Nixon's Agriculture Export Strategy

Democratic Party. The trading giants were deliberately manipulating available grain supply to hike prices. Because the US government required no accurate grain reporting, only the grain giants like Cargill and Continental Grain knew what they had.

James McHale, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Agriculture, had gone to Rome in 1974 to plead for a sensible international food policy. He pointed out that 95 per cent of all grain reserves in the world at the time were under the control of six multinational agribusiness corporations-Cargill Grain Company, Continental Grain Company, Cook Industries Inc., Dreyfus, Bunge Company and Archer-Daniel Midland. All of them were American-based companies. I I

This connection between Washington and the grain giants was the heart of Kissinger's food weapon. Jean Pierre Laviec of the International Union of Food Workers said in a statement released at the Rome Food Conference, referring to the Big Six, "They decide the quantities of vital inputs to be produced, the quantities of agricultural products to be bought, where plants will be built and investments made. The growth rate of agribusiness has risen during the last ten years and ... has been directly proportional to the increase of hunger and scarcity."12

What was to come in the following ten years and more would far surpass what Laviec warned of in 1974. The United States was about to reorganize the global food market along private corporate lines, laying the background for the later "Gene Revolution" of the 1990's.

No one group played a more decisive role in that reshaping of global agriculture during the next two decades than the Rockefeller interests and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Nixon's Agriculture Export Strategy The emergence of a US-dominated global market in grain and agriculture commodities was part of a long-term US strategy which began in the early 1970's under Richard Nixon. In August 1971, Nixon had taken the dollar off the gold exchange standard of the 1944 Bretton Woods monetary system. He let it devalue in a freefall, or float, as it was called. This was part of a strategy which

included making US grain exports strategically competitive in Europe and around the world.

Free trade was the war cry of the Nixon Administration. Cargill, Continental Grain, Archer Daniels Midland were its pew warriors.

In 1972, William Pearce became Nixon's Special Deputy Representative for Trade Negotiations, with rank of Ambassador. He had been one of the chief policy members of the President's Commission on International Trade and Investment Policy, a special trade group chaired by the former President of IBM, Albert Williams. At that time Pearce was Cargill's Vice President for Public Affairs.

Not surprisingly, Pearce saw to it that the final Williams Commission report to the President recommended that the US should pressure other countries to eliminate agriculture trade barriers which blocked imports of US agriculture products, and it argued against policies that supported what Pearce preferred to call "inefficient farmers." Pearce ensured that the Williams report focused on how to expand US food exports.

Some years later, Cargill Vice Chairman, Walter B. Saunders, told a National Grain and Feed Association convention in New Orleans, "The fundamental problem with farm policy goes back nearly 50 years to the belief that the best way to protect farm income is to link it to price .... Income must become less dependent on unit prices and more dependent of production efficiencies, diversification of income sources, better marketing and greater volume." 13 In clear words, the family farmer had to get out of the way and let the new giant agribusiness conglomerates dominate.

This policy shift, all in the name of the American virtue of"efficiency;' was to have fateful consequences over the following three decades.

Cargill's Pearce argued that American agriculture had unique advantages of scale and efficiency, technology and capital, which made it the natural contender for world export leader. Countries trying to defend their own farmers such as the European Economic Community, by his argument, were defending "inefficiency." Washington was out to dismantle the European Common Agriculture Policy, the backbone of France's post -war political stability.

The Williams-Pearce report used the global security umbrella argument, pointing out, "many of the economic problems we face today grow out of the overseas responsibilities the US has assumed as the major power of the non-communist world." It forgot to mention the deliberate background to that United States global "policeman" role. It was a thinly veiled argument to justify US pressure on its trading partners to open their markets to Cargill and other US agribusiness giants, to "help repay" the US for its Cold War role.

Pearce's strategy became a central part of the 1972 Nixon New Economic Policy. Two years later, Cargill's Pearce was on the President's Committee forEconomic Development, where he developed domestic US agriculture policy. There his target was to remove US farming's "excess human resources" (sic), to drive hundreds of thousands of family farmers into bankruptcy to make room for vast agribusiness farming. He then went back to Cargill, yet another practitioner of the revolving door system between select private companies and the Government agencies they depend on.

The Pearce strategy, adopted by the Nixon Administration, was a thinly veiled form of food imperialism. Europe, Japan and other industrialized countries should give up their domestic agriculture self-sufficiency support, and open the way for the United States to become the world granary, the most "r'ational" use of world resources. Anything else was patently "inefficient."

Washington would use the classic British "free trade" argument, in play since the 1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws, where the domieconomic and trade power benefits from forcing removal of trade protection of weaker competitors.

Pearce's, or more accurately, Cargill's strategy was to shape US trade policy for the following three decades, and playa decisive role in the ability of a handful of giant American agri-chemical corporations to take over the world market in seeds and pesticides with their GMO plants.

In order to become the world's most efficient agriculture producer, Pearce argued, traditional American family-based farming must give way to a major revolution in production. The family

farm was to become the "factory farm," and agriculture was to become "agribusiness."

The Williams Commission believed. that to carry out such "free trade" policies, US agriculture would have to be converted into an efficient export industry, phasing out domestic farm programs designed to protect farm income and move to a "free market" oriented agriculture. This approach was widely supported by corporate agribusiness, big New York banks and investment firms who saw the emerging agribusiness as a potential group of new "hot" stocks for Wall Street. It became the cornerstone of the Nixon Administration's farm policy.

Agribusiness and international trading giants like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), would set the priorities of US agriculture policy. The idea of US food self-sufficiency was replaced by a simple motto: what's good for Cargill and the grain export trading companies was "good for American agriculture:' The family farmer got lost somewhere in the shuffle, along with his Senate champion, George McGovern.

By devaluing the dollar in August 1971, and adopting his New Economic Plan (NEP), Nixon took a first step in carrying out the new export policies. As the president of the National Grain and Feed Association described it, "the NEP was very important in giving US agriculture an advantage due to the devaluation of the dollar:'14

Pearce further argued that Third World countries should give up trying to be food self-sufficient in wheat, rice, and other grains or beef, and focus instead on small fruits, sugar or vegetables. They should import the more efficient US grains and other commodities, naturally shipped by Cargill at prices controlled by Cargill, paying for it by export of the fruit and vegetables. In the bargain they would also lose food self-sufficiency. This was to open a vastly more strategic lever over developing countries over the next three decades, control of their food.

When a poorer or less developed land removed defenses against foreign food imports and opened its markets to mass-produced US products, the results could be predicted, as Pearce and Cargill well knew. According to economist J.W. Smith:

Highly mechanized farms on large acreages can produce units of food cheaper than even the poorest paid farmers of the Third Wofld. When this cheap food is sold, or given, to the Third World, the local farm economy is destroyed. If the poor and unemployed of the Third World were given access to land, access to industrial tools, and protection from cheap imports, they could plant high-protein/high calorie crops and become self-sufficient in food. Reclaiming their land and utilizing the unemployed would cost these societies almost nothing, feed them well, and save far more money than they now pay for the socalled "cheap" imported foods. 15

But such a sensible alternative was not to be allowed. The Nixon Administration began the process of destroying the domestic food production of developing countries as the opening shot in an undeclared war to create a vast new global market in "efficient" American food exports. Nixon also used the post-war trade regime known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to advance this new global agribusiness export agenda. . . In 1972, the Nixon Administration, with Cargill's Pearce in the key post of White House Deputy Trade Representative, and Peter Flanigan as head of Nixon's Council on International Economic Policy, developed the negotiating strategy for the upcoming GATT multilateral trade and tariff negotiations. Their main target in the next phase of their war for domination of world agriculture markets was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Common Market countries, the European Community.16

The CAP had been built around protective tariffs when the European Economic Community was first created in the late 1950's, to prevent dumping of US and other agriculture products onto the fragile post-war European market.

Pearce negotiated Congressional passage of the Trade Reform Act of 1974, which directed US negotiators to trade off concessions from the US in the industrial sector, in exchange for concessions to the US in the agricultural sector. This only accelerated the decline of many long-time US industries, like steel, which soon left an unseemly residue in the jobless and abandoned communities of the so-called "rust belt" scattered throughout the northeastern