Reviewing F. William Engdahl’s "Seeds of Destruction" (Part I)

Bill Engdahl is a leading researcher, economist and

analyst of the New World Order who’s written on issues

of energy, politics and economics for over 30 years.

He contributes regularly to publications like Japan’s

Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine, Grant’s

Investor.com, European Banker and Business Banker

International. He’s also a frequent speaker at

geopolitical, economic and energy related

international conferences and is a distinguished

Research Associate of the Centre for Research on

Globalization where he’s a regular contributor.

Engdahl also wrote two important books - "A Century of

War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World

Order" in 2004. It’s an essential history of

geopolitics and the importance of oil. Engdahl

explains that America’s post-WW II dominance rests on

two pillars and one commodity - unchallengeable

military power and the dollar as the world’s reserve

currency combined with the quest to control global oil

and other energy resources.

Engdahl’s newest book is just out from the Centre for

Research on Globalization. It’s a sequel to his first

one called "Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of

Genetic Manipulation" and subject of this review. It’s

the diabolical story of how Washington and four

Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world

domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide

control of our food supply and why that prospect is

chilling. The book’s compelling contents are reviewed

below in-depth so readers will know the type future

Henry Kissinger had in mind in 1970 when he said:

"Control oil and you control nations; control food and

you control the people."

Remember also, this cabal is one of many

interconnected ones with fearsome power and ruthless

intent to use it - Big Banks controlling the Federal

Reserve and our money, Big Oil our world energy

resources, Big Media our information, Big Pharma our

health, Big Technology our state-of-the-art everything

and watching us, Big Defense our wars, Big Pentagon

waging them, and other corporate predators exploiting

our lives for profit. Engdahl’s book focuses

brilliantly on one of them. To fully cover its vital

contents, this review will be in three parts for more

detail and to make it easily digestible.

Part I of "Seeds of Destruction"

In 2003, Jeffrey Smith’s "Seeds of Deception" was

published. It exposed the dangers of untested and

unregulated genetically engineered foods most people

eat every day with no knowledge of the potential

health risks. Efforts to inform the public have been

quashed, reliable science has been buried, and

consider what happened to two distinguished

scientists.

One was Ignatio Chapela, a microbial ecologist at the

University of California, Berkeley. In September,

2001, he was invited to a carefully staged meeting

with Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, Mexico’s Director of

the Commission of Biosafety in Mexico City. The

experience left Chapela shaken and angry as he

explained. Monasterio attacked him for over an hour.

"First he trashed me. He let me know how damaging to

the country and how problematic my information was to

be."

Chapela referred to what he and a UC Berkeley graduate

student, David Quist, discovered in 2000 about

genetically engineered contamination of Mexican corn

in violation of a government ban on these crops in

1998. Corn is sacred in Mexico, the country is home to

hundreds of indigenous varieties that crossbreed

naturally, and GM contamination is permanent and

unthinkable - but it happened by design.

Chapela and Quist tested corn varieties in more than a

dozen state of Oaxaca communities and discovered 6% of

the plants contaminated with GM corn. Oaxaca is in the

country’s far South so Chapela knew if contamination

spread there, it was widespread throughout Mexico.

It’s unavoidable because NAFTA allows imported US corn

with 30% of it at the time genetically modified. Now

it’s heading for nearly double that amount, and if not

contained, it soon could be all of it.

The prestigious journal Nature agreed to publish

Chapela’s findings, Monasterio wanted them quashed,

but Chapela refused to comply. As a result, he was

intimidated not to do it and threatened with being

held responsible for all damages to Mexican

agriculture and its economy.

He went ahead, nonetheless, and when his article

appeared in the publication on November 29, 2001 the

smear campaign against him began and intensified. It

was later learned that Monsanto was behind it, and the

Washington-based Bivings Group PR firm was hired to

discredit his findings and get them retracted.

It worked because the campaign didn’t focus on

Chapela’s contamination discovery, but on a second

research conclusion even more serious. He learned the

contaminated GM corn had as many as eight fragments of

the CaMV promoter that creates an unstable "hotspot."

It can cause plant genes to fragment, scatter

throughout the plant’s genome, and, if proved

conclusively, would wreck efforts to introduce GM

crops in the country. Without further evidence, there

was still room for doubt if the second finding was

valid, however, and the anti-Chapela campaign hammered

him on it.

Because of the pressure, Nature took an unprecedented

action in its 133 year history. It upheld Chapela’s

central finding but retracted the other one. That was

all it took, and the major media pounced on it. They

denounced Chapela’s incompetence and tried to

discredit everything he learned including his verified

findings. They weren’t reported, his vilification was

highlighted, and Monsanto and the Mexican government

scored a big victory.

Ironically, on April 18, 2002, two weeks after

Nature’s partial retraction, the Mexican government

announced there was massive genetic contamination of

traditional corn varieties in Oaxaca and the

neighboring state of Puebla. It was horrifying as up

to 95% of tested crops were genetically polluted and

"at a speed never before predicted." The news made

headlines in Europe and Mexico. It was ignored in the

US and Canada.

The fallout for Chapela was UC Berkeley denied him

tenure in 2003 because of his article and for

criticizing university ties to the biotech industry.

He then filed suit in April, 2004 asking remuneration

for lost wages, earnings and benefits, compensatory

damages for humiliation, mental anguish, emotional

distress and coverage of attorney fees and costs for

his action. He won in May, 2005 but not in court when

the university reversed its decision, granted him

tenure and agreed to include retroactive pay back to

2003. The damage, however, was done and is an example

of what’s at stake when anyone dares challenge a

powerful company like Monsanto.

The other man attacked was the world’s leading lectins

and plant genetic modification expert, UK-based Arpad

Pusztai. He was vilified and fired from his research

position at Scotland’s Rowett Research Institute for

publishing industry-unfriendly data he was

commissioned to produce on the safety of GMO foods.

His Rowett Research study was the first ever

independent one conducted on them anywhere. He

undertook it believing in their promise but became

alarmed by his findings. The Clinton and Blair

governments were determined to suppress them because

Washington was spending billions promoting GMO crops

and a future biotech revolution. It wasn’t about to

let even the world’s foremost expert in the field

derail the effort. His results were startling and

consider the implications for humans eating

genetically engineered foods.

Rats fed GMO potatoes had smaller livers, hearts,

testicles and brains, damaged immune systems, and

showed structural changes in their white blood cells

making them more vulnerable to infection and disease

compared to other rats fed non-GMO potatoes. It got

worse. Thymus and spleen damage showed up; enlarged

tissues, including the pancreas and intestines; and

there were cases of liver atrophy as well as

significant proliferation of stomach and intestines

cells that could be a sign of greater future risk of

cancer. Equally alarming - this all happened after 10

days of testing, and the changes persisted after 110

days that’s the human equivalent of 10 years.

GM foods today saturate our diet. Over 80% of all

supermarket processed foods contain them. Others

include grains like rice, corn and wheat; legumes like

soybeans and soy products; vegetable oils; soft

drinks; salad dressings; vegetables and fruits; dairy

products including eggs; meat and other animal

products; and even infant formula plus a vast array of

hidden additives and ingredients in processed foods

(like in tomato sauce, ice cream and peanut butter).

They’re unrevealed to consumers because labeling is

prohibited yet the more of them we eat, the greater

the potential threat to our health.

Today, we’re all lab rats in an uncontrolled,

unregulated mass human experiment the results of which

are unknown. The risks from it are beyond measure, it

will take many years to learn them, and when they’re

finally revealed it will be too late to reverse the

damage if it’s proved GM products harm human health as

independent experts strongly believe. Once GM seeds

are introduced to an area, the genie is out of the

bottle for keeps.

Despite the enormous risks, however, Washington and

growing numbers of governments around the world in

parts of Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa now

allow these products to be grown in their soil or

imported. They’re produced and sold to consumers

because agribusiness giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Dow

AgriSciences and Cargill have enormous clout to demand

it and a potent partner supporting them - the US

government and its agencies, including the Departments

of Agriculture and State, FDA, EPA and even the

defense establishment. World Trade Organization (WTO)

Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights

(TRIPS) patent rules also back them along with

industry-friendly WTO rulings like the February 7,

2006 one.

It favored a US challenge against European GMO

regulatory policies in spite of strong consumer

sentiment against these foods and ingredients on the

continent. It also violated the Biosafety Protocol

that should let nations regulate these products in the

public interest, but it doesn’t because WTO trade

rules sabotaged it. Nonetheless, anti-GMO activism

persists, consumers still have a say, and there are

hundreds of GMO-free zones around the world, including

in the US. That and more is needed to take on the

agribusiness giants that so far have everything going

their way.

In "Seeds of Deception," Jeffrey Smith did a masterful

job explaining the dangers of GM foods and

ingredients. Engdahl explains them as well but goes

much further brilliantly in his blockbuster book on

this topic. It’s the story of a powerful family and a

"small socio-political American elite (that) seeks to

establish control over the very basis of human

survival" - future life through the food we eat. The

book’s introduction says it "reads (like) a crime

story." It’s also a nightmare but one that’s very real

and threatening.

This review covers the book in-depth because of its

importance. It’s an extraordinary work that "reveals a

diabolical World of profit-driven political intrigue

(and) government corruption and coercion" that’s part

of a decades-long global scheme for total world

dominance. The book deserves vast exposure and must be

read in full for the whole disturbing story. It’s

hoped the material below will encourage readers to do

it in their own self-interest and to marshal mass

consumer actions to place food safety above corporate

profits.

Engdahl’s book supplies the ammunition to do it and is

also a sequel to his earlier one on war, oil politics

and The New World Order and follows naturally from it.

It covers the roots of the strategy to control "global

food security" that goes back to the 1930s and the

plans of a handful of American families to preserve

their wealth and power. But it centers on one in

particular that above the others "came to symbolize

the hubris and arrogance of the emerging American

century" that blossomed post-WW II. Its patriarch

began in oil and then dominated it in his powerful Oil

Trust. It was only the beginning as the family

expanded into "education of youth, medicine and

psychology," US foreign policy, and "the very science

of life itself, biology, and its applications" in

plants and agriculture.

The family’s name is Rockefeller. The patriarch was

John D., and four powerful later-generation brothers

followed him - David, Nelson, Laurance, and John D.

III. Engdahl says the GMO story covers "the evolution

of power in the hands of an elite (led by this

family), determined (above all) to bring the entire

world under their sway." They and other elites already

control most of it, including the nation’s energy, the

US Federal Reserve, and other key world central banks.

Today, three brothers are gone, David alone remains,

and he’s still a force at age 92 although he no longer

runs the family bank, JP Morgan Chase. He’s active in

family enterprises, however, including the Rockefeller

Foundation to be discussed in Part II of this review.

F. William Engdahl is the author of Seeds of

Destruction, the Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

just released by Global Research. He is also the

author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil

Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd.. To

contact him by e-mail:

info@ engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at

lendmanstephen @sbcglobal.net.

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