FOOD IS POWER ...
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techniques to the breeding of rice, the dietary staple of a majority of the planet's population. 1984 was the year Ronald Reagan was re-elected to a second term with what he saw as a strong popular mandate to press ahead with his New Right economic agenda of privatization and deregulation, along the lines that had been spelled out by John D. Rockefeller and others more than a decade earlier. American agribusiness had reached a major threshold in terms of its ability to influence USDA agricultural policy and, by extension, the world food market. The time was propitious to initiate a dramatic shift in the future control of the world food supply. The "New Eugenics": Reductio ad Absurdum ... The genetic engineering initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation was no spur of the moment decision. It was the culmination of the research it had funded since the 1930's. During the late 1930's, as the foundation was still deeply involved in funding eugenics in the Third Reich, it began to recruit chemists and physicists to foster the invention of a new science discipline, which it named molecular biology to differentiate it from classical biology. The foundation developed molecular biology as a discipline partly to deflect and blunt growing social criticism of its racist eugenics. Nazi Germany had given eugenics a "bad name:' The Rockefeller Foundation's President during the 1930's, Warren Weaver, was a physicist. He and Max Mason headed the foundation's new biology program. Their largesse in giving funds to scientific research projects gained the foundation enormous influence over the direction of science during the Great Depression by the mere fact they had funds to dispense to leading scientific researchers at a time of acute scarcity. From 1932 to 1957, the Rockefeller Foundation had handed out an impressive $90 million in grants to support the creation of the newfield of molecular biology.4 Molecular biology and the attendant work with genes was a Rockefeller Foundation creation in every sense of the word. Borrowing generously from their work in race eugenics, the foundation scientists developed the idea of molecular biology from
