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FOOD & AGRICULTURE CRISIS FACT SHEET

Restore National Sovereignty;
End Famine-Depopulation Agenda

by Marcia Merry Baker
February 2013

Feb. 15, 2013—The United States is faced with a food crisis of unprecedented proportions, one which threatens mass starvation unless there is a radical change in the system of economics and finance in the immediate weeks ahead.

FIGURE 1
U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook

As of mid-February 2013, the U.S. National Weather Service foresees no heavy rains or snowfall on the way, sufficient to relieve the drought in the North American farmbelt. The drought jeopardizes Winter wheat, reduces the soil moisture needed for corn and soy, worsens the acute hay and pasture scarcity, and threatens the entire livestock feed chain (Figure 1). There are no food reserves. This situation constitutes a world disaster threat. However, the impact of another “unlucky” crop season does not define the problem. Even if miracle weather now ensues, the crisis remains.

We face severe food shortages on the scale of impending famine because of the actions of the Obama Administration, whose policies are the culmination of decades of laws and practices, which have undermined the food-increase potential of nations. Moreover, these practices, and their continuation by Obama, have been deliberately promoted by financial and political circles, best understood as the modern-day British Empire, for which subverting nation-states and causing depopulation are the goals.

What is urgently required, is to restore national sovereignty over food production, and economic activity generally. Only this will cancel the famine-depopulation agenda.

The 25 fact-items below document the dimensions and causes of the food and agriculture crisis, who is to blame, and the specific areas of emergency action to be taken. The focus is on the United States, with summary facts on the world situation.

I. Dimensions of the Food Crisis

FIGURE 2
Cereal Production, Utilization, and Stocks
v1-cereal_production_utilization.jpg
v1-1-SNAP_assistancee_2011.jpg
USDA/Lance Cheung
Impoverishment has driven 48 million people—one in seven Americans—onto domestic food relief run by the USDA (SNAP—Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). Shown: a couple leaving the Tukwila (Wash.) Pantry with USDA food.

1. Declining production. Worldwide annual production of grains has stagnated in recent years (Figure 2). Total output (all types) went from 2,200 million metric tons two years ago to, at best, 2,240 mmt hoped for this year (U.S. Department of Agriculture). The per capita decline is worsening yearly. In the United States, annual grains production is falling, and stocks are plunging. U.S. grains output (all kinds) fell from 398 mmt in 2010, down to 384 mmt in 2011. The USDA “hopes” for 353 mmt in the current 2012-13 crop year. U.S. grain carryover stocks dropped from 57 mmt two years ago, down to 49 last year, and are now barely 37 mmt.

2. Hunger worldwide now affects 1 billion out of 7 billion people, or 14%. In the U.S., impoverishment has driven 48 million people—one in seven Americans—onto domestic food relief run by the USDA (SNAP—Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which provides a monthly stipend for food purchasing (Figure 3). If all American households could afford to go out and buy the types of quality foods they require, drastic food shortages would be instantly evident.

3. No reserves. The U.S. has no strategic food reserves—no wheat, corn, milk powder, butter, cheese, or vegetable oils. Worldwide, only a few nations have strategic food reserves—China, India, Japan, and Vietnam; and in China, maintenance of reserves and supply levels is dependent on grain and soybean imports, whose availability is plunging. Last year, China imported 12% of its basic food consumption.

High dependence on food imports is now the case for all categories of U.S. food consumption, except basic grains and meat; but now, U.S. beef production is dropping. By food group, the volumes of U.S. imports, as a percentage of domestic consumption, range from over 85% for seafood, to 30% for fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Depending on the time of year, as much as 60% of U.S. fresh produce is imported. Overall, 16% of what Americans eat is imported.

The volume of food flows from food-needy nations into the U.S. and Europe is soaring. Examples: grapefruit from West Africa; processed fruit from Egypt; fresh fruits from Kenya and South Africa; mango pulp from Haiti.

FIGURE 3
2012 Global Hunger Severity by Nation
Source: IFPRI

4. Agriculture production capacity is contracting. There is an acute livestock feed crisis in the U.S., with hay scarcity and lack of pasture, as well as shortages of corn and soy for animal rations. The 2012 U.S. hay production was under 120 million tons, 16% less than the five-year average; and 9% down from 2011. The national cattle herd in the U.S. is now at its lowest number in 61 years, standing at 89.3 million head (all types and ages), which is down 2% in just a year. The numbers of cows and heifers that calved in 2012 is the lowest in 72 years, down to 38.5 million. In Texas, the largest cattle state with over 10 million animals, the herd size dropped by 600,000, or 6%, last year alone.

U.S. beef output for 2013 is expected to fall by 1 billion pounds—i.e., 3 pounds less per capita will be produced this year. It should be noted that U.S. beef production has represented one-fifth of the entire world’s beef output in recent years.

The U.S. no longer produces enough milk for domestic needs. This gap is disguised by imports of casein and other milk constituents, from which artificial cheese and other dairy “products” are re-constituted as real. During 2012, dozens of prime dairy herds went under in California, the biggest U.S. dairy state.

The U.S. produced 1% fewer chickens in 2012 than the year before.

v1-2-5-beef_logos.jpg

5. Food-processing capacity is declining in the U.S., under the impact of unprecedented consolidation, and control by private, non-food financial interests. In beef, for example, the Big Four mega-packing companies account for over 80% of all U.S. beef processed. They operate 25 giant slaughter houses, and just a few other packing plants: Cargill, JBS, Tysons Foods Inc., and National Beef Packing. On Feb. 1, Cargill shut down its huge West Texas slaughtering facility, giving barely 10 days termination notice to its 2,000 workers, shocking the 22,000 residents of nearby Lubbock, and leaving the surrounding ranchers in the lurch. Cargill peremptorily cited the decreasing number of cattle available, at prices Cargill said it chooses no longer to pay.

The same cartelization prevails in other foods, from citrus to oilseeds. For example, in dairy products: In the U.S., Dean Foods has over 30% of the fluid market; Kraft dominates cheese. Internationally, seven giant trans-national firms dominate: Nestle S.A. (Switzerland), Groupe Danone (France), Dean Foods (Texas, U.S.A.), Koninklejke Friesland Campina N.V. (Netherlands), Land O’Lakes (Minnesota, U.S.A.), Fonterra (New Zealand), and Lactalis (France).

Internationally, Wal-Mart is the single largest food distributor in the global grocery cartel, with Carrefour (France) second, and very few others. Wal-Mart dictates low prices to farmer-suppliers worldwide. Hedge funds and Big Money of all kinds are in controlling positions throughout the food chain. Warren Buffett this month announced a giant $23 billion takeover of food giant H.J. Heinz, by his Berkshire-Hathaway and 3G Capital Management.

6. Degradation of water and land. Conditions of depleting water sources, decreasing area of farmland, and declining soil fertility are spreading. As of Feb. 5, the U.S. Drought Monitor map (Figure 4), issued by the Federal interagency team, shows that 87% of the High Plains farmbelt region is experiencing drought. Fully 100% of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska are in drought. Even where there is rain expected over the next few weeks elsewhere in the Midwest, such as in Illinois, agronomists warn that, although this will allow the Spring crop plantings of corn and soybeans, the lack of sufficient subsoil moisture during the Summer growth period may spell disaster.

FIGURE 4
U.S. Drought Monitor

However, even before our current drought episode—considered the worst in 50 years—large parts of the Southwestern and High Plains states have come to be reliant on more and deeper wells. Pumping of groundwater for irrigation, as of 2005, was three times the volume from wells in 1950. The land area irrigated in the U.S. has been declining since the 1980s.

The water table of the mid- and southern-Ogallala Aquifer region (the Southern High Plains states) has plunged, as has that of aquifers in California, Arizona, and parts of the upper Rio Grande Basin (Figure 4). Land subsidence is extensive from Southern California to West Texas. Salination of farmland is worsening, for lack of flow-through of fresh water to flush the soils.

Variations on this same situation are in effect in other breadbasket regions the world over. Added to this, are constraints wrongfully imposed on food production by deliberate government authority. In November 2012, in Australia, a cap was put on agricultural use of water in the highly developed Murray-Darling (Rivers) Basin project, which can produce food for 60 million people. In Canada, in 2005, a cap was placed against further usage-allocation of water for agriculture or any other purpose, in the Lower Saskatchewan River Basin.

7. Unreliability of transportation, power, farm inputs, and logistics is increasing. The growing inadequacy of the base grid of rail, surface, and waterway systems is evident this Winter, in the first-time-ever episode of potential shutdown of barge shipping on the mid-Mississippi River channel. Narrowly averted, a potential repeat threat remains, because there is no redundancy of rail to handle the needs of the farmbelt if barge traffic is interrupted, nor the other way around.

v1-6-Maumee_Dam_Ind..jpg
USDA/Nathan Baggett
There is a huge backlog of work on locks and dams, channel dredging, and other upkeep of the waterway system. As an example, corrosion of the Maumee Dam in Fort Wayne, Ind. (shown here) has produced holes that have caused massive leaks in the structure.

There is a gigantic backlog of work on locks and dams, channel dredging, and other upkeep of the waterway system. Some of the Upper Mississippi River District installations are 60 years old; some on the Ohio River District system, even 90 years old. In 2010, a 280-foot stretch of lock wall, at Lockport, Ill., simply caved in.

The U.S. rail system has contracted drastically since its peak in the 1920s. Roadways in rural farming counties have a huge deficit of bridge replacement and repair. Likewise, electricity generation and distribution have not kept pace, since expansion of nuclear power was halted.

Infrastructure to protect against flooding and other weather extremes, in particular, levees, is deficient in many farm counties. For example, nothing has been done about full-scale levees and pumps in the New Madrid zone of Missouri, along the west bank of the Mississippi River.

8. Seed cartel control. Monsanto (headquartered in St. Louis) and a few other agro-chemical companies (Syngenta, DuPont/Pioneer, BASF, BayerCrop Science, Dow/DeKalb) operate a global cartel, controlling food-crop traits, bio-techniques, and seed supplies, wrongfully claiming patent rights, on the scale of controlling the means to life. For example, this cartel controls 80-90% of corn and soybean seeds currently used for the U.S. crops. The Big Three—Monsanto, Syngenta, and DuPont/Pioneer—control 50% of all the world’s commercial seed market. They similarly have a lock on directions of research, and what crop traits are developed for the future.

9. Vulnerability to plant and animal diseases. Research for agriculture advance—in crop and animal genetics, and biogeochemistry in general—has been thwarted for decades, to the degree that, today, we have needless vulnerabilities to outbreaks and epidemics of botanical, veterinary, and zoönotic diseases, as well as constraints to yield potentials.

For example, the wheat rust fungus UG99 (first identified in East Africa in 1999), is now making its way across Southwest Asia, and constitutes a world wheat crop threat. This danger arises—as was denounced by Norman Borlaug in 2009—because agriculture research was not supported over the past few decades, sufficient to develop fungus-resistant wheat strains, as a standby reserve, in case of mutations and new outbreaks. Now there is a scramble.

Threats to crops and livestock are intensified by the long-distance, free-trade patterns in play under globalization, which spread pathogens. The 1980s Mad Cow disease outbreak, originating in the British Isles, is a costly example. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates that nearly half of the food-borne-illness outbreaks today in the U.S. come from “global-sourced” food, mostly from Asia.

Highly concentrated domestic production also spreads illness widely. The incidence of laboratory-confirmed bacterial food-borne illness in 2011, compared with that of 2006-08, shows a 14% increase of Campylobacter; a 15% increase of Vibrio; a 6% Salmonella increase; and 8% Listeria increase.

FIGURE 5
FAO Food Price Index

10. Hyperinflation. Costs are climbing for food, and for animal feed, and food prices are set for take-off (Figure 5). For example, the price for a whole chicken was 21% higher in December 2012, than a year earlier (“Livestock, Dairy & Poultry Outlook,” USDA, February 2013). The only reason retail beef prices have not soared, is that so many ranchers and dairymen were liquidating their herds. Now the consumer price will skyrocket.

Speculation on agricultural commodities futures in Chicago is going wild. An estimated 80% of this involves “shadow bushels” and similar contracts, which are gambling bets, with no relation to real users of the commodities—wheat, corn, soybeans, etc.—for the food chain. Corn futures went from $5.50 to $8.50 a bushel from June to August last Summer on the Chicago Board of Trade.

11. Public opinion is becoming more and more ignorant about science and the economy, in particular, where food comes from. People are ready marks for all kinds of superstitions and manipulation. Delusions abound, including: “local markets” are a solution; eliminate grazing herds to allow the prairies to revert to their “original” state; biofuels are “renewable”; genetically modified foods will kill you; low-tech farming is more “natural.” Most evil of all, is the lie that resources are fixed, and population has outstripped agriculture’s ability to provide.

II. Causes of the Crisis

Monsanto and a few other agro-chemical companies operate a global cartel, controlling food-crop traits, bio-techniques, and seed supplies, wrongfully claiming patent rights, on the scale of controlling the means to life.

12. The shift to “markets” and monetarism—valuation in money terms—as the guiding principle for the United States, instead of physical-economic and scientific growth, can be dated to the August 1971 removal of the U.S. dollar from a fixed exchange-rate standard, launching floating currency rates, and decades of casino economics.

The concept of parity-pricing for farmers’ output, which had worked with spectacular success during the World War II years, was dismissed as “outmoded” in the 1970s. The parity-pricing principle was that, by ensuring that farmers’ incomes covered their costs of production, plus a decent profit, at the same time ensured that the public would have a secure food supply.

Instead, the ruse was asserted in the 1970s, that citizens must rely for their food security on farmers responding to “market signals” to be induced to produce the right amounts and types of foods to meet national needs.

The ensuing series of five-year U.S. farm laws, in this environment, introduced ever more extreme forms of “markets” orientation for U.S. agriculture, replacing Federal responsibility for food increase. Today, we’ve reached the phase where markets mumbo-jumbo is expressed as “risk management” (crop insurance and hedge-betting), which ends up as the “high risk” of no food for the population.

A turning point was the 1996 “Freedom to Farm Act,” known as the “Freedom to Fail.” Over the decades, thousands of family-farm operations were financially ruined. Farm county populations declined; rural towns died out. The productive potential was undermined.

13. National sovereignty was undermined by new international treaties and organizations, directly aimed at preventing food reliability:

1986-1994. The GATT Uruguay Round (UN General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), started in Punte del Este, was conducted under the theme, “One World/One Market,” to coerce national governments to stop supporting their own farmers, stop using tariffs to protect their own domestic industry, stop controlling their banking, give up their right to tariffs, etc. These nation-building measures are denounced as “trade distorting.”

1994. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, making the U.S., Mexico, and Canada one market.

1995. The World Trade Organization (WTO) went into operation, based on the GATT anti-nation-state tenets. There are today 158 member-nations, nominally adhering to the dogma.

14. Deregulation and globalized ownership of vital functions of the U.S. economy have been perpetrated in accordance with the “world markets” WTO onslaught, allowing looting and destruction, and furthering concentration of control by cartels, of such basics as energy systems, water, and transportation, as well as food processing and distribution, and banking—euphemistically called “financial services” in WTO jargon. In the 1970s, rail and trucking were deregulated. In 2000-01, electricity deregulation began, starting in California.

In 1999, banking was deregulated by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, Pub.L. 106-102), which discontinued the 1933 Glass-Steagall law, which separated commercial from speculative banking. A year later, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 was signed, which discontinued the provisions of the 1936 Commodity Exchange Act, which confined futures trading to regulated venues. A frenzy of over-the-counter betting commenced, on all kinds of wild derivatives, especially credit default swaps. Huge financial bubbles ensued, as well as food-commodities futures speculation. In 2007, the inevitable blowout of the entire monetary system began.

15. Patent rights to food seeds and lifeform genetics were wrongfully instituted in the United States, against all stated law and tradition, over the last 40 years.

Today Monsanto is in the forefront of holding and exerting food patent rights, in the U.S. and internationally. Monsanto alone claims to supply 40% of corn and soy seeds in Brazil; and 50% in Argentina.

In 1970, the Plant Variety Protection Act started the process, by granting private “certificate” rights over food seeds, for the first time ever. In the past, new breeds of flowers had limited protection; but never seeds for food.

In 1985, the U.S. Patent Office ruled that plants could qualify for patent-protection under the concept of the powerful industrial patent, with no exceptions for farmers or researchers.

In 1995, the Supreme Court upheld plant and animal patenting under the Utility Patent Law, no holds barred (December 2001, JEM Ag Supply, Inc. v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International Corp.).

The Justice Department anti-trust division has stood aside for years, while U.S. seed control was consolidated, and further, while Monsanto, Syngenta, and others have terrorized farmers, seed dealers and anyone they target. Monsanto’s seed-police operations—called “field checks”—seek out situations to file lawsuits, and ruin farmers, on charges of violating its seed- and trait-license privileges.

Monsanto has a case to be heard Feb. 19 in the Supreme Court against Indiana farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman, claiming that he infringed on Monsanto’s right to its “invention” of a certain soybean seed, because Bowman bought and planted seed from a grain elevator, which had obtained it in a commodity purchase from another farmer, who originally planted Monsanto seed. The “I win, you lose” implications are clear. Monsanto has reportedly filed suit and ruined farmers in 27 states; won 72 claims, with recorded judgments of $23 million against farmers.

16. Imposition of Green ideology. The conceptual origins of the Green movement lie in the history of eugenics and master-race “conservation,” centered in the long-lived networks of the British and European oligarchy. The modern greenie actions and laws of the past five decades clearly serve to restrict farming and food. They have locked up land in the false name of “conservation,” prevented water management under the excuse of preserving “biosystems,” and committed many other crimes.

The core Green tenet, is that resources are fixed and running out; mankind’s activities pollute and abet this, to the point of overheating the Earth. Greenism asserts that man is not a creative being, able to create the future by making scientific and technical advances to literally create new resources and potentials; man is on a par with the animals, always at risk of depleting his own ecosystem, and functioning as a “cancer” on Earth (Paul R. Ehrlich, Julian Huxley).

Following World War II, a number of organizations were founded in the U.S. to conduct pseudo-environmentalist campaigns, against farming in particular: 1946, the Conservation Foundation, Washington, D.C.; 1951, the Nature Conservancy, Washington, D.C. (originally, the Ecologists Union, 1946); 1961, World Wildlife Foundation, Washington, D.C.; 1970, Natural Resources Defense Council, New York City; 1974, World Watch Institute, Washington, D.C.

The international kick-off came with the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, and its call to assay the detrimental impact of humans on the environment. In 1982, there was the Rio de Janeiro UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), issuing an action plan to limit human impacts. In 1982, the UN General Assembly issued a World Charter for Nature. In 1988, UN agencies founded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to issue reports on how humans must restrict their activities in the name of cooling the overheating planet. In 1997, in Kyoto, Japan, nations met and committed to a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which went into effect as the Kyoto Protocol, on how to reduce so-called greenhouse gas emissions from 2008 to 2012.

In the U.S., the alien Green outlook was shopped into a series of laws and executive orders over the decades. On Jan. 1, 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) went into effect, to which many future measures were added, to restrict farming and related activity, in the false name of protecting the environment. For example, in 1989, the North American Wetlands Conservation Act was passed, setting out funding for creating and retaining marshes. In 1985, the Conservation Reserve Program was begun, to take farmland out of production. The CRP, started in the 1985 farm law, took a program in the 1954 Agriculture Act, which had assisted farmers in not using highly erodible land (for 1-3 years), and instead, the CRP twisted that principle into a mass set-aside of land (for 10-15 years), as an anti-food program, done in tandem with the thwarting of NAWAPA (North American Water and Power Alliance).

Thus, the Green movement is a mind-control operation, concocted decades ago, to back monetarist measures against nations, and effect depopulation.

FIGURE 6
NAWAPA: Parsons Original Conceptual Design, ca. 1960s

17. Cancellation of NAWAPA and other land- and water-improvement projects. The continental-scale North American Water and Power Alliance, proposed in the 1960s, for completion by 1990, was shelved, along with other regional-scale projects, and nuclear-power-associated programs, especially nuclear-powered desalination of seawater. Today’s water crisis is directly a result of this obstruction (Figure 6).

Had NAWAPA been built, there would have been some 52 to 62 additional million acre feet a year (MAFY), depending on supply, added to the Lower 48 states, which is 13-plus percent of the total water in use there in 2005. For Canada, the additional, organized water supplies through NAWAPA would have allowed for the full development of its rich potential as a sovereign, growing nation.

As it is, any dry spell is an automatic disaster. Today’s vulnerability to weather extremes affecting agriculture is also the result of cancellation of upkeep on existing infrastructure (dams, levees, drainage systems).

The nominal arguments against NAWAPA were: 1) it is too “costly” according to money measures; and 2) it disturbs “nature,” according to Green ideology.

USDA/Steven Vaughn
In 2012, over 10% of U.S. gasoline came from corn-ethanol, causing scarcity for livestock feed, food, and exports, given the drought damage to the corn crop.

18. Burning food for fuel. The most blatant cause of the immediate grain food crisis, is biofuels. At present, 42% of the U.S. corn crop is being converted to ethanol; 26% of U.S. soy oil is going into biodiesel. This represents the loss of food for millions. The Green lie, is that crops for energy are “renewable.”

The laws and orders which led up to this are straightforward, emanating from the London financial crowd, under Greenie-environmentalist ideology.

In 2002, the U.S. Sustainable Energy Act mandated the development of biofuels as a “renewable” energy source.

In 2005, the Energy Policy Act (PL 109-58) set compulsory levels for annual biofuel production.

In 2007, the Energy Independence and Security Act (PL 110-140) set higher volumes of annual biofuels production, as mandates.

In 2012, over 10% of U.S. gasoline came from corn-ethanol, causing scarcity for livestock feed, food, and exports, given the drought damage to the corn crop. The Clean Air Act has a clause—Section 211 (o)(7)—for waiving the Renewable Fuels Standards yearly mandate, in cases of emergency, but the Obama Administration refuses to do it.

(Note, regarding the quibble that byproducts—dry distillers grains/DDG—from corn-ethanol distilling, can be used for livestock feed, which, argue biofuels advocates, brings down to 25%, not 40%, the usual figure given, of the corn harvest now going for non-food use: Cancel biofuels, and zero percent of corn will be burned as fuel.)

19. Demoralization of farmers is contributing to allowing the biofuels criminality to continue. Farming communities have been emotionally pressured for decades by Greenism and globalization—suffering wild price swings, debts, monopolistic markets, infrastructure decay, and the shutdown of their towns, churches, schools, and other community institutions. Whereas in the past, U.S. high-technology farmers and farm-state leaders were in the forefront of scientific/economic development and moral policy, across the board, for example, in Rural Electrification, the World War II food-output drive, and nuclear power; now, instead, cornbelt leaders, for instance, cynically defend biofuels as the only way to boost “market demand,” so crop growers’ output prices and incomes will remain high. They refuse to fight to restore the sovereign prerogative of our Federal government to intervene to support farmers and food, for the general good.

III. Deliberate Depopulation Policy

20. The intent of depopulation, not mere stupidity, is behind the practices which are undercutting nation-states, their physical economic development, and food production. The policy nexus responsible operates through transnational financial and political circles, centered on London, i.e., the neo-British Empire, or globalization. These are the same networks acting to keep down nations, by deliberately promoting warfare, under expedient, fabricated “concerns,” such as preserving human rights, “responsibility to protect” (R2P), the threat of terrorism, etc. In 1999, Tony Blair, then British prime minister, proclaimed this globalist strife-orientation, as the “end of the Peace of Westphalia” policy. Its British imperial lineage traces back centuries, through such episodes as the 1845-49 Irish potato famine, the 1876-78 famine in India under the British East India Co., and the 1943 Bengal famine under Winston Churchill.

21. Advocates of depopulation, in their own words:

Thomas Malthus, employee, British East India Co., 1780s: It is a postulate “that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the Earth to produce subsistence for man.

“Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetrical ratio. . . .

“This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.” Malthus recommended the spread of diseases, casting out poor newborns as superfluous, and other population-reduction measures (“An Essay on the Principle of Population,” London, 1789).

HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, 1980s: “You cannot keep a bigger flock of sheep than you are capable of feeding. In other words, conservation may involve culling in order to keep a balance between the relative numbers in each species within any particular habitat. I realise this is a very touchy subject, but the fact remains that mankind is part of the living world. . . . Every new acre brought into cultivation means another acre denied to wild species.” The Prince recommends more disease, curbing human breeding and poverty. “In the event I am reborn, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation” (August 1988, to Deutsche Presse Agentur).

Bill Gates, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2000s: Gates’ formulation is that fewer people are a necessity, because of global warming. He asserts that philanthropic betterment of health and agriculture will limit the number of people, so that their activities won’t emit more CO2 than the planet Earth can withstand. At a conference in 2010, he said: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now, if we do a really good job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15%” (speech titled, “Innovating to Zero” at a Technology, Entertainment and Design 2010 Conference, in Long Beach, California).

In May 2009, Gates and 10 others of the “Billionaires Club” (including George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Michael Bloomberg) held a private confab in New York City to discuss “charity” activities to shrink population.

v1-fig7-iowa_crop_prices_year_1950-2011.pdf
Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Iowa Field Office

British Royal Society, 2012: Its report, “People and the Planet” (May) asserts that, to avoid “a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills,” the world’s population of 7 billion, and its consumption must be cut. Praising the Royal Society “analysis,” Paul Ehrlich (Stanford University and longtime “theorist” of British population reduction, starting with The Population Bomb in 1972), summarized its message more forthrightly than the report: “How many [people] you support depends on lifestyles. We came up with 1.5 to 2 billion because you can’t have big active cities and wilderness. If you want a battery chicken world where everyone has minimum space and food and everyone is kept just about alive, you might be able to support in the long term about 4 or 5 billion people. But you already have 7 billion. So we have to humanely and as rapidly as possible move to population shrinkage. . .” (Ehrlich, in the Guardian, April 26, 2012).

22. Barack Obama’s actions to carry out the depopulation agenda, are crimes on behalf of alien British globalism, constituting grounds for impeachment. Tony Blair was an official advisor to Obama in 2012. Operatives from the Gates Foundation are in key positions throughout the Obama Administration, including Rajiv Shah, director of USAID (at Gates Foundation 2002-09); David Lane, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Rome agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (at Gates Foundation, 2001-07). Obama made Monsanto man Robert Beachey (former president of Danforth Plant Science Center, supported by the Monsanto Fund) head of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

In brief:

More food-for-fuel, bioproducts. The Obama Administration is continuing, even expanding, the use of food for biofuels, at a time of extreme food shortages and bad weather (Figure 7). On Nov. 16, 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency summarily denied the appeal to waive, even partially, the yearly mandate for ethanol, made by an unprecedented combination of nine governors, and dozens of groups representing livestock, processing, restaurant, grocery, and other food interests. The EPA statement said it “determined that no harm” would come from continuing biofuels.

In fact, what has come to pass is exactly what 12 livestock organizations warned of on July 30, 2012, in their appeal for a biofuels suspension: “The drought-induced reduction in the corn supply [2012-13] means that the mandated utilization of corn for renewable fuels will so reduce the supply of corn and increase its price that livestock and poultry producers will be forced to reduce the size of their herds and flocks, causing some to go out of business and jobs to be lost. . . .”

In June 2012, the EPA legalized public sales pf E15 (gasoline with 15% ethanol), up from the current E10 blend.)

On Dec. 3, 2012, the Obama EPA announced its approval of grain sorghum as a feedstock under the Renewable Fuels Standard of the 2007 biofuels law. In January 2013, the Obama Administration extended the biodiesel tax incentive program for two years, retroactive to January 2012, which will consume more soybeans. This Winter, the Obama USDA reiterated full support to expanding the Obama Biobased Products program across the board, and announced new R&D grants on ways to divert agriculture capacity for for non-food use.

v1-9-Ethanol_gas_pump.jpg
EIRNS/Stuart Lewis
In June 2012, the EPA legalized public sales pf E15 (gasoline with 15% ethanol), up from the current E10 blend), thus removing yet more food from Americans’ dinner tables.

Refusal to support farmers, food supply. The Obama Administration refuses to intervene to prevent the loss of dairy farms in California and elsewhere, the loss of cattle herds, poultry flocks, and downscaling of hog operations. His Administration is allowing unprecedented consolidation and downsizing of slaughtering and food-processing capacity.

Obama’s USDA chief economist Dr. Joe Glauber says the U.S. agriculture economy “is strong,” because “in aggregate,” farm incomes are at new record highs, “in nominal terms.” He refers to high row crop prices (corn, soybeans), because of ethanol and scarcity (testimony to the Senate, Feb. 14, 2013). The Obama Administration will not set floor/parity-based prices for the output of farmers and ranchers, to support farm incomes, tamp down price swings, and in particular, set up contingency mechanisms to hold up corn growers’ prices, for when corn-ethanol is stopped—because Obama opposes all this.

The Landsat program, for monitoring Earth from space, has barely been preserved; key weather satellite programs are being eliminated. The Obama Green downgrade to more wind, solar, and biomass energy is jeopardizing economic life. Along with opposing full-scale restoration of nuclear power, the Obama Administration has drastically cut fusion power research funding.

Prevention of Glass-Steagall. In 2010, the Obama White House intervened to prevent Congress from considering and acting on bills to re-instate Glass-Steagall, and instead shoved in the dud Dodd-Frank law, a companion to the multi-trillions of Federal bailouts given to Wall Street/City of London banks, from the Bush Presidency through to the present. Obama repeated in October 2012, “There is no evidence that having Glass-Steagall in place would somehow change the dynamic. . .” (Rolling Stone, Oct. 25 interview).

Hyperinflation. The Obama Administration refuses to ban agro-commodity speculation on the Chicago Board of Trade, and other futures and derivatives exchanges, and put on food and feed price caps and controls where necessary at points in the food chain. Obama’s actions have set the stage for out-of-control food hyperinflation and chaos in the coming months.

IV. Re-Assert Sovereignty, Cancel the Famine Agenda

23. The threefold recovery program for the United States, to end monetarist destruction and restore the economy, is based on re-activating national sovereignty:

(a) Glass-Steagall. Immediately, re-instate the 1933 Glass-Steagall law, which separated commercial banking from speculative finance. This will outlaw the protection of gambling as part of our Federally insured banking system, terminating the hyperinflationary bailouts. The bill is ready to go in the House of Representatives, as HR 129 (The Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2013), which in 2012 had garnered co-sponsors (as HR 1489). HR 129 has 15.

(b) Re-establish ample credit. Once the banking system is again sound, the Federal government shall issue credit to amply supply nation-serving projects and purposes, including grants and loans to now-bankrupt state and local governments, to enable them to carry out their vital functions.

FIGURE 8
NAWAPA XXI

(c) Launch the necessary nation-building projects, foremost of which is NAWAPA XXI, the updated version of the 1960s, Kennedy-era North American Water and Power Alliance. The concept diverts a portion of Arctic-flowing water from the Northwest of our continent, southward through Canada, the western United States, and as far South as Mexico. This 20-year plan not only alleviates drought, and regulates flows for navigation and all purposes, but creates upwards of 6 million jobs in the U.S., and a demand for heavy manufacturing inputs and a skilled workforce once again. The rolls of 48 million poor Americans dependent on food relief will shrink to zero. Canada and Mexico will prosper.

NASA
The Landsat program, for monitoring Earth from space, has barely been preserved, and key weather satellite programs are being eliminated, as a result of the Obama-Green anti-science agenda.

In tandem with launching NAWAPA XXI (Figure 8), start up the other priority tasks, including refurbishing the entire inland waterway system; building storm-surge barriers at key coastal sites, and resuming the development of nuclear energy as the power platform for the future.

24. Nullify the WTO! Return to collaboration among sovereign nations. Restoring a future-building focus to the United States opens the way for beneficial relations with other nations, especially Russia, China, and India. The raft of wrongful globalist obligations can be swept aside, beginning with the WTO, making way for mutual-interest trade, and collaboration on intercontinental projects. The multinational cartels dominating food, chemicals, fuels, minerals, and other critical commodities, can be curbed and broken up. In particular, the “intellectual property rights” policing of cartel-owned patent rights to crop and lifeform genetics must cease.

25. Cancel biofuels. Institute floor prices—based on the parity principle—for corn and other commodities, to support farm and ranch capacity, to go all-out for plentiful food and fiber. Parity-pricing, as introduced and demonstrated under the Franklin Roosevelt Administration, will support a steady situation for young farmers, and generation-to-generation family-scale farm�ing, instead of the current get-big-or-get-out global-marketing pressure, where farm-syndicates, connected to cartels, end up controlling the food chain and the use of the land.

In the very short term, collaborate with other nations on how to muster the needed emergency rations, to relieve hunger anywhere and everywhere in the world, while economic potential is built up.

marciabaker@larouchepub.com