SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION
Democratic Party. The trading giants were deliberately manipulating available grain supply to hike prices. Because the US government required no accurate grain reporting, only the grain giants like Cargill and Continental Grain knew what they had. James McHale, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Agriculture, had gone to Rome in 1974 to plead for a sensible international food policy. He pointed out that 95 per cent of all grain reserves in the world at the time were under the control of six multinational agribusiness corporations-Cargill Grain Company, Continental Grain Company, Cook Industries Inc., Dreyfus, Bunge Company and Archer-Daniel Midland. All of them were American-based companies. I I This connection between Washington and the grain giants was the heart of Kissinger's food weapon. Jean Pierre Laviec of the International Union of Food Workers said in a statement released at the Rome Food Conference, referring to the Big Six, "They decide the quantities of vital inputs to be produced, the quantities of agricultural products to be bought, where plants will be built and investments made. The growth rate of agribusiness has risen during the last ten years and ... has been directly proportional to the increase of hunger and scarcity."12 What was to come in the following ten years and more would far surpass what Laviec warned of in 1974. The United States was about to reorganize the global food market along private corporate lines, laying the background for the later "Gene Revolution" of the 1990's. No one group played a more decisive role in that reshaping of global agriculture during the next two decades than the Rockefeller interests and the Rockefeller Foundation. Nixon's Agriculture Export Strategy The emergence of a US-dominated global market in grain and agriculture commodities was part of a long-term US strategy which began in the early 1970's under Richard Nixon. In August 1971, Nixon had taken the dollar off the gold exchange standard of the 1944 Bretton Woods monetary system. He let it devalue in a freefall, or float, as it was called. This was part of a strategy which
