4
SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION
US Government agencies entrusted with the mandate to safeguard the health and safety of the overall population were becoming dangerously biased. Some years before, the first commercial GMO product hit the market in the US, the Reagan Administration had been moving quietly to open its doors wide to Monsanto and other private companies which were developing gene-manipulated products. The · key actor within the Reagan Administration on decisions pertaining to the new field ofgenetically modified products was former head of the CIA, Vice President George Herbert Walker Bushwho would himself soon be President, and father of the later President, George W. Bush. By the early 1980's, numerous agribusiness corporations were in a gold rush frenzy to develop GMO plants, livestock and GMObased animal drugs. There was no regulatory system in place to control the development, risks and sale of the products. The agribusiness companies wanted to keep it that way. The Reagan-Bush Administration was partly driven by an ideological agenda of imposing deregulation, reducing Government supervision in every facet of daily life. Food safety was no exception. Rather to the contrary, and even if that meant the general population could become guinea pigs for entirely untested new health risks. The Fraud of "Substantial Equivalence" In 1986, Vice President Bush hosted a group of executives from a giant chemical company, Monsanto Corporation of St ..Louis, Missouri, for a special White House strategy meeting. The purpose . of the unpublicized meeting, according to former US Department of Agriculture official, Claire Hope Cummings, was to discuss the "deregulation" of the emerging biotech industry. Monsanto had had a long history of involvement with the US Government and even with Bush's CIA. It had developed the deadly herbicide, Agent Orange, for defoliation of jungle areas in Vietnam during the 1960's. It also had a long record of fraud, cover-up and bribery.
