The Rockefeller-Wallace Report

elite moved governments and others to suit their agenda. The UN was to be their vehicle, as they saw it, wrapped in the clothing of world democracy.

According to historian John Loftus, Rockefeller used behindthe-scenes pressure to get the backing of all Latin American nations in the founding San Francisco conference of the United Nations in 1945. This included the pro-Axis regime of Juan Peron in Argentina. Rockefeller and Washington pressured Peron to officially declare war on Germany and Italy, even though it was two weeks before the war's end. That allowed Argentina to vote with the "winning" side.

Rockefeller's politiCal strategy was to use his block of Latin American nations to "buy" the majority vote at the UN. The Latin American bloc represented nineteen votes to Europe's nine. As a result, Washington and the powerful international banking business interests shaping its postwar agenda, ended up with decisive control of the IMF, the World Bank and a dominant role in the United Nations. I? The Rockefeller family, generous to a fault, even donated the land for the headquarters of the new United Nations in New York City. It was also good business, and a nice tax write-off to boot.

On the whole, Nelson Rockefeller was well situated in 1941, more than perhaps anyone else in US business circles, to launch his major Latin American agribusiness initiative.

The Rockefeller-Wallace Report In 1941, some months before Pearl Harbor had brought the United States into the war, Rockefeller and US Vice President Henry A. Wallace, the former Agriculture Secretary of Franklin Roosevelt, sent a team to Mexico to discuss how to increase food production with the Mexican government. Wallace was a well-known agriculturist, who had served as Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture until 1940, and who had founded the seed company that became Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., which decades later would become a DuPont company and one of the Big Four GMO seed giants.

The Wallace-Rockefeller team's Mexico report emphasized the need to breed crops that had higher yields. At the time, corn was

the major crop of Mexico, along with wheat and beans. In 1943, as a result of the project, the Rockefeller Foundation started the Mexican Agricultural Program (MAC), headed by the Rockefeller Foundation's George Harrar. The program included a young plant pathologist from the Rockefeller Foundation named Norman Borlaug. The Rockefeller family was preparing the first steps of what was to become a major transformation of world agricultural markets after the war . . That same year, as Nelson and Vice President Wallace were surveying Latin America for agricultural opportunities for the United States, Laurance and Nelson Rockefeller both had begun buying up, on the cheap, vast holdings of high-quality Latin American farmland. The family was diversifying their fortune from oil into ·agriculture. 18

This was not simple family farming, however, but global "agribusiness;' as it began to be called in the 1950's. Oil was the core of the new agribusiness economics. And oil was something the Rockefellers knew cold. The economic model of global monopoly concentration they had built up in oil over decades would be the model for transforming the nature of world agriculture into a global "agribusiness."

In March 1941, nine months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the US into the war, Laurance took advantage of British financial duress in the Americas and bought 1.5 million acres of prime agricultural land on the Magdalena River in Colombia. Brother Nelson had also just bought a vast ranch in Venezuela, once owned by Simon Bolivar. As a Rockefeller aide at CIAA glibly said at the time, "There are good properties in the British portfolio. We might as well pick them up now."J9

By the time Roosevelt named thirty-two-year-old Nelson Rockefeller to be Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, Rockefeller was fully involved with food and agribusiness. In 1943, Edward O'Neal, President of the American Farm Bureau Federation, joined with Nelson and other top US businessmen at Chapultepec, Mexico, for a conference on Inter-American cooperation organized by the US State Department.

At Chapultepec, Rockefeller agreed with O'Neal that US agriculture needed new export markets. The markets of Latin America were coming into their view. Nelson said he was looking for new "frontiers:' Rockefeller, in a true spirit of free market, demanded that the Americas be closed to all but US business interests, while demanding that the world, including governments of Latin America, open their doors to US products, including agriculture. 20

Rockefeller also agreed with US Pentagon generals at Chapultepec, that selling US military surplus weapons to the governments of Latin America would be a good way to lock those countries into dependence on Washington for their military security after the war.2! Dependence on US military security was to work in tandem with Latin American economic dependence on US companies and on US bank capital. No one was more in the forefront of this transition in the.l940's than the Rockefeller family. They also held major stock in the largest military defence industries.22

As the Cold War escalated in the late 1940's, Truman announced that the US would fight the expansion of Communism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He called for exporting US technical expertise and capital to the developing world, stressing that the American private sector, and not the US Government, should play the leading role in transferring US technology abroad.

The concept came from Nelson Rockefeller. US domination of global agricultural technology was fast becoming a weapon of the Cold War for Washington, and above all for the powerful Rockefeller interests.

By the beginning of the 1950's, US export of agricultural products was nearly equal in importance to arms and manufactures export. The US Department of Agriculture food surplus was viewed as a weapon of US foreign policy. As noted earlier, by 1954, p.L. 480 or "Food for Peace:' had formalized the process in a major way.

The Rockefeller family and the Rockefeller Foundation had little problem getting their view of global food and population issues across to the US State Department. They and their allies from the New York Council on Foreign Relations dominated the senior ranks of the US foreign policy establishment.