Global Research

First published on September 22, 2008.

Of relevance to the ongoing restructuring of agriculture under the helm of  NATO, the Gates Foundation, Monsanto and the Rockefellers.

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The controversial ‘Doomsday Seed Vault’, a nuclear-bomb-proof vault deep into the side of a mountain in NATO-member Norway’s Svalbard, near the Arctic Circle, has begun to collect seed samples from the entire world to freeze in the newly opened facility. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, have constructed what is called by BBC the ‘doomsday seed bank.’

Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It sits on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group. Now scientists connected with the project are roaming the world to collect samples of every seed variety known, using the fraudulent argument of protecting against Global Warming to obtain samples of the crop diversity of the planet. The implications are potentially more dangerous than the threat of nuclear war.

As climate change is credited as one of the main drivers behind soaring food prices, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the private organization which is responsible for maintaining the Seed Vault, is searching crop collections from Azerbaijan to Nigeria, allegedly for the traits that could defend the world agriculture against the impact of future changes. Traits, such as drought resistance in wheat, or salinity tolerance in potato, they argue, will become essential as crops around the world have to adapt to new climate conditions under forecast changes from Global Warming.

Beginning this past March, more than 200,000 crop varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East—drawn from vast seed collections maintained by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)—were shipped to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a facility capable of preserving their vitality for thousands of years.

The seeds were from varieties of rice, wheat, beans, sorghum, sweet potatoes, lentils, chick peas and a host of other food, forage and agro-forestry plants. They are being safeguarded in the facility, which was created as a ‘repository of last resort for humanity’s agricultural heritage.’ The vault was officially built by the Norwegian government as a service to the global community, and a Rome-based international NGO, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will fund its operation. It officially opened on February 26, 2008.

Unofficially, the Seed Vault project is one of the largest steps taken yet by the handful of GMO agribusiness giants including Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta of Basle, the Rockefeller Foundation in addition to the Gates family foundation, the world’s largest private foundation combining the wealth as well of Warren Buffett. As I described in an earlier piece posted January 3, 2008 in this space,  Der »Tresor des Jüngsten Gerichts« in der Arktis(((THOMAS Can we make a link here??))), the project appears to be far from the innocent humanitarian enterprise its promoters claim. The key organizations involved have a long, often dirty history of fraud, intimidation and dubious methods to force the spread of patented Genetically Modified plant seeds into the world agriculture food chain.

Readers seeking a more detailed background on the GMO companies, the so-called Four Horsemen of the Seeds Apokalypse—Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow Chemical and DuPont—are encouraged to look further in my book, Saat der Zerstörung: die Dunkle Seite der Gen-Manipulation ((( Here a Hyperlink as well to book))) . There I describe the decades long background of the Rockefeller Foundation, working in close concert with Monsanto and others to create the scientifically flawed technology of introducing foreign traits into the seeds of the world’s main food crops and thereby claiming grounds for exclusive patent rights to sell seeds of corn, rice, potato varieties, soybeans and countless other basic crops including cotton. GMO is a scientifically unstable technique whose long-term health impact on humans or even animals has never been independently tested by any Government.

That is a result of deliberate US policy, initiated in 1992 by then-President George H. W. Bush in consultation with top officials of Monsanto. Then Bush signed an Executive decree mandating the responsible Federal agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and others NOT to independently test the genetically modified seeds for possible harmful effects, but to consider them to be ‘Substantially Equivalent’ to conventional corn, soybeans, rice and such. That political fraud allowed Monsanto to submit GMO seed varieties for approval to plant commercially using only Monsanto-conducted test results as ‘proof’ that the seeds were safe. That was only the beginning of a policy of malign neglect on the side of the US Government regarding the dangers of GMO.

Toxic for human embryos

Compounding the dangers, the US Government also refused to examine, independently, the possible harmful effects to ground water and to humans and animals of the patented chemical herbicides which had to be sold alongside the Monsanto or DuPont or other GMO seeds. The seeds were patented in effect to force farmers to buy exclusively the herbicide of the seed patent owner.

As an example, Monsanto initially held patent rights to a powerful herbicide, Roundup©, which today is the world’s most used herbicide. Monsanto developed and patented a soybean seed it names Roundup Ready©. Roudup Ready soybeans are “ready” for the Roundup herbicide. The Monsanto soybean is specially developed to be resistant to Roundup herbicide, a powerful poison that kills everything it touches. That pairing of herbicide and seed gives companies promoting the GMO product a lock on both sale of patented seeds as well as their mated herbicide chemicals. All major GMO seed giants started out as chemical companies.

More alarming is the fact that, according to numerous studies worldwide, GMO crops over time need more, not less, herbicide as the weeds develop a special resistance to become ‘superweeds’.

Then a scientific study that has to date been blocked out of the public debate, suggests that the active elements in the world’s largest-selling herbicide, Monsanto’s Roundup, are toxic and get into ground water and into the human diet. The study found that Roundup had a measurable effect on human embryonic and placental cells.

The scientific study, released in the magazine, Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology in November 2006 by a group of scientists headed by N. Benachour and G. E. Seralini of the University of Caen in France, following extensive tests with rats fed a diet of plants treated with Roundup, whose active ingredient is Glyphosate, that ‘we can conclude that the failure to account for the combined effects…will undoubtedly lead to the underestimation of potential hazards, especially at the endocrine disruption level, and hence to erroneous conclusions at a regulatory level regarding the risk that they provoke.’ The scientists concluded, ‘Thus the toxic or hormonal impact of chemical mixtures in formulations (of Roundup—w.e.) appears to be underestimated.’ Moreover, the Caen University scientists found that the toxic effects of Roundup were ‘thus amplified with time. Taken together, these data suggest that Roundup exposure may effect human reproduction and fetal development in case of contamination.’[1]

The last statement, translated into layman’s language is that the world’s most popular herbicide has manifest impact on human embryo cells and no Government is moving to call for a ban on its sale pending larger more thorough independent tests. The scientific article was buried and no one outside a tiny scientific community even knew the alarming results. The story should have been banner headline in the world press: ‘Scientists claim GMO Herbicide toxic to human embryo!’

NATO gets world seed samples

The fact that GMO is a product of the Rockefeller Foundation, an organization which has been the leading world organization promoting the racialist eugenics agenda since the 1920’s, and promoting population reduction programs including forced sterilization of women in Puerto Rico, Nicaragua and elsewhere in the developing world is relevant to the probable agenda of the people who placed a global seed vault on the property of a NATO country far remote from any prying of the public.

The picture gets more ominous in context of the Arctic Seed Vault of the Rockefeller Foundation, Gates, Monsanto et al. The seeds for the Doomsday Seed Vault are being gathered from select seed banks around the world established by CGIAR. This first installment from the CGIAR collections will contain duplicates from international agricultural research centers based in Benin, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines and Syria. Collectively, the CGIAR centers maintain 600,000 plant varieties in crop gene-banks, which are regarded as the foundation of global efforts to conserve agricultural biodiversity. The seed banks are supposed to be protected from attempts of Monsanto et al to try to use the seeds for their patent efforts. There have been documented cases, however, where seed samples were illegally given to Monsanto or other GMO giants to develop GMO traits. Now by collecting all possible seed varieties far away from prying eyes in the Arctic,  the seed companies such as Monsanto who are part of the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault project, have at least the theoretical possibility of taking those seeds and patenting the most essential for their proliferation of GMO across the human food chain.

“We’re tempted to say that nobody in their right mind would ever use these things,” remarked Stanford University biophysicist, Professor Steven Block, a man with years of personal experience with classified Pentagon and Government biological research.“But,” Block added, “not everybody is in their right mind….” [2]

The Svalbard project deserves far more public attention and scrutiny.

NOTES

[1] N. Benachour, et al, Time- and Dose-Dependent Effects of Roundup on Human Embryonic and Placental Cells, 20 November 2006, Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, vol. 53, pp.126-133.

[2] Prof. Steven Block, quoted in Mark Shwartz, “Biological Warfare Emerges as 21st-Century Threat”, Stanford Report, news-service.stanford.edu/news/2001/january17/bioterror-117.html.,, 11 January 2001.