"Food as a Weapon"

USA. Steel was dilled a "sunset" industry, while agribusiness was to become a "sunrise" industry in the parlance of the day.

"Food as a Weapon" Backed by Cargill and the giant US grain trade conglomerates, Henry Kissinger began an aggressive diplomacy, which he referred to as "Food as a Weapon." The Russian "grain robbery" had been one example of his diplomacy with the food weapon, a "carrot" approach. Another was his use of P.L. 480 in Vietnam during the War.

As popular opposition to the Vietnam War grew, it became· difficult for the Administration to get funding from Congress for economic and military aid to South Vietnam. Congress was putting limitations on aid and the White House was looking for ways to avoid this kind of interference. One solution was to divert US aid through multilateral institutions dominated by the US, and another was to use food aid to support US diplomatic and military objectives.

P.L. 480 programs were not subject to annual Congressional appropriations review and Nixon could spend up to $2.5 billion by borrowing from the Department of Agriculture's Commodity Credit Corporation, the same agency used some years later to covertly funnel US military aid to Saddam Hussein. With commercial markets booming and government reserves exhausted the Agriculture Department no longer needed P.L. 480 to dispose of surplus grain and food. The State Department played a major role in determining where the aid went. Kissinger's motto was clearly one of "rewarding friends and punishing enemies".

P.L. 480 became a direct military subsidy for the Indochina war machine. In the beginning of 1974 the food aid to South Vietnam was $207 million. When Congress cut economic aid by 20%, the White House increased the P.L. 480 allocation to $499 million. Kissinger added a special provision so Vietnam and Cambodia could use 100% of counterpart funds for direct military purposes. I?

When Congress passed an amendment in 1974 requiring that 70% of food aid be given to countries on the UN's list of the Most

Seriously Affected countries, Kissinger tried to get the UN to put South Vietnam on its list, which failed. Ultimately the White House circumvented Congress by just upping the amount of PL 480 aid from $1 billion to $1.6 billion. IS

Kissinger then aimed his food weapon at Chile.

Like other forms of US aid to Chile, PL 480 was turned "off" when the socialist government of Salvador Allende came into power and began to implement a series of economic reforms. The aid cutoff was done on Kissinger's orders. It was turned back "on" as soon as the US-backed military dictatorship of Augosto Pinochet was mpower.

Food played a key part in the Kissinger-orchestrated coup against Allende in 1973. Supported by the State Department and the CIA, right-wing wealthy Chilean landowners sabotaged food production, doubling food imports and exhausting Chile's foreign reserves.19 This made it very difficult for Chile to import food. The ensuing food shortages created middle class discontent. Allende's request for food credit was denied by the US State Department, even though it should have been the Department of Agriculture's domain. Kissinger had stolen the turf from Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz.

After the 1973 military coup, the US food aid granted to Chile was sold on the domestic market by the Pinochet government. That did nothing to ease the plight of the workers there because of massive inflation and erosion of purchasing power. The military junta was the main beneficiary because the of food aid eased balance of payments difficulties and freed up money for the military, at the time the 9th largest importer of US arms.20

Back in 1948, as the Cold War was heating up, and Washington was setting up NATO, the man who was the architect of the US policy of "containment" of the Soviet Union, State Department senior plannin.g official George Kennan noted in a Top Secret memorandum to the Secretary of State:

We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population .... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envY and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of dis-

parity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.21

Such a steel-cold assessment of the role of the United States in the early 1970's found receptive ears with Henry Kissinger, a devotee of unsentimental balance of power Realpolitik. Nixon had also given Kissinger the task of heading a top secret Government task force to examine the relation between population growth in developing nations, and its relation to US national security.

The motivation behind the secret task force had come from John D. Rockefeller and the Rockefeller Population Council. The core idea went back to the 1939 Council on Foreign Relations' War and Peace Studies Project leader, Isaiah Bowman. Global depopulation and food control were to become US strategic policy under Kissinger. This was to be the new "solution" to the threats to US global power and to its continued access to cheap raw materials from the developing world.

Notes

1. For a brief introduction to the extraordinary post-1945 bases of American global hegemony, useful are the following: Henry Luce, "The American Century': Life, 17 February 1941. New York Council on Foreign Relations, The War & Peace Studies summarized in http://www.cfr.org. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003. Andre Gunder Frank, Crisis: In the World Economy, Heinemann, London, 1980. 2. Francis J. Gavin, Ideas, Power and the Politics of America's International Monetary Policy during the 1%0'5, http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/faculty/gavin. See also F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd, London, 2004, for a disc,!ssion of the de Gaulle gold issue. Also Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, French Actions and the Recent Gold Crisis, Washington, D.C., 20 March 1968. 3. Samuel Huntington, et al., The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Trilateral Commission, New York University Press, 1975. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technotronic Era, Harper Publishing House, New York, 1970. 6. Clifton B. Luttrell, The Russian Wheat Deal-Hindsight vs. Foresight, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, October 1972, p. 2. 7. F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Or4er, 2004,London, Pluto Press Ltd., pp.130-138. 8. Time, What to Do: Costly Choices, 11 November, 1974, p.6. 9. US Department of Agriculture, World Grain Consumption and Stocks, 19602003, Washington DC, Production, Supply & Distribution, Electronic Database, updated 9 April 2004. 10. Sen. George McGovern, cited in Laurence Simon, "The Ethics of Triage: A Perspective on the World Food Conference", The Christian Century, 1-8 January 1975.

11. Laurence Simon, op. cit 12. Ibid. For a more complete discussion of the role of Kissinger in the 1973 oil price shock, see F. William Engdahl, op. cit. 13. Walter B. Saunders cited in A.V. Krebs, editor, The Agribusiness Examiner, Issue # 31, 26 April 1999. 14. A.V. Krebs, op. cit.

15. J. w. Smith, The World's Wasted Wealth 2, Institute for Economic Democracy, 1994, pp. 63, 64. 16. A. V. Krebs, Cargill & Co.'s "Comparative Advantage in Free Trade", The Agribusiness Examiner, #31, 26 April 1999. 17. Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origins and Fundamentals of us World Dominance, London, Pluto Press Ltd., Second Edition, 2003 (originally published in 1972), pp. 229-235 for an excellent elaboration on the political workings of PL 480 under Kissinger. In hearings before the US Senate on the PL 480 legislation, Sen. Milton R. Young observed that US agricultural surpluses could be used as an instrument of foreign policy: "In my opinion, we have been blessed and not cursed with some surpluses. We are in the position of a nation with agricultural surpluses, when many other nations are starving. When we have such surpluses, we have adverse farm prices ... This bill proposes for the first time, I think, a very feasible and sound method of trying to make our agricultural surpluses available to other nations of the world who are needy and in want of these supplies." (Cited in Congressional Research Service, 1979: 2). 18. Noah Zerbe, Feeding the Famine? American Food Aid and the GMO Debate in Southern Africa, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, in http://www.geoci-. ties.com/nzerbe/pubs/famine.pdf., pp. 9-10. 19. NACLA, "US Grain Arsenal" Chapter 2: «The Food Weapon: Mightier than Missiles.», Latin America and Empire Report, October 1975, http:// www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357Lsum_s4_NACLA_Ch2.htm!. 20. Ibid.

21. George F. Kennan, "PPS/23: Review of Current Trends in U.S. Foreign Policy", Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Volume I, pp. 509-529. Policy Planning Staff Files, Memorandum by the Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Kennan)2 to the Secretary of State and the Under Secretary of State (Lovett). TOP SECRET.PPS/23. [Washington,] 24 February 1948. Kennan, one of the most influential shapers of the US Cold War, was author of a famous 1947 article in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. The article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct;' was published in Foreign Affairs in July 1947. Signed under the pseudonym, "X' the true author was Kennan, who had been Ambassador Averell Harriman's Deputy in Moscow in 1946. The article set out the doctrine of containment of the Soviet Union, later known as the Cold War.