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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] NATO’s Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic
  • Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 11:28:49 -0600



NATO’s Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic
Using "Climate Change" as a Pretext to Appropriate World Seeds' Treasure
by F. William Engdahl
September 27, 2008
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10300

The controversial ‘Doomsday Seed Vault’, a nuclear-bomb-proof vault deep into
the side of a mountain in NATO-member Norway’s Svalbard, near the Arctic
Circle, has begun to collect seed samples from the entire world to freeze in
the newly opened facility. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with
the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the
Government of Norway, among others, have constructed what is called by BBC
the ‘doomsday seed bank.’

Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It sits on
the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group. Now
scientists connected with the project are roaming the world to collect
samples of every seed variety known, using the fraudulent argument of
protecting against Global Warming to obtain samples of the crop diversity of
the planet. The implications are potentially more dangerous than the threat
of nuclear war.

As climate change is credited as one of the main drivers behind soaring food
prices, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the private organization which is
responsible for maintaining the Seed Vault, is searching crop collections
from Azerbaijan to Nigeria, allegedly for the traits that could defend the
world agriculture against the impact of future changes. Traits, such as
drought resistance in wheat, or salinity tolerance in potato, they argue,
will become essential as crops around the world have to adapt to new climate
conditions under forecast changes from Global Warming.

Beginning this past March, more than 200,000 crop varieties from Asia,
Africa, Latin America and the Middle East—drawn from vast seed collections
maintained by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
(CGIAR)—were shipped to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a facility
capable of preserving their vitality for thousands of years.

The seeds were from varieties of rice, wheat, beans, sorghum, sweet potatoes,
lentils, chick peas and a host of other food, forage and agro-forestry
plants. They are being safeguarded in the facility, which was created as a
‘repository of last resort for humanity’s agricultural heritage.’ The vault
was officially built by the Norwegian government as a service to the global
community, and a Rome-based international NGO, the Global Crop Diversity
Trust, will fund its operation. It officially opened on February 26, 2008.

Unofficially, the Seed Vault project is one of the largest steps taken yet by
the handful of GMO agribusiness giants including Monsanto Corporation,
Syngenta of Basle, the Rockefeller Foundation in addition to the Gates family
foundation, the world’s largest private foundation combining the wealth as
well of Warren Buffett. As I described in an earlier piece posted January 3,
2008 in this space, Der »Tresor des Jüngsten Gerichts« in der
Arktis(((THOMAS Can we make a link here??))), the project appears to be far
from the innocent humanitarian enterprise its promoters claim. The key
organizations involved have a long, often dirty history of fraud,
intimidation and dubious methods to force the spread of patented Genetically
Modified plant seeds into the world agriculture food chain.

Readers seeking a more detailed background on the GMO companies, the
so-called Four Horsemen of the Seeds Apokalypse—Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow
Chemical and DuPont—are encouraged to look further in my book, Saat der
Zerstörung: die Dunkle Seite der Gen-Manipulation ((( Here a Hyperlink as
well to book))) . There I describe the decades long background of the
Rockefeller Foundation, working in close concert with Monsanto and others to
create the scientifically flawed technology of introducing foreign traits
into the seeds of the world’s main food crops and thereby claiming grounds
for exclusive patent rights to sell seeds of corn, rice, potato varieties,
soybeans and countless other basic crops including cotton. GMO is a
scientifically unstable technique whose long-term health impact on humans or
even animals has never been independently tested by any Government.

That is a result of deliberate US policy, initiated in 1992 by then-President
George H. W. Bush in consultation with top officials of Monsanto. Then Bush
signed an Executive decree mandating the responsible Federal agencies such as
the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and others
NOT to independently test the genetically modified seeds for possible harmful
effects, but to consider them to be ‘Substantially Equivalent’ to
conventional corn, soybeans, rice and such. That political fraud allowed
Monsanto to submit GMO seed varieties for approval to plant commercially
using only Monsanto-conducted test results as ‘proof’ that the seeds were
safe. That was only the beginning of a policy of malign neglect on the side
of the US Government regarding the dangers of GMO.

Toxic for human embryos

Compounding the dangers, the US Government also refused to examine,
independently, the possible harmful effects to ground water and to humans and
animals of the patented chemical herbicides which had to be sold alongside
the Monsanto or DuPont or other GMO seeds. The seeds were patented in effect
to force farmers to buy exclusively the herbicide of the seed patent owner.

As an example, Monsanto initially held patent rights to a powerful herbicide,
Roundup©, which today is the world’s most used herbicide. Monsanto developed
and patented a soybean seed it names Roundup Ready©. Roudup Ready soybeans
are “ready” for the Roundup herbicide. The Monsanto soybean is specially
developed to be resistant to Roundup herbicide, a powerful poison that kills
everything it touches. That pairing of herbicide and seed gives companies
promoting the GMO product a lock on both sale of patented seeds as well as
their mated herbicide chemicals. All major GMO seed giants started out as
chemical companies.

More alarming is the fact that, according to numerous studies worldwide, GMO
crops over time need more, not less, herbicide as the weeds develop a special
resistance to become ‘superweeds’.

Then a scientific study that has to date been blocked out of the public
debate, suggests that the active elements in the world’s largest-selling
herbicide, Monsanto’s Roundup, are toxic and get into ground water and into
the human diet. The study found that Roundup had a measurable effect on human
embryonic and placental cells.

The scientific study, released in the magazine, Archives of Environmental
Contamination and Toxicology in November 2006 by a group of scientists headed
by N. Benachour and G. E. Seralini of the University of Caen in France,
following extensive tests with rats fed a diet of plants treated with
Roundup, whose active ingredient is Glyphosate, that ‘we can conclude that
the failure to account for the combined effects…will undoubtedly lead to the
underestimation of potential hazards, especially at the endocrine disruption
level, and hence to erroneous conclusions at a regulatory level regarding the
risk that they provoke.’ The scientists concluded, ‘Thus the toxic or
hormonal impact of chemical mixtures in formulations (of Roundup—w.e.)
appears to be underestimated.’ Moreover, the Caen University scientists found
that the toxic effects of Roundup were ‘thus amplified with time. Taken
together, these data suggest that Roundup exposure may effect human
reproduction and fetal development in case of contamination.’[1]

The last statement, translated into layman’s language is that the world’s
most popular herbicide has manifest impact on human embryo cells and no
Government is moving to call for a ban on its sale pending larger more
thorough independent tests. The scientific article was buried and no one
outside a tiny scientific community even knew the alarming results. The story
should have been banner headline in the world press: ‘Scientists claim GMO
Herbicide toxic to human embryo!’

NATO gets world seed samples

The fact that GMO is a product of the Rockefeller Foundation, an organization
which has been the leading world organization promoting the racialist
eugenics agenda since the 1920’s, and promoting population reduction programs
including forced sterilization of women in Puerto Rico, Nicaragua and
elsewhere in the developing world is relevant to the probable agenda of the
people who placed a global seed vault on the property of a NATO country far
remote from any prying of the public.

The picture gets more ominous in context of the Arctic Seed Vault of the
Rockefeller Foundation, Gates, Monsanto et al. The seeds for the Doomsday
Seed Vault are being gathered from select seed banks around the world
established by CGIAR. This first installment from the CGIAR collections will
contain duplicates from international agricultural research centers based in
Benin, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, the
Philippines and Syria. Collectively, the CGIAR centers maintain 600,000 plant
varieties in crop gene-banks, which are regarded as the foundation of global
efforts to conserve agricultural biodiversity. The seed banks are supposed to
be protected from attempts of Monsanto et al to try to use the seeds for
their patent efforts. There have been documented cases, however, where seed
samples were illegally given to Monsanto or other GMO giants to develop GMO
traits. Now by collecting all possible seed varieties far away from prying
eyes in the Arctic, the seed companies such as Monsanto who are part of the
Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault project, have at least the theoretical
possibility of taking those seeds and patenting the most essential for their
proliferation of GMO across the human food chain.

“We’re tempted to say that nobody in their right mind would ever use these
things,” remarked Stanford University biophysicist, Professor Steven Block, a
man with years of personal experience with classified Pentagon and Government
biological research.“But,” Block added, “not everybody is in their right mind…
.” [2]

The Svalbard project deserves far more public attention and scrutiny.

NOTES

[1] N. Benachour, et al, Time- and Dose-Dependent Effects of Roundup on Human
Embryonic and Placental Cells, 20 November 2006, Archives of Environmental
Contamination and Toxicology, vol. 53, pp.126-133.

[2] Prof. Steven Block, quoted in Mark Shwartz, “Biological Warfare Emerges
as 21st-Century Threat”, Stanford Report,
news-service.stanford.edu/news/2001/january17/bioterror-117.html.,, 11
January 2001.





  • [Livingontheland] NATO’s Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic, Tradingpost, 09/27/2008

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