The Rockefeller Foundation and the destruction of global agriculture
No one group has done more to damage our global agriculture and food quality than the Rockefeller Foundation.
They began in the early 1950s after the War to fund two Harvard Business School professors to develop vertical integration which they named “Agribusiness.” The farmer became the least important.
They then created the fraudulent Green Revolution in Mexico and India in the 1960s and later the pro-GMO Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa since 2006.
Money from the Rockefeller Foundation literally created the disastrous genetically modified organism (“GMO”) genetically altered plants with their toxic glyphosate pesticides. Now again, the foundation is engaged in a major policy change in global food and agriculture and it’s not good.
Sinister Rockefeller Food System Agenda — They Created It and Now Want to Destroy It
By F. William Engdahl as published in the New Eastern Outlook on 21 October 2021
In their latest report, ‘True Cost of Food: Measuring What Matters to Transform the US Food System’, the Rockefeller Foundation is deeply engaged in a coordinated effort to radically change the way we produce food and how we calculate its true cost. They claim it is part of a global consensus, through the UN, to create “sustainable” agriculture amid the ongoing covid breakdown crisis. Far from being a positive change, it is intended to radically change our access to healthy food and our choice of what we eat. The Foundation, which has just released the second food report in two years, is partnering with the Davos World Economic Forum and big agribusiness to lead the drive. Their new slogan is “True Cost of Food.”
True Cost?
Rajiv Shah, President of the Foundation writes, “We spent the past year working with experts and advocates across the field to measure impact of the US food system. The result is the first US-wide set of metrics that can help us measure the cost of our food more accurately. With this new analysis, governments, advocates, food producers, and individuals are better equipped to transform our food system to be more nourishing, regenerative, and equitable …”
Here is where the words must be looked at more closely. These guys are experts at neuro-linguistic programming (“NLP”). In effect, it reads as if the same Rockefeller Foundation responsible for our industrialised, globalised food chain and the destruction that process has wrought on not only the family farm but also the quality of our global agriculture and diet, is now blaming their creation for huge external costs of our food. However, they write as if the greedy family farmer is to blame, not corporate agribusiness.
Shah states, “This report is a wake-up call. The US food system as it stands is adversely affecting our environment, our health, and our society.” Shah’s Rockefeller study states, “The US food system’s current set-up has led to costly impacts on the health of people, society and the planet. Global warming, reduced biodiversity, water and air pollution, food waste and the high incidence of diet-related illnesses are key unintended consequences of the current production system.” This is ominous.
The study adds, “ The burden of impact of these costs are disproportionately borne by communities that are marginalised and underserved, often communities of colour, many of whom are the backbone as farmers, fishers, ranchers and food workers.”
Using a Dutch group, True Price Foundation, the report calculates that the “true cost” of the US food system is not the $1.1 trillion that Americans spend annually on food, but rather at least $3.2 trillion per year when taking into account its impact on the health of people, livelihoods and the environment. This huge added cost is calculated mainly from health effects including cancer and diabetes and environmental effects such as CO2 emissions of what they call “unsustainable” agriculture. True Cost Foundation has a three-man board including Herman Mulder, a former banker with ABN Amro, one of the world’s leading agribusiness banks; Charles Evers, former Corporate controller and CFO with Unilever NV (1981-2002), one of the world’s leading agribusiness giants; and Jasper de Jong, Partner at Allen & Overy, one of the world’s largest law firms based in London. This is the team behind pricing such abstractions as a tonne of CO2 and other costs for the Rockefeller report. The only point is that CO2 is a harmless essential component of all life and is no cause for a rising global temperature.
Also notable about the Rockefeller report, True Cost of Food, is that the contributors included law school professors, university economists, the World Wildlife Fund (“WWF”), and the True Cost Foundation. No single farmer organisation was included.
The report calculates that the major “hidden” costs of America’s food production come from agriculture’s negative impact on health and on the environment: “The biggest unaccounted costs are from negative impacts on human health, worsening environmental degradation and biodiversity loss.” They put a number on all this. For example, direct environmental impacts including greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions, water use, and soil erosion they claim cost $350 billion annually; and the impact on biodiversity as a result of land use, and soil, water and air pollution they say costs the US economy $455 billion. Then they calculate the health costs of the US food system. Here the report includes costs to the economy of obesity, of cardio-vascular diseases which are the leading cause of death globally, cancer, diabetes and other non-communicable diseases. This supposedly adds another $ 1 trillion to our “true” food costs. Totaling both effects as claimed adds some $1.8 trillion of the estimated $2.2 external costs of food. To claim the dollar costs of these diseases in the rigged US healthcare system is the sole fault of the agriculture ignores the bloated health costs since Obamacare insurance took effect. By the way, Rockefeller also created the modern medical system with his Flexner Report along with the Carnegie Foundation in 1910. But that’s another story.
There is no disputing that agribusiness industrialised food production in the USA since the 1950s has turned the once-productive family farm into a corporate appendage of a system of factory farms, GMO seed and agrichemicals monopolies like Monsanto-Bayer and DuPontDow (Corteva), huge slaughtering operations such as of Tyson and Smithfield Foods, and retailers like Walmart or Whole Foods. But the report suggests that traditional family farmers are to blame. This is to set the stage for an agriculture Great Reset that will be even more harmful as the remaining range-fed beef is replaced with lab-grown GMO plant beef and similar products. The United States Department of Agriculture (“USDA”) recently wrote that the “primary sources of greenhouse gases in agriculture are the production of nitrogen-based fertilisers; the combustion of fossil fuels such as coal, gasoline, diesel fuel and natural gas; and waste management. Livestock enteric fermentation, or the fermentation that takes place in the digestive systems of ruminant animals, results in methane emissions.”
The message is that the current American food production is to blame and that radical and costly changes are urgently needed. The difficulty in reading the report is that the language is deliberately vague and deceptive. For example, one of the most damaging components of American agriculture since the 1990s has been the wholesale introduction of GMO crops – especially soybeans, corn and cotton and the highly carcinogenic Monsanto-Bayer Roundup with glyphosate. The Rockefeller report omits their direct role in fostering that devastation by their creating and promoting Monsanto and GMOs for decades, knowing it was destructive. Rockefeller Foundation policy is to introduce gene-edited crops, GMO.2, and destroy America’s present agriculture in favour of patented costly alternatives, claiming it is too costly and not “sustainable” or “inclusive.” The second largest global food producer, the EU, will be their next target.
AGRA, Gates and Davos
This agenda is not surprising when we look at the background of the key actors at Rockefeller Foundation. The President, Rajiv Shah, came out of a background at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he was Director of Agricultural Development. At Gates Foundation Shah worked with the Rockefeller Foundation to create the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. He is intimately tied to the Davos World Economic Forum (“WEF”) of Great Reset guru, Klaus Schwab, where Shah recently co-chaired the WEF Global Future Council on the New Agenda for Economic Growth and Recovery. There he wrote that “governments must actively shape markets towards green and inclusive growth.”
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (“AGRA”) is a project that has tried to force GMO seeds and related pesticides at huge cost on poorer African small farmers. It has been an agricultural disaster for African farmers. The AGRA model plays a key role in understanding the unspoken agenda of the Rockefeller Foundation and allies such as WEF and the Gates Foundation. The person responsible under Shah at Rockefeller for the agriculture program is Roy Steiner, the foundation’s Senior Vice President for Food Initiative. Steiner was with Shah at the Gates Foundation and worked with Shah to create the pro-GMO AGRA in Africa.
The deep role of both Shah and Steiner in AGRA and its GMO agenda gives a very good idea of how Rockefeller & Co. plan the radical transformation of US agriculture, and it is not good. The report says that it will reduce CO2 and methane emissions and introduce plant-based alternatives. Bill Gates co-funded the startup of the imitation meat company, Impossible Foods, using lab-grown fake meat and gene-editing. He insists synthetic beef is a necessary strategy to address climate change and declares that Americans and other Western nations must switch to a diet of 100% synthetic beef. No more cows no more gas emissions …
Davos, Rockefeller and UN World Food Summit
The agriculture agenda of the influential Rockefeller Foundation, the agenda of Davos WEF and of the UN all converge on the Great Reset and UN Agenda 2030 for “sustainable agriculture.” On 23 September 2021 in New York, the UN hosted the ‘Food Systems Summit 2021’. The chair of the summit was Agnes Kalibata UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy to the 2021 Food Systems Summit. Her selection was vehemently opposed by dozens of NGOs based on the fact she is President of the Gates-Rockefeller AGRA in Africa. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced the summit as a part of the ‘Decade of Action’ for achieving Agenda 2030 sustainable goals. Olivier De Schutter, former UN special rapporteur on the right to food, stated that the Food Summit was the result of “closed-door agreements” at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
In June 2019 at the UN, WEF head Klaus Schwab and UN’s Guterres signed a formal partnership “to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” One year later amid the covid pandemia, Klaus Schwab announced the launch of the technocratic Great Reset together with Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN; and Kristalina Georgieva of the International Monetary Fund. Davos, the UN and Rockefeller Foundation are all on one agenda and it is not good for the future health and food of mankind. This is no conspiracy theory; it’s the real conspiracy.
About the Author
F. William Engdahl is an American writer based in Germany and an award-winning geopolitical analyst, strategic risk consultant, author, professor and lecturer. He has been researching and writing about the world political scene for more than thirty years.
Featured image taken from the article ‘Rockefeller Foundation Announces Farmer-Led, Regenerative Agriculture Grants’, Food Tank, December 2022
