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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] How Bill Gates, Syngenta and Rockefeller Became Custodians of the Doomsday Crop Diversity Vault
  • Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2011 09:06:07 -0700


How Bill Gates, Syngenta and Rockefeller Became Custodians of the Doomsday
Crop Diversity Vault
12th June by Theodora Filis
http://dfilis.blogspot.com/2011/06/are-gates-syngenta-rockefeller-really.html

When names like, Gates, Rockefeller and Syngenta show up as key players on
the same project, I find time to research. One thing this elite group can not
be accused of is a reluctance to make an impact on the world, be it positive
or negative. So what could get them all to invest millions of US dollars
each? I found out, and it's fascinating.

Deep inside a frozen mountain, high above an icy fjord, near the Arctic
Circle, three concrete chambers are home to our world's most important
natural resources. Built to withstand global warming, floods, wars, and a
nuclear catastrophe, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, nicknamed the 'doomsday
seed bank' by the BBC, was officially opened on February 26, 2008, and serves
as the ultimate safety net for our world's seeds.

Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions of US dollars, in this project,
along with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Norwegian government and many
others.

“The history of Svalbard Global Seed Vault starts as early as 1983.
Preserving seed from food plants is an absolutely essential part of the work
of preserving the world’s biodiversity, adapting to climate change and global
warming and thereby ensuring food for the world’s population for the
foreseeable future. There are hundreds of gene banks around the world. But
some of them are vulnerable to natural disasters, war or the lack of
management or finance. The foundation of a global ”central bank” for the
world’s seeds (primarily of food plants) has therefore long been an issue.”
Svalbard Press Release

Did we miss something here? Their press release stated, 'so that crop
diversity can be conserved for the foreseeable future'. What future do the
seed bank's sponsors foresee that would threaten the global availability of
current seeds?

The first notable point is who is sponsoring the doomsday seed vault. Joining
the Norwegian government are, as noted, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation;
the US agribusiness giant DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred, one of the world's largest
owners of patented genetically-modified plant seeds and related
agrichemicals; Syngenta, the major Swiss-based GMO seed and agrichemicals
company through its Syngenta Foundation; the Rockefeller Foundation, the
private group who raised over $100 million for this project since the 1970's;
CGIAR, the global network created by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Why are the Gates and Rockefeller foundations supporting the proliferation of
patented seeds – which, as it has in every other place on earth, destroys the
plant seed varieties? At the same time, why invest tens of millions of
dollars to preserve every seed variety known in a bomb-proof doomsday vault
near the remote Arctic Circle ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for
the future’?

Perhaps it's no accident that the Rockefeller and Gates foundations are
quietly financing the ‘doomsday seed vault’ on Svalbard.

The Svalbard project will be run by an organization called the Global Crop
Diversity Trust (GCDT). Founded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO) and Bioversity International (formerly the International
Plant Genetic Research Institute), an offshoot of the CGIAR.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is based in Rome. Its Board is chaired by
Margaret Catley-Carlson a Canadian also on the advisory board of Group Suez
Lyonnaise des Eaux, one of the world’s largest private water companies.
Catley-Carlson was also president until 1998 of the New York-based Population
Council, John D. Rockefeller’s population reduction organization, set up in
1952 to advance the Rockefeller family’s eugenics program under the cover of
promoting “family planning,” birth control devices, sterilization and
“population control” in developing countries.

Other GCDT board members include former Bank of America executive presently
head of the Hollywood DreamWorks Animation, Lewis Coleman. Coleman is also
the lead Board Director of Northrup Grumman Corporation, one of America’s
largest military industry Pentagon contractors.

Jorio Dauster (Brazil) is also Board Chairman of Brasil Ecodiesel. He is a
former Ambassador of Brazil to the European Union, and Chief Negotiator of
Brazil’s foreign debt for the Ministry of Finance. Dauster has also served as
President of the Brazilian Coffee Institute and as Coordinator of the Project
for the Modernization of Brazil’s Patent System, which involves legalizing
patents on seeds which are genetically modified, something until recently
forbidden by Brazil’s laws.

Cary Fowler is the Trust’s Executive Director. Fowler was Professor and
Director of Research in the Department for International Environment &
Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He was also
a Senior Advisor to the Director General of Bioversity International. There
he represented the Future Harvest Centres of the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in negotiations on the
International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources. In the 1990s, he headed the
International Program on Plant Genetic Resources at the FAO. He drafted and
supervised negotiations of FAO’s Global Plan of Action for Plant Genetic
Resources, adopted by 150 countries in 1996. He is a past-member of the
National Plant Genetic Resources Board of the US and the Board of Trustees of
the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, another
Rockefeller Foundation and CGIAR project.

GCDT board member Dr. Mangala Rai of India is the Secretary of India’s
Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE), and Director
General of the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR). He is also a
Board Member of the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Rice Research
Institute (IRRI), which promoted the world’s first major GMO experiment, the
much-hyped ‘Golden Rice’ which proved a failure. Rai has served as Board
Member for CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), and a
Member of the Executive Council of the CGIAR.

The 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 by Monsanto et al to try to use the seeds for their
patent efforts. However, there have been documented cases where seed samples
were illegally given to Monsanto and other GMO giants to develop GMO traits.

Global Crop Diversity Trust Donors also include, the Rockefeller and Gates
Foundations, GMO giants DuPont-Pioneer Hi-Bred, Syngenta of Basle
Switzerland, CGIAR and the State Department’s energetically pro-GMO agency
for development aid, USAID.

It would seem the foxes are guarding the hen-house of mankind – the global
seed diversity store in Svalbard.

Sources:

William Engdahl, Seeds of Destruction, Montreal, (Global Research, 2007).
John H. Davis, Harvard Business Review, 1956, cited in Geoffrey Lawrence,
Agribusiness, Capitalism and the Countryside, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1987. See
also Harvard Business School, The Evolution of an Industry and a Seminar:
Agribusiness Seminar, http://www.exed.hbs.edu/programs/agb/seminar.html.
Myriam Mayet, The New Green Revolution in Africa: Trojan Horse for GMOs?,
May, 2007, African Centre for Biosafety, www.biosafetyafrica.net.
ETC Group, Green Revolution 2.0 for Africa?, Communique Issue #94,
March/April 2007.
Global Crop Diversity Trust website, in
http://www.croptrust.org/main/donors.php.




  • [Livingontheland] How Bill Gates, Syngenta and Rockefeller Became Custodians of the Doomsday Crop Diversity Vault, Tradingpost, 11/08/2011

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