by F. William Engdahl
July 3, 2011
from
GlobalResearch Website
F. William Engdahl, is the
author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic
Manipulation, published by Global Research.
He is also the author of Gods
of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century; A
Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order
and Full Spectrum Dominance : Totalitarian Democracy in the New
World Order. He may be contacted via his website,
www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
Reproduction of all or
significant parts of this article, as well as foreign translations,
require the author’s prior permission. |
My late grandfather, a man of sturdy
Norwegian-American farm stock, who later became a newspaper editor and
political activist during the First World War, used to say,
'A man can get used to pretty much anything
with time, except dying... and even that with some practice.'
Well, as fate has it, it seems we, the vast
majority of the human race, are about to test that adage in regard to the
availability of our daily bread itself.
Food is one of those funny things it's hard to live without. We all tend to
take it for granted that our local supermarket will continue to offer
whatever we wish, in abundance, at affordable prices or nearly so. Yet
living without adequate food is the growing prospect facing hundreds of
millions, if not billions, of us over the coming years.
In a sense it's a genuine paradox. Our planet has everything we need to
produce nutritious natural food to feed the entire world population many
times over. This is the case, despite the ravages of industrialized
agriculture over the past half century or more.
Then, how can it be that our world faces, according to some predictions, the
prospect of a decade or more of famine on a global scale? The answer lies in
the forces and interest groups that have decided to artificially create a
scarcity of nutritious food.
The problem has several important dimensions.
Eliminating emergency
reserves
The ability to manipulate the price of essential foods worldwide at will -
almost irrespective of today’s physical supply and demand for grains - is
quite recent. It is also scarcely understood.
Up until the grain crisis of the mid-1970s there was no single "world price"
for grain, the benchmark for the price of all foods and food products.
Grain
prices were determined locally in thousands of market places where buyer and
seller met. The onset of economic globalization was to change that radically
to the worse as the tiny percent of grains traded internationally were able
to set the global price for the bulk of grains grown.
From the time of the earliest traces left by Sumerian civilization some two
thousand years before Christ, in the region between the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers in today's Iraq, almost every culture had the practice of storing a
reserve stock of a grain harvest - right up to the most recent times. Wars,
droughts and famines were the reason.
When properly stored, grain can be
safely stored over a period of about seven years, enabling reserve stocks in
case of an emergency.
After the Second World War, Washington created a General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to serve as a wedge to push free trade among major
industrial nations, especially the European Community. During initial
negotiations, agriculture was deliberately kept off the table at the
insistence of the Europeans, especially the French, who regarded political
defense of Europe’s Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) and European agriculture
protections as non-negotiable.
Beginning in the 1980s with the political crusades of Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan, the extremist free market views of Chicago's
Milton Friedman
became increasingly accepted by leading European power circles.
Step-by-step
the resistance to the Washington agriculture free trade agenda dissolved.
After more than seven years of intense horse-trading, lobbying and pressure,
the European Union finally agreed in 1993 to the
GATT Uruguay Round,
requiring a major reduction of national agriculture protection. Central to
the Uruguay Round deal was agreement on one major change: national grain
reserves as a government responsibility were to be ended.
Under the new 1993 GATT agreement, formalized with the creation of a World
Trade Organization to police the agreements with enforceable sanctions
against violators, ‘free trade’ in agriculture products was for the first
time an agreed priority of the world's major trading nations, a fateful
decision to put it mildly.
Henceforth, grain reserves were to be managed by the ‘free market,’ by
private companies, greatest among them the U.S. Grain Cartel giants, the
behemoths of American agribusiness. The grain companies argued that they
would be able to fill any emergency gaps more efficiently and save
governments the cost.
That ill-advised decision would open the floodgates to
unprecedented grain market shenanigans and manipulations.
-
ADM (Archer Daniels Midland)
-
Continental Grain
-
Bunge and the primus inter
pares, Cargill (the largest privately-held grain and agribusiness trading
company in the world),
...emerged the great winners of the WTO process.
The outcome of the GATT agriculture talks was very much to the liking of the
people at Cargill. That was no surprise to insiders. Former Cargill
executive Dan Amstutz played the key role in drafting the agriculture trade
section of the GATT Uruguay Round.[1]
In 1985 D. Gale Johnson of the University of
Chicago, a colleague of Milton Friedman, co-authored a seminal report for
David Rockefeller's
Trilateral Commission that was the blueprint for what
they called "market-oriented" agricultural reform. It provided the framework
for the U.S. position in the coming GATT Uruguay Round negotiations.
The
Rockefeller group and its think tanks were the architects of ‘agricultural
reform,’ as with so much in our post-1945 world.
The process of eliminating government grain reserves in major producing
countries took time, but with the passage of the
1996 Farm Bill, the U.S. had
virtually eliminated its grain reserves. The EU followed soon after.
Today,
among major agriculture producing countries, only China and India still hold
to a strategic security policy of nationally held grain reserves. [2]
Wall Street smells
blood
The elimination of national grain reserves in the USA and EU and other major
OECD industrial countries set the stage for the next step in the process -
elimination of agricultural commodity derivatives regulation, allowing
unbridled unchecked speculative manipulations.
Under the Clinton Treasury (1999 - 2000) the deregulation of government
controls over agriculture commodity speculation was formalized by the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) - the government body charged
with supervising derivatives trade in exchanges such as the Chicago Board of
Trade or NYMEX - and in legislation drafted by Tim Geithner and
Larry
Summers at Treasury.
As described below, it was no accident that Wall Street
pushed Geithner, former President of the NY Federal Reserve, to become
Obama’s Treasury Secretary in 2008, amid the worst financial debacle in
history.
Something to do with having foxes guard henhouses.
When Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State in 1972-1973, acting in league
with the Department of Agriculture and major U.S. grain trading companies, he
orchestrated an unprecedented 200% jump in the price of grain. The price
hike was triggered at that time by the U.S. signing a three-year contract with
the Soviet Union that had just gone through a disastrous harvest failure.
The U.S.-Soviet deal hit amid global drought and severely reduced harvests
worldwide, hardly a prudent time to sell the entire U.S. grain cupboard to an
ostensible Cold War opponent. The sale took place amid a major world grain
harvest shortfall leading to the explosive price rise. Critical voices in
U.S.
press at the time appropriately dubbed it the Great Grain Robbery.
Kissinger
had even arranged for much of the cost of shipping U.S. grain to the Soviets
to be paid by U.S. taxpayers. Cargill and company laughed all the way to the
bank. [3]
Around the same time, the big American grain companies - Cargill,
Continental Grain, ADM, Bunge - began what would be a twenty-year process of
transforming world grain markets into venues for controlling essential human
and animal nutrition by manipulating grain prices regardless of supply.
The twenty-year process of the U.S.’ gaining control of world grain markets
and prices took a giant leap forward in the 1980s with the advent of
financial commodity index trading and other derivatives.
The Summers-Geithner-Wall Street new version of the earlier grain robbery
especially after 2006 would eventually pale anything Kissinger and friends
had engineered in the 1970s.
In 1999, at the urging of major Wall Street banks such as,
-
Goldman Sachs
-
JP
Morgan
-
Chase Manhattan
-
Citibank,
...the Clinton Administration drafted a
statute that would fundamentally alter grain-trading history.
It was called
the
Commodity Futures Modernization Act and was made law in 2000.
The two key architects of Clinton’s new law were a former Goldman Sachs
consultant and Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and his Assistant
at Treasury Tim Geithner, friend of Wall Street and today Obama’s Treasury
Secretary. Secretary Summers was also a key player in preventing efforts to
regulate financial derivatives in commodities and financial products.[4]
The Summers-Geithner recommendations were contained in a November 1999
Report to Congress from the President's Working Group on Financial Markets,
the infamous "Plunge Protection Team." [5]
At the time, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) proposed also
to deregulate trading in derivatives between major banks or financial
institutions, including derivatives of grain and other agricultural
commodities.[6]
The historic and unprecedented deregulation opened a massive hole in
Government supervision of derivatives trading, a gaping hole that ultimately
facilitated the derivatives games leading to the 2007 financial collapse. It
also formed the deregulation free-for-all that is behind much of the recent
explosion in grain prices.
Some years earlier in 1991 Goldman Sachs had rolled out its own commodity
"index," which was to go on to become the global benchmark for derivatives
trading of all commodities, including food and oil. The Goldman Sachs
Commodity Index or GSCI was a new derivative that tracked the prices of some
24 commodities - from corn to hogs to coffee to wheat to precious metals and
energy.
From the point of view of Wall Street, the idea was brilliant. It
let speculators gamble on the future price of an entire range of raw
materials in one step, a kind of Wall Street version of a “one-step”
gambling mall…
With the CFTC deregulation of commodity trading in 1999 Goldman Sachs was
positioned to reap sweet financial rewards with its GSCI.
Now bankers and
hedge funds and other high-profile speculators were able to take huge
positions or bets on the future grain price with no need to take delivery of
actual wheat or corn at the end.
The price of grain was now run by the new casino masters of grain supplies -
from Wall Street to London and beyond - who traded grain futures and options
in Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City. No longer was future price a form of
hedging limited to knowledgeable active participants in the grain industry,
whether farmers or millers or large grain end-users - the individual traders
who had relied on futures contracts for more than a century to insulate
themselves from risks of harvest failure or disasters.
Grain had become a new speculative field for anyone willing to risk
investors' capital, high stakes gamblers such as Goldman Sachs or Deutsche
Bank or high-risk offshore hedge funds. Grain, like oil before it, had now
been almost entirely decoupled from everyday supply and demand in the short
term.
The price could be manipulated for brief periods through rumor rather
than fact. [7]
Unlike directly involved parties like millers or farmers or large restaurant
chains, speculators neither produced nor took delivery of the corn or wheat
they gambled with. They could hardly take delivery of 10 tons of hard red
winter wheat and store it. Their game was a complex new form of arbitrage
where the only rule was to buy low and sell high.
Derivative instruments and
U.S. Government laissez faire regulatory negligence allowed the players’
potential profits from the game to be leveraged often many-fold.
But there was another perverse twist:
Goldman Sachs' GSCI was structured so
that investors could only buy the contract. It was, as the industry calls
it, "long only."
No one could bet on a fall in grain prices with it. You
only stood to profit from an ever-rising grain price and that happened as
ever more innocent investors were suckered into high-risk commodity
speculation creating a kind-of self-fulfilling prophesy.[8]
That long-only feature was done to encourage bank clients to leave their
money with the bank or fund for the long term and let the bankers play with
other people’s money, with huge potential windfall profits to the bankers -
while any losses fell to the clients.
The fatal flaw was that the GSCI structure did not allow "short selling"
that would force prices down in times of grain surplus. Investors were lured
into a system that required them to buy and keep buying once grain prices
rose for whatever reason.
Soon other banks, including,
-
Barclays
-
Deutsche Bank
-
Pimco
-
JP Morgan Chase
-
AIG
-
Bear Stearns
-
Lehman Brothers,
...floated their own commodity index funds.[9]
For the first time, high-risk commodity
investing - including into grain and other agriculture products - became a
financial product for the "little man" who knew little if anything about
what he was getting into, just that his banker or fund adviser was urging
him to invest in it. The banks as usual played with "other people’s money" -
at the expense of ‘other people.’
In a detailed analysis of the grain price bubble of 2007-2008, Olivier de Schutter, a UN Special Rapporteur on the
Right to Food, recently concluded
that,
"a significant portion of the increases in price and volatility of
essential food commodities can only be explained by the emergence of a
speculative bubble." [10]
The timing of that bubble was notable
as it conveniently offset huge losses of those same mega-banks that were
under water with their excesses in securitized home mortgages and other Wall
Street casino madness.
Schutter added,
In particular, there is a reason to believe that a significant role was
played by the entry into markets for derivatives based on food commodities
of large, powerful institutional investors such as hedge funds, pension
funds and investment banks, all of which are generally unconcerned with
agricultural market fundamentals. Such entry was made possible because of
deregulation in important commodity derivatives markets beginning in 2000.
[11]
Following the collapse of the dot.com stock bubble in 2000, as Wall Street
and other major financial players began seeking alternatives, commodities
and high-risk derivatives based on baskets of commodities became a major
speculative investment theme for the first time.
Since 2000 the totality of dollars invested in various commodity index funds
- Goldman Sachs’ GSCI being the largest - has risen from some $13 billion in
2003 to a staggering $317 billion during the oil and grain speculation
bubble in 2008.
This was documented in a study by Lehman Brothers shortly
before Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made them a sacrificial lamb in
order to bail out his Wall Street cronies.[12]
Since 2008 with some fluctuation, investor funds have continued to pour into
various commodity funds, keeping food prices high and rising. From 2005 to
2008, the worldwide price of food rose 80 percent - and has kept rising.
In
the period from May 2010 through May 2011 the price of wheat rose again some
85%.
"It's unprecedented how much investment capital we've seen in commodity
markets," said Kendell Keith, president of the National Grain and Feed
Association, in a recent interview. [13]
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN estimates that since 2004,
world food prices on average have soared by an unprecedented 240%.
The
offering of food commodities as a speculative alternative by the large banks
and hedge funds exploded in 2007 when the U.S. sub-prime financial tsunami
first hit. Since then, speculation in food commodities has only gathered
more momentum as other investments in stocks and bonds became highly
dangerous. One result has been a predictably rapid rise in starvation,
hunger and malnutrition in poorer populations around the world.
The FAO calculates that food-deficit countries will be forced to spend fully
30% more on importing food - with a world value of a staggering $1.3
trillion.
Three decades ago, that international market was tiny; today it is
overwhelmingly dominated by a small handful of U.S. agribusiness giants.
Agribusiness, like military exports, is a core U.S. strategic sector, long
supported to extraordinary lengths by Washington. It is part of a larger and
rather private agenda shaped decades ago under the aegis of the Rockefeller
and Ford Foundations and their eugenics advocates. [14]
Importing food is today the rule rather than the exception as cheap,
globalized agribusiness products, often under IMF pressure, are being forced
onto populations across the developing world, including formerly
self-sufficient food-producing societies now rendered dependant on imported
food. This is done in the name of ‘free trade’ or what is often called
‘market-oriented agriculture.’
Left unsaid is that the so-called ‘market’ is
colossally inefficient and unhealthy, literally and financially. Imported
food dependency is artificially created by huge multinational conglomerates
such as,
-
Tyson Foods
-
Smithfield
-
Cargill
-
Nestle,
...corporate giants whose
last concern seems to be the health and well-being of those of us who must
consume their industrial food products.
The cheap agribusiness imports often undercut the prices of locally grown
crops, driving millions from their land into overcrowded cities in desperate
search of jobs.
Today the price of wheat derivatives, or ‘paper wheat,’ controls the price
of real wheat as speculators like,
-
Goldman Sachs
-
JP Morgan Chase
-
HSBC
-
Barclays,
...or numerous offshore hedge funds - with little interest in grains
other than as a profit source - now outnumber bona-fide agriculture industry
hedgers four-to-one.
That is a complete reversal of the situation that dominated grain prices for
the past hundred years or more. For some 75 years, the CFTC had imposed
limits on how much of certain agricultural commodities - including wheat,
cotton, soybeans, soybean meal, corn, and oats - can be traded by
non-commercial players who are not part of the food industry.
So-called
‘commercial hedgers,’ like farmers or food processors, previously could
trade unlimited amounts in order to manage their risk. Not so with pure
speculators.
Those limits were designed to prevent manipulation and distortion in what
are relatively small markets. With the passage of the Summers-Geithner
Commodity Modernization Act of 2000 and the infamous ‘Enron Loophole’ -
allowing exemption from government regulation - the fast and loose trading
in energy derivatives was rapidly expanded to include food commodities.
The
dam broke in 2006 when Deutsche Bank asked for and was granted CFTC
permission to be exempt from all trading limits. The regulatory authorities
assured them that there would be no penalties for exceeding the limits.
Others followed, lemming like. [15]
For some two billion people in the world who spend more than half of their
income on food, the effects have been horrifying. During the
speculation-driven grain price explosion in 2008, more than a quarter
billion people became what the UN terms "food insecure," or a total of one
billion human beings, a new record. [16]
That need never have occurred had it not been for the diabolical
consequences of the U.S. Government deregulating grain speculation, with
support from the U.S. Congress over the past decade or more. By early 2008,
upwards of 35% of all U.S. arable land was being planted with corn to be
burned as biofuel under the new Bush Administration incentives. In 2011 the
total is more than 40%.
Thus, the stage was set for the slightest minor
market shock to detonate a massive speculative bubble in grain markets, as
was then being done by the use of the same GSCI index games as are played
with oil.
Agribusiness as a
long-term strategy
The record rise in grain and food prices in recent years is not a mere Wall
Street profit gimmick, although obscene profits are being made.
Rather, it
is apparently an integral part of a long-term strategy whose roots go back
to the years just after World War Two when Nelson Rockefeller and his
brothers tried to organize the global food chain along the same monopoly
model they had used for world oil.
Food would henceforth become just another
commodity like oil or tin or silver whose scarcity and price could
ultimately be controlled by a small group of powerful trading insiders.
At the same time the Rockefeller brothers were expanding their global
business reach from oil to agriculture in the developing world through their
technology-driven Green Revolution scheme after the war, they were also
financing a little-noticed project at Harvard University. The project would
form the infrastructure for their plan to globalize world food production
under the central control of a handful of private corporations.
Its creators gave it the name ‘agribusiness,’ in order to differentiate it
from traditional farmer-based agriculture - the cultivation of crops for
human sustenance and nutrition.
The push to place world national
governments’ emergency grain reserves into private hands was merely a
logical expansion of the original Rockefeller agribusiness strategy, as was
their highly mis-represented “Green Revolution” which at day’s end merely
promoted a huge sale of U.S. agriculture products from John Deere tractors
(using large volumes of Standard Oil Rockefeller products) to U.S. chemical
fertilizers made by other companies in
the Rockefeller orbit - forcing a
trend to large scale farming and forcing millions off the land into cities
where they former a cheap labor pool for large multinationals.
The
highly-touted harvest yields turned out to be actual losses after several
harvests. [17]
Agribusiness and the Green Revolution went hand-in-glove. They were part of
a grandiose strategy which included Rockefeller Foundation financing of
research for development of genetic alteration of plants a few years later.
John H. Davis had been Assistant Agriculture Secretary under President
Dwight Eisenhower in the early 1950s. He left Washington in 1955 and went to
the Harvard Graduate School of Business, an unusual place for an agriculture
expert in those days. Davis had a clear strategy.
In 1956 he wrote an
article in the Harvard Business Review in which he declared,
“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 observers had a clue back
then.[18]
Davis, together with another Harvard Business School professor, Ray
Goldberg, formed a Harvard team with Russian-born economist Wassily
Leontief, who was then mapping the entire U.S. economy, in a project funded by
the Rockefeller Foundation. During the war, the U.S. Government had hired
Leontief to develop a method of dynamic analysis of the total economy that
he referred to as ‘input-output’ analysis.
Leontief worked for the U.S. Labor
Department as well as for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
predecessor to the CIA.[19]
In 1948 Leontief got a major four-year $100,000 grant from the Rockefeller
Foundation to set up the Harvard ‘Economic Research Project on the Structure
of the American Economy.’ A year later the U.S. Air Force joined the Harvard
project, a curious engagement for one of the prime U.S. military branches.
The
transistor and electronic computers had just been developed along with
methods of linear programming that would allow the processing of vast
amounts of statistical data on the economy.
Soon the Ford Foundation joined
in to fund the Harvard project.[20]
The Harvard project and its agribusiness component were part of a major
attempt to revolutionize U.S. and later, global food production. It was to
take four decades before it dominated the food industry.
Professor Goldberg
later referred to the agribusiness revolution and the development of
genetically-modified agribusiness as,
‘changing our global economy and society
more dramatically than any other single event in the history of
mankind.’ [21]
He just might have been right as we are now
likely about to witness over the coming decade.
As Ray Goldberg boasted years later, the core idea driving their
agribusiness project was the re-introduction of ‘vertical integration’ into
U.S. food production.
By the 1970s most Americans had forgotten that bitter
battles had been fought before World War I and during the 1920's to pass
laws in Congress to prohibit vertical integration by giant conglomerates,
and to break up trusts such as Standard Oil, in order to prevent them from
monopolizing whole sectors of vital industries.
It wasn’t until the David Rockefeller-backed Presidency of Jimmy Carter in
the late 1970’s that U.S. multinational business was able to begin the
rollback of decades of carefully constructed U.S. Government regulations of
health, food safety and consumer protection laws, and open the doors to a
new wave of vertical integration of agriculture.
The vertical integration
process was sold to unaware citizens under the banner of ‘economic
efficiency’ and ‘economy of scale.’ [22]
A return to vertical integration and the accompanying agribusiness were
introduced amid a publicity campaign in mainstream media and from industry
claiming that government had encroached far too much into the daily lives of
its citizens and had to be cut back to give ordinary Americans ‘freedom.’
The war cry of the campaigners was ‘deregulation.’
Of course, de-regulation
by government merely opened the door to private control - another form of
regulation - by the largest and most powerful corporate groups in any given
industry. That was certainly the case for agriculture - the big four grain
cartel companies dominated world grain markets from the 1970s to today.
They
worked hand-in-glove with big Wall Street derivative players such as Goldman
Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup.
By the latter part of 2007, trading in food derivatives was fully
deregulated by Washington, and U.S. government grain reserves gone. The way
was clear for dramatic food price rises.
The speculative machine that had been put into place by Wall Street and its
banker friends was creating the potential for significant, long-term food
inflation. But the inflation needed a major ‘venting’ to get the ball really
rolling.
That was to come from
George W. Bush.
The Killer Punch - BP,
Bioethanol and Genocide
In 2007, just as the U.S. real estate crisis was causing the first tsunami
shock waves through Wall Street, the Bush Administration made a major public
relations push to convince the world that the U.S. had turned into a "better
steward of the environment."
Too many fell for the hype.
The center of the Bush program, announced in his January 2007 State of the
Union Address, was something called '20 in 10' - cutting U.S. gasoline use 20%
by 2010. The official reason given to the public was to "reduce dependency
on imported oil," as well as cutting unwanted "greenhouse gas" emissions.
That wasn't the case, of course, but it made good PR. Repeat it often enough
and maybe most people will believe it.
Maybe they won't realize that their
taxpayer subsidies are being used to grow ethanol corn instead of feed corn
and are also driving the price of their daily bread through the roof.
The heart of the Bush plan was a huge taxpayer-subsidized expansion of the
use of bio-ethanol for transport fuel. President Bush's first plan required
production of 35 billion gallons (about 133 billion liters) of ethanol a
year by 2017. Congress had already mandated, via the Energy Policy Act of
2005, that corn ethanol for fuel must rise from 4 billion gallons in 2006 to
7.5 billion gallons in 2012.
To make certain it would happen, farmers and big agribusiness giants like
ADM were given generous taxpayer subsidies to grow corn for fuel instead of
for food. David Rockefeller’s corporate farms were one of the largest
recipients of U.S. Government agriculture subsidies. Currently ethanol
producers in the U.S. get a subsidy of 51 cents per gallon of ethanol.
The
subsidy is paid to the blender, usually an oil company, that blends it with
gasoline for sale. In the 2011 harvest year, an estimated 40% of all corn
acreage in the United States is expected to be grown for biofuel.
As a result of these generous U.S. Government subsidies to produce bio-ethanol
fuels, and the new legislative mandate, the U.S. refinery industry has been
investing big time in building special new ethanol distilleries, similar to
oil refineries, except they produce ethanol fuel. The number currently under
construction exceeds the total number of oil refineries built in the U.S. over
the past 25 years.
When finished in the next 2-3 years, the demand for corn
and other grain to make ethanol for car fuel will double from present
levels.
Not wanting to be left behind, the EU bureaucrats in Brussels - no doubt
generously encouraged by the likes of BP, Cargill, ADM and the major biofuel
lobby - came up with its own scheme for "10 in 20" or a mandate that 10% of
all road fuel in the EU by 2020 be from biofuel. Shockingly, they did so
despite the existence of a report by the same EU Commission on the damaging
impact of such a massive turn to subsidized biofuels.
The London Times
reported,
A study by the Commission on the land use implications of sourcing only 5.6
per cent of Europe’s transport fuel from biofuels concluded that any
significant rise beyond 5.6 per cent would 'rapidly' increase carbon
emissions and 'erode the environmental sustainability of biofuels'...
Like
most political diktats, the figure of 10 per cent was plucked out of the air
and no one at the Commission had a clue, when the policy was adopted, how
the fuel industry was to meet the one in ten mandate without a huge rise in biofuel planting in the tropics. [23]
In short, the use of farmland worldwide for bio-ethanol and other biofuels -
burning the food product rather than using it for human or animal feed - is
being treated in Washington, the EU, Brazil and other major centers as a
major new growth industry.
The impact on human beings, however, is quite the
opposite. It is rapidly becoming a death industry, death of millions of
innocent human beings unable to afford adequate nourishment for themselves
or their families.
The United States today is far and away the world's largest producer of
ethanol biofuel for transportation fuel. In 2010 the U.S. produced 13 billion
gallons (U.S.) or 50 billion liters of ethanol biofuel, amounting to near 60%
of the world’s total. The EU added some 6% to the global total as number
three behind Brazil in a macabre contest to see which country can destroy
the most food by burning toxic biofuels. [24]
The most alarming aspect of the entire biofuel scam is the fact that three
full years after the grain price explosion of 2008 was demonstrated to be
directly tied to the biofuels removal of millions of acres of U.S. farmland -
from corn for feed to corn for fuel - no action has been taken either in the
U.S. Congress or in the EU or anywhere else to reverse that insane policy.
The
stunning inaction seems testimony to the political power of the biofuels
lobby. Who are they? Not surprisingly, they are the same agri and oil giants
behind U.S. and EU food and energy policy.
Major players include,
-
BP
-
Shell
-
ExxonMobil
-
Chevron
-
ADM
-
Cargill,
...and the like.
It is a powerful lobby and
sees a goose that can literally lay multiple golden eggs in the form of
mandated biofuels requirements of the EU and USA and elsewhere.
This January the Institute for European Environment Policy (IEEP), an
independent body, issued a report on the role of bioenergy in EU
governments' "renewable energy action plans." Recent proclamations by the
German government that renewables will replace nuclear electric generation
by 2020, and similar pledges by other EU governments, all rely on a
fantastic delusion that the electriic power being generated by large nuclear
plants can come from biodiesel.
The January IEEP study notes that:
More than half of the renewable energy which EU Member States expect to
consume annually by 2020 will consist of bioenergy, e.g. biomass, bioliquids
and biofuels. This is revealed in a first evaluation of the proposed scale
of deployment of bioenergy by the EU Member States in the period to 2020 as
forecast in their National Renewable Energy Action Plans (NREAPs)...
A
significant increase in absolute consumption of bioenergy is anticipated. In
the 23 plans examined, bioenergy will thus remain the main contributor to
the renewable energy sector. Overall, the bioenergy contribution to final
energy consumption is expected to more than double, from 5.4% in 2005 to
almost 12% (124Mtoe) in 2020.
Bioenergy will have a quasi-dominant role in
the renewable portion of the EU heating and cooling sector, and is foreseen
to contribute more than 80% to the sectoral target.
In the electricity
sector the bioenergy share will be relatively low but in the transport
sector it is expected to reach nearly 90% of total renewable energy by the
year 2020. [25]
The IEEP conducted an analysis of required land acreage needed for the
cultivation of such a huge increase of biofuels by 2020.
They estimated,
after all factors are properly calculated, that an additional "4.1 to 6.9
million hectares" in the European Union will be needed for biofuel, acreage
more than three times the entire state of Kansas.
Further, belying the EU myth that biofuels give a reduction of CO2 (even
were CO2 a problem - which is highly contested among serious scientists),
the IEEP calculates that the enormous rise in biofuel use will lead to more
CO2 emissions from vehicles, equivalent to adding as many as 26 million
additional vehicles on European roads. [26]
Biofuels are highly undesirable for countless reasons, as many serious
environmental organizations have begun to realize. The corn ethanol industry
has grown, largely due to powerful corn and oil lobbies. High demand will
likely increase corn ethanol and gas prices as corn ethanol is mixed with
gasoline.
Ethanol energy gets poor fuel-economy with standard engines. And most
importantly, it simply is not possible to produce the amount of corn
required to make the fuel a viable alternative to oil or a serious supplier
of energy. [27]
New Global Dustbowls?
What biofuels and their pushers - from BP to agribusiness, combined with the
mad decisions of governments from Washington to Berlin to Paris and beyond -
have accomplished is the elimination of grain security reserves worldwide.
This has been vigorously mixed with a cocktail of deregulated free commodity
derivatives trading to create the ingredients for the worst potential food
crisis in human history.
The testing of that hypothesis may unfortunately already be underway at the
hands of forces far beyond the ability of man to control. At the recent
annual meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical
Society, scientists from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the
Air
Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) presented results of studies of recent
solar flare activity, by far the greatest factor influencing climate change
on Earth.
Flares occur in periodic cycles such as 11-year, 22-year and
longer ones. The solar studies indicate that the Earth is now at the
beginning of what might be a decade or longer period of greatly reduced
solar activity.
Reduced solar sunspot activity means a less active sun.
As Dutch physicist Gijs B. Graafland puts it,
“It will affect severely the evaporation of ocean
water and by that the amount of rain. This results in lower water for
agriculture and therefore in less growth and more severe blowing away of dry
fertile top soil layers which gives a decade of high food prices.” [28]
Translated to us, that could mean climate catastrophes, harvest failures,
droughts and dust storms - such as those that swept the U.S. Midwest during
the Great Depression of the 1930s - in fertile regions across the planet,
not just once but over a span of years.
If the solar physicists as well as earlier
Russian astrophysicist, Habibullo Abdussamatov, the head of space research
at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia who predicted
similar onset of a new “Little Ice Age” [29] beginning 2014, are
right, we may soon face a food crisis on a scale our planet never in history
has faced. [30]
Notes
[1] F. William Engdahl, Seeds of
Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation,
www.GlobalResearch.ca, Montreal, 2007, pp. 216-219.
[2] Sophia Murphy, Strategic Grain Reserves In an Era of Volatility,
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Minneapolis, October 2009.
[3] Anon., Another Soviet Grain Sting, Time, November 28, 1977, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,919164,00.html#ixzz1NMsb5yQY
[4] PBS, The Warning, Public Broadcasting System, October 20, 2009,
accessed in http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/#morelink.
[5] Lawrence Summers et al, Over-the-Counter Derivatives Markets and the
Commodity Exchange Act: Report of The President’s Working Group on
Financial Markets, Washington, D.C., November 1999.
[6] Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, CFTC Releases Plan for Market
Deregulation, March 1, 2000, accessed in http://library.findlaw.com/2000/Mar/1/128962.html.
[7] Frederick Kaufman, How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis,
Foreign Policy, April 27, 2011, accessed in http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/27/how_goldman_sachs_created_the_food_crisis.
[8] Amine Bouchentouf, et al, Investing in Commodities via the Futures
Markets, accessed in http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/investing-in-commodities-via-the-futures-markets.html#ixzz1PdYxiCqD.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Olivier de Scheutter, Food Commodities Speculation and Food Price
Crises, Briefing Note 02, September 2010, accessed in http://www.srfood.org/images/stories/pdf/otherdocuments/20102309_briefing_note_02_en_ok.pdf
[11] Ibid.
[12] Frederick Kaufman, The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved
millions and got away with it, July 2010, Harper’s Magazine, pp. 32, 24.
[13] Frederick Kaufman, How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis,
Foreign Policy, April 27, 2011, accessed in http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/27/how_goldman_sachs_created_the_food_crisis
[14] Neena Rai, et al, High Food Prices Pose Threat to Poor Nations, The
Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2011.
[15] Global Labour Institute, Food Crisis - Financializing Food:
Deregulation, Commodity Markets and the Rising Cost of Food, Geneva,
June 7, 2008, accessed in http://www.globallabour.info/en/2008/07/financializing_food_deregulati.html
[16] Ibid.
[17] See F. William Engdahl, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of
Genetic Manipulation, 2007, Montreal, Global Research Publishers,
pp.123-151 for a more detailed analysis of the fraud of the Green
Revolution and its so-called “wonder wheat“ from Norman Borlaug, himself
a product of the Rockefeller research organization.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Current Biography, 1967, Wassily Leontief; and Ray Goldberg.
[21] Ray Goldberg, The Evolution of Agribusiness, Harvard Business
School Executive Education Faculty Interviews: www.exed.hbs.edu/faculty/rgoldberg.html.
W. Leontief, Studies in the Structure of the American Economy, 1953.
International Science Press Inc., White Plains, New York. In its 1956
Annual Report, the Ford Foundation noted the following grant: ‘Harvard
Economic Research Project:’ In addition to these over-all programs, a
grant of $240,000 was made to support the activities of the Harvard
Economic Research Project over a six-year period. This center, under the
direction of Professor Wassily Leontief, was engaged in a series of
quantitative studies of the structure of the American economy, focusing
mainly on inter-industry relationships and the interconnections between
industry and other sectors of the economy. Equal support was contributed
by the Rockefeller Foundation. See also Ray Goldberg, The Genetic
Revolution: Transforming our Industry, Its Institutions, and Its
Functions, an address to The International Food and Agribusiness
Management Association (IAMA). Chicago, June 26, 2000. Goldberg founded
and headed the IAMA as well as holding seats on the boards of
agribusiness giants Archer Daniels Midland, Smithfield Foods and DuPont
Pioneer Hi-Bred. He practiced what he preached.
[22] F. William Engdahl, op. cit.
[23] Carl Mortished, We’re on a green road to hell, The London Times,
April 10, 2010.
[24] F.O. Lichts, Industry Statistics: 2010 World Fuel Ethanol
Production, Renewable Fuels Association, accessed in http://www.ethanolrfa.org/pages/statistics#E.
[25] IEEP Study, The Role of Bioenergy in the National Renewable Energy
Action Plans: A First Identification of Issues and Uncertainties,
January 31, 2011, accessed in http://www.ieep.eu/topics/climate-change-and-energy/energy/bioenergy/.
[26] IEEP Press Release, New Report Concludes that Indirect Impacts of
EU Biofuel Policy will Create Major Environmental Pressure, November 8,
2010.
[27] P. Gosselin, German Ethanol Requirement Turns Into A Debacle, March
4, 2011, accessed in www.notrickszone.com/2011/03/04/German-Ethanol-Requirement-Turns-Into-A-Debacle.
[28] Gijs B. Graafland, Effects of low sunspot levels on evaporation…,
May 9, 2011, private email to the author.
[29] Jerome R. Corsi,
New Ice Age to begin in 2014 - Russian scientist to
alarmists: 'Sun heats Earth!', May 17, 2010, WorldNetDaily.
[30] Solar Science Staff Writers, Major Drop In Solar Activity
Predicted, June 15, 2011, Boulder Colorado, accessed in
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Major_Drop_In_Solar_Activity_Predicted_999.html