Beyond Golden Rice: The Rockefeller Foundation’s long-term agenda behind Genetically Modified Food

‘A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.’ – Ted Turner to Audubon Magazine, 1996

In an April 18th 2009 article on the development of GM-Food for the African continent, ‘Strange Fruit: Could genetically modified foods offer a solution to the world’s food crisis? the author mentions that the Rockefeller Foundation has recently set out to fund the process of ‘biofortified rice’ for third world nations, invented by a Swiss scientist named Ingo Potrykus.

In 2000 a Swiss scientist named Ingo Potrykus modified rice, adding a bacterial gene and two genes from the daffodil, to add Vitamin A to rice. His plan was to find an easy way of countering the vitamin deficiency which causes blindness in around half a million people, mainly children, every year. Half of them die within 12 months of going blind and others die of diseases such as malaria because the deficiency affects their immune system. Professor Potrykus called his invention Golden Rice.’

But there’s nothing recent about the Rockefeller Foundation’s involvement in the research and development of genetically enhanced rice, as we learn from a November 14, 2000 publication by the Rockefeller Foundation in which the director of Food Security of the Rockefeller Foundation Gary H. Toenniessen states that in the early 1990’s the Swiss scientist along with a colleague:

“…approached the Foundation. Dr. Ingo Potrykus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich was a specialist in plant genetic transformation and his lab was one of the first to genetically engineer rice. (…) These two scientists proposed to genetically engineer `rice with daffodil genes to produce nutritionally significant levels of beta-carotene in the rice endosperm. At a foundation-sponsored workshop, other scientists agreed that this task was difficult but achievable, and the effort was funded.’

Ten years later, it seems, the experiments had proven a great success. In a keynote speech by Rockefeller Foundation’s president Judith Rodin on October 17 2008, the speaker points out that the research concerning genetically engineered rice has been underway for at least 65 years- and all this time received the generous support of the Foundation’s deep pockets. Rodin explains:

‘In the sixty-five years since they began, we’ve funded the work of Golden Rice’s engineers, Dr. Peter Beyer, Dr. Ingo Potrykus, and others for more than fifteen of them. (…) I’m delighted to announce, today, that we will be providing funding to the International Rice Research Institute – which we helped establish almost fifty years ago – to shepherd Golden Rice through national, regulatory approval processes in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. And we hope this is just the beginning.’

On behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation, Representative Akinwumi Adesina stated before the Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Conference on September 28 2007 that the continent of Africa was especially chosen as the Foundation’s favourite playing ground. But he laments:

‘Regarding genetic engineering, by and large, African countries do not currently have in place regulatory frameworks that allow their use for food production. Many challenges face the introduction and cultivation of GM crops in Africa, including fear of GE crops.’

Adesina goes on by bringing climate change into the equation, dumping fear upon fear, and hoping perhaps that a new fear will eliminate the former one:

‘Assisting Africa to meet its food needs has other advantages for climate change. (…) Increasing population pressure and reliance on extensive agricultural practises will likely lead to further deforestations and carbon dioxide emissions and contributions to climate change.’

Under the umbrella of “climate change’ all serious concern about playing God with the earth’s flora (and Fauna) can be thrown aside without a second thought it seems. Rockefeller Foundation representative Gary H. Toenniessen stated during a conference in his lecture “Opportunities for and challenges to Plant Biotechnology Adoption in Developing Countries‘:

‘Public acceptance of transgenic crops and genetically modified (GM) food, or rather, lack thereof, is a major constraint to the adoption of plant biotechnology, particularly in Europe. (…) Orchestrated campaigns against GM foods have consequently found a receptive audience amongst urban consumers. The situation in developing countries may well be different’, he adds slyly.

This same opinion is being conveyed in a 2005 “strategic review of the organisation (the Rockefeller Foundation), wherein several “challenges’ are brought forward that might stand in the way of the next level of globalisation that the Foundation has mapped out for all of us, one of these being ‘resistance to the development and use of genetically modified foods’.

Here comes into play the promotion of ‘global warming’. By claiming global warming will affect all nations and all peoples, and coupling the supposed climate hazard to the necessity of GM-crops lest the third world starve and die by the lack of it, the different pieces of this diabolical puzzle come together. The spectre of global climate change hangs over the world food situation, they claim, and the anticipated resistance might well be lessened if the people are adequately bamboozled into accepting the Foundation’s genetically modified foods program for fear of a vengeful God raining his wrath onto their heads. If the globalists would lie to lure the people into accepting GM foods, they would certainly not think twice about lying about the motives behind the development of these foods for mass production.

In an October 8 2006 editorial by Dean Kleckner (member emeritus of the World Food Prize Board of Advisors) on AgWeb.Com, he comments on the announced investments by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation’s ambition to spark a “Green Revolution’ on the impoverished continent of Africa. He states that ‘The 21st-century’s Green Revolution must also be a Gene Revolution.’

The Foundation itself is strangely upfront about its long-term objectives, when it bragged in the 2006 ‘The Rockefeller Foundation’s International Program on Rice Biotechnology’:

‘The Rockefeller Foundation has a long, complex, and rich history in promoting agricultural development throughout the developing world. The Foundation began its major field-based program in Mexico in the 1940s, which led to the series of technologies, insights, and processes collectively known as the ‘Green Revolution’. (…) Through a series of strategically placed grants, some of the world’s premier laboratories were invited to participate in the program.’

As we learn from the 1968 Rockefeller Foundation annual report, the term Green Revolution has been around for quite a while. In the report the Foundation’s president J. George Harrah already speaks of the ‘Green Revolution’, built upon ‘miracle rice’ and ‘miracle wheat’.

In a panegyric ten years later, dedicated to the Foundation’s founder John D. Rockefeller III, there is mentioned as one of his merits:

‘Mr. Rockefeller was one of the great guiding spirits of The Rockefeller Foundation over a 47-year period, and was the chairman of the Board of Trustees from 1952 to 1971. During this period, the Foundation carried out a major part of its commitment to agricultural development and the conquest of hunger, resulting in the so-called Green Revolution.’

Further on (page 21) in an unlikely frank revelation, the president of the Foundation elaborates on the true countenance of this supposed ‘Green Revolution.’

‘Because of the Green Revolution, per capita protein consumption kept pace with the doubling of populations in the less-developed countries (LDC’s) which occurred between 1950 and 1975. But it was recognised by most, and certainly by the Foundation staff, that we were merely buying time, and that the geometric expansion of population had to be reduced lest the Malthusian prediction became true globally, as contrasted with just regionally, as now applies.’

In another publication- Africa’s Turn: A New Green Revolution for the 21st century– the foundation states that ‘Before all else, the original Green Revolution was a product of philanthropy, in a carefully negotiated partnership with government.(…) After first seeking and receiving an invitation from the Mexican government, the Foundation created the Oficina de Estudios Especiales within the Mexican Department of Agriculture, initially staffed by scientists on the Rockefeller payroll.’

This is no idle bragging or foundational hubris. In an April 2008 editorial in the journal Science, Nina Fedoroff (plant geneticist, currently serving as senior scientific advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) wrote:

‘A new Green Revolution demands a global commitment to creating a modern agricultural infrastructure everywhere.’

The Rockefeller Foundation thoroughly agrees with this statement. In fact, it has for decades directed all its resources to create just such an infrastructure. To illustrate how far back the research and its intended international scope go, it will suffice to quote form a Rockefeller Foundation annual report from 1963:

‘The Foundation conducts international projects for the improvement of the world’s four most important foods- corn, wheat, potatoes, and rice.’

It is interesting to note here that in the very same year (1963) the Codex Alimentarius Commission was forced into being by the World Health Organisation and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. But then it is important to always keep in mind that these international bodies all spring from the same source and are funded by the same families. In 1984 alone, the Foundation allocated funds of millions of US dollars in appropriations to scientists on molecular genetics (Washington State University) and genetic manipulation of rice (University of Leiden). In the years after, the Foundation has energetically allocated funds every single year to research and development in GM-crops.

And the list of allocated funds literally goes on forever, with grants handed to numerous research facilities across the globe all with the aim of producing, promoting and implementing genetically modified crops in the third, second and first world. The next step in the unfolding of the Foundation’s agenda was the creation of an adequate fear on which their “superfood’ might thrive more rapidly. The more people who use the earth’s resources, the more a swift policy is needed to reduce global population.

But originally it was global cooling, not global warming, with which the GM-agenda was to be helped forward. In the 1974 annual report a conference on the topic of climate change was announced called “Climate Change, Food Production, and Interstate Conflict’:

‘This interdisciplinary conference, organised jointly by RF (Rockefeller Foundation) officers from Conflict in International Relations, Quality of the Environment, and Conquest of Hunger programs, will bring together climatologists, scientists concerned with food production (…) to examine the future implications of the global cooling trend now under way and its effects on world food production.’

In the 1973 annual report (page 54), long before the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming was injected into society’s bloodstream, one of the funds approved for allocation to ‘international organisations’ to analyze the implications of climate modification for international affairs. The institute for World Order received a grant for the establishment of university-based world order studies.’

By the time it was decided by the globalists that a global warming hype would serve their interests better than a global cooling trend, they accelerated their program in a great hurry. In 1996, the Foundation mentioned in their annual report that:

‘The Rockefeller Foundation created the Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) program to cultivate a network of talented midcareer professionals from diverse disciplines and sectors committed to sustainable development.’

In regards to the many activities of LEAD, the report mentions:

‘Economic advancement and human development are predicated on sufficient supplies of energy. Yet the byproducts of fossil-fuel energy production also pose many of humankind’s greatest threats. Carbon dioxide released form fossil fuels, if allowed to build up in the earth’s atmosphere, has the potential to seal in excess heat that could LEAD to global warming.’

So what is it all about, this elaborate program of ‘magical rice’ and ‘magical wheat’, spanning many decades in slow but strategic progression? And why is “˜global warming’ being mixed in the equation? In the 1968 annual Foundation report the real reason for this determined labour comes to light:

‘Major organisations such as the Population Council and the National and International Planned Parenthood Federations have been supported (read: by the Foundation) in a variety of ways. These and other existing organisations, as well as others that may come into being, represent exceedingly important instrumentalities for the extension of family planning information and contraceptive methods.’

In bone chilling language, the aims and future steps of the Foundation is being outlined (page 54):

‘It will explore potentialities of training programs, seminars, public forums, symposia, and other devices for conveying information about the impact of population growth on economic and social development to government officials from ministries of health, planning commissions, and other appropriate agencies, in the interest of motivating greater action on population policy and population control programs.’

As we know, the call for more family planning in the name of the environment has been increasingly promoted by the Malthusian minded elite. It is clear that one of the ‘other devices’ the report mentions, has been found and thoroughly exploited: the great myth of Anthropogenic Global Warming was created and covered with the subtle sauce of science to give the whole thing an air of credibility. And the eugenics agenda continues.


Articles by: Jurriaan Maessen

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