Prof. Francis Boyle who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by the US Congress, the Pentagon is ‘now gearing up to fight and win biological warfare’ as part of two Bush national strategy directives adopted, he notes, ‘without public knowledge and review’ in 2002. Boyle adds that in 2001-2004 alone the US Federal Government spent $14.5 billion for civilian bio-warfare-related work, a staggering sum.

Rutgers University biologist Richard Ebright estimates that over 300 scientific institutions and some 12,000 individuals in the USA today have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare. Alone there are 497 US Government NIH grants for research into infectious diseases with biowarfare potential. Of course this is being justified under the rubric of defending against possible terror attack as so much is today.

Many of the US Government dollars spent on biowarfare research involve genetic engineering. MIT biology professor Jonathan King says that the ‘growing bio-terror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population.’ King adds, ‘while such programs are always called defensive, with biological weapons, defensive and offensive programs overlap almost completely.’ 13

Time will tell whether, God Forbid, the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Bank of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation is part of another Final Solution, this involving the extinction of the Late, Great Planet Earth.

——————————————————————————–
F. William Engdahl is the author of Seeds of Destruction, the Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation just released by Global Research. He also the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd.

William Engdahl is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). His writings can
be consulted on www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net and on Global Research.

Infographic: Nick Scott / MNN

For a planet where water covers 70 percent of the surface, Earth certainly makes its residents work hard for a drink. Aside from fish and other saltwater-sipping sea life, most of us have to share what little freshwater we can find on land.

What is groundwater?

Groundwater is simply water — mainly from rain and snow, but also from some human activities — that has soaked into the soil. That’s the end of its journey from our perspective, but the water keeps going long after it’s gone underground. It percolates downward, with dirt and rock particles filtering out dangerous bacteria as it sinks. When it finally reaches an impermeable layer of bedrock deep below the surface, it stops and begins to saturate the surrounding soil. Over many millennia, this pool of purified groundwater can grow into vast subterranean aquifers.

Some groundwater may eventually become encased in rock thanks to gradual geologic shifting, forming pressurized pockets known as “confined aquifers.” These require complex drilling and pumping operations to extract their contents, leaving such deep deposits mainly for industrial uses such as large-scale farm irrigation. Other groundwater deposits are limited only by water supply and the bedrock below, and these “unconfined aquifers” make up the majority of residential groundwater sources in the United States.

Groundwater’s quantity is far from the only concern, however; its quality is also under constant assault from a variety of sources. Natural poisoning of groundwater has long been known to occur around the world, as underground deposits of arsenic, heavy metals or even radon can seep into an aquifer and contaminate its contents. It’s also possible that toxin-producing bacteria can naturally infiltrate an aquifer, despite the cleansing effects of soil and rocks above.

Some of this is dumped into streams and rivers, where it’s concentrated and carried far away. That’s how farm and lawn runoff has helped create hundreds of coastal “dead zones” around the world, or areas where a buildup of fertilizer feeds giant algae blooms that deplete the water’s oxygen, making it inhospitable to marine life. Major U.S. dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay are widely blamed on farm runoff, since their tributaries pass through many large agricultural areas.

Cities’ and suburbs’ stormwater is also a major source of trouble, often containing motor oil, gasoline, weed killers, insecticides, bleach, paint thinner, and any other substances dumped or left out in the open. Cleaning solvents such as dry cleaners’ perchloroethylene (a potential carcinogen) can be caught up in runoff, as can parabens and other suspected endocrine disruptors often found in laundry soap and shampoo — chemicals that seem to be turning male frogs and fish into females.

In urban places where impermeable surfaces like concrete or asphalt cover the ground, more of this runoff flows for longer distances, picking up more toxins on the way. And while much of it ends up in sewers and streams, plenty of runoff is also soaked up by soil, where it sinks downward and replenishes aquifers.

This can happen around big farms and animal-feeding operations, where fertilizers, pesticides, and manure often exist in large concentrations. When farm runoff drifts down into the ground, it can sometimes overload the soil’s filtration system and taint groundwater below. Some of the most dangerous agricultural pollutants include:

• Fertilizers: In estuaries and coastal waters, fertilizers often create algae blooms and dead zones. In groundwater, they can lead to the buildup of nitrates, which are carcinogenic. They can also impede infants’ ability to transport oxygen in their blood, leading to “blue baby syndrome.”
• Bacteria: Leaky or overflowing sewers and septic tanks can release bacteria-laden human waste into surface water and soil, potentially contaminating drinking-water sources. But concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) often deal in even larger amounts of waste. Farmers spread manure across fields as fertilizer, and many let it collect in wastewater lagoons lined with plastic to stop it from seeping into groundwater. Soil normally would filter out harmful bacteria anyway, but large enough concentrations can make it through and contaminate an aquifer. Such incidents are rarely scientifically proven, however, given the difficulty of tracing an individual illness back to bacteria deep in the soil. The EPA regulates livestock operations with more than 700 cows, but the New York Times reported in September that those regulations are rarely enforced and farmers often aren’t required to turn in paperwork. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has since responded by announcing that the agency will overhaul the way it enforces the 1972 Clean Water Act.
• Pesticides: DDT famously washed into U.S. waterways in the 1960s and ’70s, moving up the food chain into fish and eventually into bald eagles — the synthetic pesticide soon began thinning out bald eagles’ eggshells so much it pushed the national bird to the brink of extinction. Not all pesticides bioaccumulate this way, and the most toxic era of pesticide use (copper and chlorine compounds, for example) is long behind us. But large crop fields, as well as private lawns and golf courses, are still sprayed with many EPA-regulated insecticides, fungicides and herbicides. Studies have linked one common weed killer, atrazine, to birth defects, cancer and low sperm counts in humans, and the EPA recently announced it will re-examine its previous findings that the chemical is harmless to human health.
• Antibiotics: Cattle, hogs and other livestock in CAFOs are often given a regimen of pre-emptive antibiotics, warding off the bacterial diseases that would normally flourish in such an environment. While many livestock industries have come to rely on such drugs, they may also be helping make some bacteria more drug-resistant. Overexposure to antibiotics can help bacteria evolve an immunity to the drugs, weeding out the weaker individuals and leaving more hardy ones alive to reproduce. In theory, this phenomenon can eventually create “superbugs,” or drug-resistant strains of bacteria and viruses. In July, the Obama administration announced it was seeking a ban on unnecessary antibiotics in livestock, although similar attempts have been shot down before by the agribusiness lobby.

Other sources

City and farm runoff aren’t the only sources of groundwater pollution. Here are four other substantial threats to clean groundwater supplies:

• Natural gas drilling: A process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is often used to drill for natural gas. A blend of chemicals is mixed with water and blasted deep into cracks in the ground, opening them up to make the gas more accessible. EPA scientists are currently conducting an investigation into whether natural gas drilling is contaminating groundwater sources in some Western states — many houses have been abandoned after methane seeped into the water, and at least one house exploded in 2003, killing three people inside.
• Mining: Mad rushes for gold, silver, mercury and other metals left a toxic legacy throughout many Western states during the 1800s and early 1900s, paralleled by current and former coal mines in the East and Midwest. Toxins such as lead and arsenic were used in 19th-century mining, and often persist today in abandoned mine shafts. A recent study by the U.S. Geological Survey found nearly every inland freshwater fish species is contaminated to some degree with mercury, a combination of mine runoff and emissions from burning fossil fuels, namely coal.
• Military bases: Some U.S. military facilities have been criticized over the years for polluting local water sources, although the Defense Department has worked recently to lessen its environmental impact. But many bases are still plagued by contamination from long ago — the Associated Press reported earlier this month that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has spent $116 million cleaning up 58 Cold War-era nuclear missile sites that were contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE), a chemical that was used to clean and maintain warheads but has since drifted into some groundwater supplies. TCE is believed to damage the human nervous system, lungs and liver, and can cause abnormal heartbeat, coma or even death. It’s also “reasonably anticipated” to cause cancer in humans, according to the National Toxicology Program, and the total nationwide cleanup may cost $400 million before it’s finished.
• Saltwater intrusion: By overpumping an aquifer near the coast, people are in danger of creating a vacuum that can quickly be filled with salty seawater. Known as “saltwater intrusion,” this phenomenon can make a water supply undrinkable and useless for irrigation, effectively rubbing saltwater in the wound of already-low water levels.

• Brighter Living: Conserving water indoors
• How can I be smart about watering my lawn and garden?
• Lax oversight creates toxic water supply
• What is the Gulf of Mexico dead zone?
• What happened to the Everglades?
• EPA to evaluate whether common weed killer harms more than weeds
• EPA: Chemicals found in Wyo. drinking water might be from fracking
• Levels of Indian groundwater have dropped dramatically, study says
• As Las Vegas spreads into the desert, water gets even more scarce
• School drinking water contains toxins, AP investigation finds

By Russell McLendon; Reprinted from MNN.com

monsanto.mediaroom.com

I saw this movie the other night at our Green Rheem Thater Night. If you have the time and inclination to learn about Monsanto wanting to control the world’s food supply through genetic engineering, the information in this movie is both horrifying and amazing!  To me, oddly echoing aspects of  Soylent Green…

The World According to Monsanto

monsanto.mediaroom.com

monsanto.mediaroom.com

Thanks to Big Farma, we’ve seen horrific water contamination that has been linked to myriad health problems. As your members of Congress debate health care, we need to make sure they’re considering the impact of corporate agribusiness on the public’s health.

To give you an example, just one hog company — Smithfield — will produce 26 million tons of hog waste a year. And when I say ‘waste’, I don’t just mean fecal matter. This includes tons of antibiotics, afterbirth, stillborn pigs, blood, urine, and anything else that goes into a hog’s pen.

This waste is collected into lagoons that often overflow, contaminating our water supplies. Not to mention Big Farma has to pump tons of antibiotics into the hogs because they live in such horrific conditions — meaning the food itself is a chemical cacophony.

These are issues our Congress needs to look at as they look at health care. So please, send your members of Congress a message asking them to do so:
http://www.environmental-action.org/big-farma?id4=ES

Dan Stafford
Environmental Action Organizer
http://www.environmental-action.org

         

Pants to Poverty is a new kind of underwear brand on a mission to rid the world of bad pants whilst making some of the most gorgeous cotton underwear on the planet. Pants that are great for people and planet.

Pants for Poverty work with over 7,000 tribal cotton farmers in the “Suicide belt” of India who run and own their own organization – Zameen Organic, the world’s first farmer owned marketing company for fairtrade and organic cotton.

Based in Hyderabad in India, Zameen will soon be majority owned by the 6,700 of India’s poorest farmers, most of whom are in the Vidarbha region– an area where on average 26 farmers commit suicide every day due to unfair trade. Since Zameen started its work, there have been no suicides in the areas they serve and farmers are paid approximately 30% more than they are for conventional cotton.

Zameen means that, in exchange for their hard work on their own land, the farmers get:

• A guaranteed fair, market price for their cotton
• Fairtrade and organic premiums
• Organizational and agricultural support to establish their own co-operatives, bank accounts and maximize the impact of their organic farming
• Majority ownership of shares in Zameen Organic and farmer representatives on the board
• A dividend on the profits generated by the company.
• Direct communication with the consumers through Pants to Poverty
• A clean, chemical free environment to live in
• An extra 50p per pair is donated by Pants to poverty to fund the establishment of the world’s first source of child labour free seeds.

View Pants to Poverty Products at:

http://www.ecofriendonline.com/search.php?pg=1&sman=8167

Photo: Patrn at Flickr

As a country, America’s always disparaged for its addiction to oil. But as individuals, the truth is we’re much more addicted to a different international product: coffee. Fortunately, we’re not alone. In fact, the world loves coffee so much it’s the second-most traded commodity, bested only by that pesky petrol.

Given that status, a few alterations to your daily caffeine fix can have a big impact on how farmers treat the land where coffee is grown.

The nice thing about words like “organic” and “fair trade” is that they make people who care about the Earth also care about buying a particular product. The logos certifying these claims therefore get placed front and center on a bag of beans and make their labels function like those of wines and olive oils: Everything you need to know about the product is right there. That is, if you understand the certifications. Some apply to the land, others apply to the workers and still others attempt to cover a little of everything.

Organic: Thanks to that omnipresent purveyor of all things natural, Whole Foods, most people are familiar with the word “organic,” and the kind of organic they’re probably used to buying is USDA Organic. Lots of rumors have circulated around this slogan; the most typical is that to get it, a product only needs to be 30 percent organic. Not true. To don this label, a product must be at least 95 percent organic. The coffee Cliff Notes is that most synthetic substances (think fertilizers or pesticides) can’t be used in the land or on the product, and that farming practices must maintain or improve the quality of the land.

Other organic certifications you might see on your grocer’s shelves are CCOF, which stands for California Certified Organic Farmers, and QAI, or Quality Assurance International, which is also based in California. Although both have their own organic certification programs, the bottom line is that they’re also accredited to certify products as USDA Organic and are therefore trustworthy organizations.

Fair Trade: Anyone glancing at this logo can figure out it indicates coffee farmers received a fair price for their goods. But this distinction goes a lot deeper than cash for crops. Among other things, Fair Trade also requires safe working conditions and fair wages for workers, prohibits child labor, and encourages sustainable farming practices and community reinvestment. The logo we see here in the States indicates that an American nonprofit called TransFair has audited and certified that the coffee producers were paid a fair price for their goods. The German company Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International monitors the other side of the equation and ensures that farmers and farming practices are meeting certification standards. The paper trail might sound confusing for the layperson, but for those spending the extra dollars on certified beans, it means there’s an assurance their money is being used well.

Rainforest Alliance Certified: This is kind of a one-stop shop for environmental sustainability and social responsibility. To obtain this label, growers must meet 80 percent of criteria established by the Sustainable Agriculture Network, an organization of environmental groups in Latin America that works directly with producers to audit farms and provide Rainforest Alliance certification. The stipulations cover everything from protecting ecosystems to wastewater management and nondiscriminatory hiring practices. Although the organization is quick to point out that not all Rainforest Alliance Certified products are organic, the Sustainable Agriculture Network’s criteria do prohibit the use of chemicals that are illegal in the United States and Europe as well as substances that have been identified as persistent organic pollutants.

Shade-grown or Bird Friendly: Shade-grown coffee is presumably better for rainforest ecosystems because it preserves the upper tiers of trees in which rainforest life thrives. Unfortunately this buzzword can be tossed around to sell coffee without being substantiated. If your goal in buying shade-grown coffee is to protect the planet’s biodiversity, then the certification you’re really looking for is Bird Friendly. Although this certification is not as readily found as the others (particularly in the mega-stores), it’s a convenient one to look for because it indicates the coffee farm has met USDA organic growing standards in addition to fair wages and access to health care for workers.

There is one caveat when buying based on certification labels: Producers have to pay fees to get these distinctions. If you’re a gourmand suffering from a crisis of green conscience because your preferred coffee doesn’t have any kind of certification, don’t panic yet. Smaller retailers and suppliers are more able to maintain direct communication with their producers and can speak to their growing and employment practices if you ask.

Written by Layla Bellows; Reprinted from Mother Nature Network

ROCKERS FOR A CAUSE: Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson and Neil Young are doing their part. (Photo: Paul Natkin/Photo Reserve Inc. 2008)

WIN TWO TICKETS TO THIS YEAR’S FARM AID:  Go to mnn.com

In 1985, thousands of small family farms in America were on the brink of collapse, pushed into foreclosure by the crushing debts they had incurred trying to compete with the growing force of industrialized agriculture.

That year, during the Live Aid concert, Willie Nelson listened as Bob Dylan wondered aloud whether some of the money they raised could help support American farmers. It planted a seed in Nelson’s mind, and just six weeks later — after some calls to fellow musicians — the first Farm Aid concert took place in Illinois, raising $7 million.

This fall, Farm Aid will get back to its Midwest roots when it hits St. Louis, Mo., to raise a fresh round of funds for the farmers who protect our soil, air, water and biodiversity while also producing high-quality, healthy food for us all.

The concert will feature Nelson and fellow Farm Aid cofounders Neil Young and John Mellencamp along with Dave Matthews, Jason Mraz, Wilco, Jamey Johnson and Phosphorescent. Additional performers will be announced in the coming weeks.

Since its inception, Farm Aid has raised nearly $35 million to promote a strong family farm system of agriculture by providing direct support to farmers, fostering demand among the public for fresh local food from family farms and providing grants to organizations that promote fair farm policies.

Farm Aid staff help family farmers make the transition to more sustainable farming practices, which can also be more profitable. They’re also helping to fuel the demand for organic, responsibly produced food through the Good Food Movement, which helps connect consumers with farmers markets and local farm stands.

Farm Aid 2009 will take place on Oct. 4 at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in St. Louis. Visit FarmAid.org for tickets, updates, concert gear and more.

Written by Stephanie Rogers / Reprinted from mnn.com