In Brazil and Venezuela

course, American agribusiness firms like DuPont, Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. Thus, encouraged by the Rockefeller Green Revolution, beginning in the late 1950's, US agribusiness export was rapidly becoming a strategic core of US economic strategy alongside oil and military hardware.

In Brazil and Venezuela As the Rockefeller Foundation's Green Revolution was making major inroads in Mexico, Nelson Rockefeller set up another organization to pursue similar work in Brazil and Venezuela. He wanted to continue projects he had started at the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Intelligence Affairs (ClAA) during World War II. Joining with several former ClAA colleagues, he created the American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AlA). The declared objective of the AlA was the transfer of technology and education.

With the AlA, Rockefeller wanted to rapidly modernize basic infrastructure. The AlA argued that if their efforts failed, the region faced the prospect that an exploding population would decrease the standard of living. As a major stockholder in Venezuela's Creole Petroleum, Rockefeller convinced Shell, Mobil, Gulf, and various other private donors to join him in underwriting the AIXs projects after 1946. Nelson and his brothers had sponsored a series of studies, a precursor to NSSM 200, pinpointing which nations in Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa were likely to be "soft on communism." Brazil and Venezuela in Latin America were singled out in the study-Brazil because of its vast untapped wealth and Venezuela because of the Rockefeller family's involvement with its oi1.25

Nelson A. Rockefeller was a master of deploying the rhetoric of Cold War necessity in the name of US "national security" while advancing family interests. It did not hurt his effort that his old friend and former head of the Rockefeller Foundation, John Foster Dulles, now Secretary of State, pursued a policy of nuclear "massive retaliation" and Cold War "brinksmanship:' which made the population ever-aware of the alleged dangers and threat of the

Soviet military. That made it quite easy to justify almost anything in the name of "US national security interests."

What Nelson Rockefeller and other leading US bankers and businessmen were creating with agriculture in Latin America was the early phase of what was to be a revolution in world food production. In the process, they set out to take over the control of basic daily necessities of the majority of the.world's population. Like most revolutions, it wasn't what it advertised itself to be.

The Rockefeller Foundation, not s'urprisingly, was at the forefront here too. They even gave the process a new term-agribusiness. Their model of agribusiness, driven by rules set out by the dominant player, US industry and finance, provided the perfect partner for the introduction, by the 1990's, of genetically engineered food crops or GMO plants. How this marriage of strategic interests came about and of what its longer-term goals consisted were to remain hidden under the rubric of free market efficiency, modernization, feeding a malnourished world and other public relations fabrications-thus cleverly obscuring the boldest coup over the destiny of entire nations ever attempted.

Notes

1. Peter Grose, Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996, New York, Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1996. pp. 23-26. This official account by the CFR of the War and Peace Studies project states: "More than two years before the Japanese attack on Harbor, the research staff of the Council on Foreign Relations had started to envision a venture that would dominate the life of the institution for the demanding years ahead. With the memory of the Inquiry in focus, they conceived a role for the Council in the formulation of national policy. On September 12, 1939, as Nazi Germany invaded Poland, (CFR's Hamilton Fish) Armstrong and Mallory entrained to Washington to meet with Assistant Secretary of State George S. Messersmith. At that time the Department of State could command few resources for study, research, policy planning, and initiative; on such matters, the career diplomats on the eve of World War II were scarcely better off than had been their predecessors when America entered World War I. The men from the Council proposed a discreet venture reminiscent of the Inquiry: a program of independent analysis and study that would guide American foreign policy in the coming years of war and the challenging new world that would emerge after. The project became known as the War and Peace Studies. "The matter is strictly confidential," wrote (Isaiah) Bowman, "because the whole plan would be 'ditched' if it became generally known that the State Department is working in collaboration with any outside The Rockefeller Foundation agreed to fund the project, reluctantly at first, but, once convinced of its relevance, with nearly $350,000. Over the coming five years, almost 100 men participated in the War and Peace Studies, divided into four functional topic groups: economic and financial, security and armaments, territorial, and political. These groups met more than 250 times, usually in New York, over dinner and late into the night. They produced 682 memoranda for the State Department, which marked them classified and circulated them among the appropriate government departments." . 2. Ibid., pp. 10,15. 3. U.S. Supreme Court, US v. US Steel Corporation, U.S. 417,1920, p. 25I. 4. Henry Luce, "The American Century:' Life, 17 February 1941. 5. Handbook, The New York Council on Foreign Relations, Studies of American Interests in the War and the Peace, New York, 1939-1942, cited in Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003, pp. 325-328.: 6. Neil Smith, op. cit., p. 287. 7. Joseph S. Nye Jr, "Propaganda Isn't the Way: Soft Power", The International Herald Tribune, 10 January 2003. Nye defines what he coined as "soft power":

"Soft power is the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will. Both hard and soft powers are important ... but attraction is much cheaper than coercion, and an asset that needs to be nourished." 8. Kramer, Paul, "Nelson Rockefeller and British Security Coordination", Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 16, 1981, pp. 77-81. 9. Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1947, Delacorte, New York, 1983, pp.53-54. 10. Ibid., p. 56. 11. Ibid., pp. 67-69. 12. William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid, Ballantine Books, New York, 1976, pp.308-311. 13. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon-Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, HarperCollins, New York, 1995,pp. 115-116. 14. Thomas O'Brien, Making the Americas: U.S. Business People and Latin Americans from the Age of Revolutions to the Era of Globalization, History Compass 2, LA 067,2004, pp. 14-15. 15. Los Angeles Times, Mexico 75 Years Later, Today's Zapatistas Still Fight the Rockefeller Legacy, 14 May 1995. 16. William Stevenson, op. cit., p. 309. 17. John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People, St. Martin's, New York, 1994, pp. 165-171. 18. Margaret Carroll Boardman, Sowing the Seeds of the Green Revolution: The Pivotal Role Mexico and International Non-Profit Organizations Play in Making. Biotechnology an Important Foreign Policy Issue for the 21st Century, http://www.isop.ucla.edu/profmexivolume4/3summer99/Green_Finalm.htm. 19. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, op. cit., pp. 116, 168. 20. Ibid., p. 166. 21. Ibid., p. 169. 22. Committee on Rules and Administration, U.S. Senate, 9yd Congress, 2nd Session, Hearings, The Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York to be Vice President of the United States, Washington D.C., Government Printing Office, 1974, cited in Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, op. cit., p. 373. In addition to the known holdings in the Standard Oil companies, Rockefeller's investments included such prime defense contractors as McDonnell Aircraft, Chrysler Corp.,

Boeing, Monsanto, Dow Chemical, Hercules, Bendix, Motorola and numerous other defense contractors. 23. John Freivalds, Brazil Agriculture: Winning the Great Farms Race, 3 March 2005, http://www.brazilmax.com/news.cfm/tborigem/fe_business/id/5. 24. Lester Brown, Seeds of Change, Praeger, New York, 1969, Chapter 1: New Seeds and Mechanization.

25. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, op. cit., pp. 212-214.