Early Agribusiness: Rockefeller Teams up with Cargill

The Rockefeller group wielded tremendous influence on the State Department. Every man who served as Secretary of State in the critical Cold War years ranging from 1952 to the end of Jimmy Carter's Presidency in 1979 had formerly been a leading figure from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, a Wall Street lawyer, was Chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation before he came to Washington in 1952. John Kennedy's and later Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, left his job as President of the Rockefeller Foundation to come to Washington in 1961. Nixon's National Security Adviser and Rusk's successor in 1974 as Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, also came from the inner circle of the Rockefeller Foundation. Moreover, Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, came to Washington from his post as Chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation. But the enormous influence of this private, non-profit foundation on post-war American foreign policy was kept well in the background.

Dulles, Rusk, Vance and Kissinger all understood the Rockefeller views on the importance of private sector activity over the role of government, and they understood how the Rockefellers viewed agriculture-as a commodity just like oil, which could be traded, controlled, made scarce or plentiful depending on foreign policy goals of the few corporations controlling its trade.

Remarkably enough, the Dulles-Rusk -Vance-KissingerRockefeller ties were rarely mentioned openly, even though they were essential to understandinR key aspects of US foreign policy and food policy.

Early Agribusiness: Rockefeller Teams up with Cargill In 1947, after the end of the War, Nelson Rockefeller founded another new company called International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC). IBEe's aim was to show that private capital, organized as a profit-making enterprise, could upgrade the agriculture of developing countries. In reaUty, IBEC was about the introduction of massscale agribusiness in countries where US dollars could buy huge influence in the 1950's and 1960's.

Rockefeller's IBEC invited Cargill, a privately-held US agribusiness giant, to work with it in Brazil. IBEC had lots of plans: hybrid corn production, hog production, crop dusting with helicopters, contract plowing and grain storage. One IBEC company was Sementes Agroceres, which later played a key role in plant and animal genetics in Brazil.23

IBEC and Cargill began developing hybrid corn seed varieties. They turned Brazil into the world's third largest corn producer after the US and China. In Brazil, the corn was mixed with soymeal for animal feed. That was later to become instrumental in the proliferation of GMO soybeans on the world animal feed market in the late 1990's.

The agricultural economics of sugarcane also led to Brazil's prominent role in the production of soybeans. Sugarcane plants could typically produce for about five years after which they had to be dug out and new cane planted, a procedure known as «rationing:' Brazilian farmers pioneered the planting of soybeans between the digging out of the old and planting of the new cane. Soybeans enriched or "fixed" nitrogen in the soil. Since sugarcane needs nitrogen, this reduced demand for fertilizer, which was the reason soybeans were introduced in Brazil.

Cargill and the other US grain trading companies later developed soybeans into a major export commodity, initially as animal feed. It became a major weapon in the US food control arsenal.

Lester Brown, whose own Worldwatch Institute was created with a 1974 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, stated the agenda of the Rockefeller Foundation's Green Revolution: «Fertilizer is in the package of new inputs which farmers need in order to realize the full potential of the new seed. Once it becomes profitable to use modern technology, the demand for all kinds of farm inputs increases rapidly. And so, only agro-business firms can supply these inputs efficiently."24

Brown further declared that the multinational corporation was "an amazingly efficient way of institutionalizing the transfer of technical knowledge in agriculture." And the agribusiness firms which were then in the best position to provide seeds and fertilizer were, of