Kissinger and Food Politics

Kissinger and Food Politics Henry Kissinger was moving to take complete control over the US foreign policy apparatus by 1973.

And as both Secretary of State and the President's National Security Adviser, Kissinger was to make food a centerpiece of his diplomacy along with oil geopolitics.5

Food had played a strategic, albeit less central role in post-war US foreign policy with the onset of the Cold War. It was masked under the rhetoric of programs with positive sounding names, such as Food for Peace (P.L. 480). Often Washington daimed its food exports subsidies were tied to domestic pressure from its farmers. This was far from the real reason, but it served to cover the true situation, that American agriculture was in the process of being transformed from family-run small farms to global agribusiness · concerns.

Domination of global agriculture trade was to be one of the central pillars of post-war Washington policy, along with domination of world oil markets and non-communist world defense sales. Henry Kissinger reportedly dedared to one journalist at the time, "If you control oil, you control nations. If you control food, you control people."

By the early 1970's, Washington, or more accurately, very powerful private cirdes, induding the Rockefeller family, were about to try to control both, in a process whose daunting scope was perhaps its best deception.

Initially, the agriculture weapon was used by Washington more as a dub to hit other countries .. Starting in the 1970's, there was a major shift in food policy. This redirection was a precursor to the agro-chemical cartels of the 1970's.

The defining event for the emergence of a new US food policy was a world food crisis in 1973, which took place at the same time that Henry Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy" triggered the OPEC 400% increase in world oil prices. The combination of a drastic energy price shock and a global food shortage for grain staples, was the breeding ground for a significant new Washington policy turn. The turn was wrapped in "national security" secrecy.