Global Research, January 11, 2009
webofdebt.com

Letter to the bank – Dear Sirs, In light of recent developments, when you returned my check marked “insufficient funds,” were you referring to my funds or yours?

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith famously said, “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.” If banks can create money, why are we suffering from a “credit crunch”? Why can’t banks create all the money they can find borrowers for? Last fall, Congress committed an unprecedented $700 billion in taxpayer money to reversing the credit crisis, and the Federal Reserve has already fanned that into $8.5 trillion in loans and commitments.1 But the bank bailout has proven to be no more than a boondoggle for a handful of lucky Wall Street banks, without getting credit flowing again.

To understand the real cause of the credit crisis and how it can be reversed, we first need to understand credit itself – what it is, where it comes from, and what the real tourniquet is that has limited its flow. Banks actually create credit; and if private banks can do it, so could public banks or public treasuries. The crisis is not one of “liquidity” but of “solvency.” It has been caused, not by the banks’ inability to get credit (something they can create with accounting entries), but by their inability to meet the capital requirement imposed by the Bank for International Settlements, the private foreign head of the international banking system. That inability, in turn, has been caused by the derivatives virus; and only a few big banks are seriously infected with it. By bailing out these big banks, the government is actually spreading the virus by furnishing the funds for them to take over smaller regional banks.

A more effective alternative than trying to patch up the hopelessly imperiled derivatives positions of these few Wall Street banks would be to simply create another credit system with a pristine set of books. We don’t need to fix the Wall Street disease; we can bypass the whole problem and create a new, healthy, parallel system. A network of public banks (federal and state) could create “credit” just as private banks do now.

This credit could be extended at low interest rates to consumers and at very low interest to local governments, drastically reducing the cost of public projects by reducing the cost of funding them.
That is not a radical proposal. It is what private banks themselves do every day. But bankers will dispute it, and most people have trouble believing it. So to make a compelling case for this solution, the first thing that needs to be established is that . . .

Banks Create the Money They Lend
Bankers will tell you that they do not create money. At a 10% reserve requirement, they simply lend out 90% of their deposits. The catch is that their “deposits” include the money they have written into their customers’ accounts as loans. That is how loans are made: numbers are simply written into the accounts of borrowers, as many reputable authorities have attested. Here are two of them, dating back to when officials were either more aware of what was going on or more open about it:

“[W]hen a bank makes a loan, it simply adds to the borrower’s deposit account in the bank by the amount of the loan. The money is not taken from anyone else’s deposit; it was not previously paid in to the bank by anyone. It’s new money, created by the bank for the use of the borrower.”

– Robert B. Anderson, Treasury Secretary under Eisenhower, in an interview
reported in the August 31, 1959 issue of U.S. News and World Report

“Do private banks issue money today? Yes. Although banks no longer have the right to issue bank notes, they can create money in the form of bank deposits when they lend money to businesses, or buy securities. . . . The important thing to remember is that when banks lend money they don’t necessarily take it from anyone else to lend. Thus they ‘create’ it.”

– Congressman Wright Patman, Money Facts (House Committee on Banking and Currency, 1964)

The process by which banks create money was detailed in a revealing booklet put out by the Chicago Federal Reserve titled Modern Money Mechanics.2 The booklet was periodically revised until 1992, when it had reached 50 pages long. It is written in somewhat difficult prose, but here are a few relevant passages:

“The actual process of money creation takes place primarily in banks.” [p3]

Translation: banks create money.
“In the absence of legal reserve requirements, banks can build up deposits by increasing loans and investments so long as they keep enough currency on hand to redeem whatever amounts the holders of deposits want to convert into currency.” [p3]

Translation: banks can create as much money as they want by writing loans into their borrowers’ accounts, limited only by (a) legal reserve requirements (money that must be held in reserve – traditionally about 10% of outstanding deposits and loans) or (b) the amount of money they will need to keep on hand to pay any depositors who might come for their money (also traditionally about 10%).

“Banks may increase the balances in their reserve accounts by depositing checks and proceeds from electronic funds transfers as well as currency.” [p4]

Translation: the “reserves” that count toward the reserve requirement include currency, deposited checks, and electronic funds transfers. (Note that the “deposits” created as loans are excluded from this list of allowable reserves: the bank cannot just keep bootstrapping loans on top of loans but must have money from external sources backing up its liabilities equal to about 10% of its loans and deposits.)

“The money-creation process takes place principally through transaction accounts [accounts that can be drawn on without restriction].” [p2]

” With a uniform 10 percent reserve requirement, a $1 increase in reserves would support $10 of additional transaction accounts.” [p49]

Translation: $1 deposited by a customer can be fanned into $10 in loans.

“In the real world, a bank’s lending is not normally constrained by the amount of excess reserves it has at any given moment. Rather, loans are made, or not made, depending on the bank’s credit policies and its expectations about its ability to obtain the funds necessary to pay its customers’ checks and maintain required reserves in a timely fashion.”

Translation: In practice, banks issue loans without worrying too much about whether they have the reserves to cover them. If they come up short, they can just borrow them:

“[Since] the individual bank does not know today precisely what its reserve position will be at the time the proceeds of today’s loans are paid out. . . . many banks turn to the money market – borrowing funds to cover deficits or lending temporary surpluses.” [p50]

“[A] bank may [also] borrow reserves temporarily from its Reserve Bank. . . .
[However], banks are discouraged from borrowing [Reserve Bank] adjustment credit too frequently or for extended time periods.” [p29]

Translation: If the bank finds at the end of the accounting period that its reserves do not come to the required 10% of its outstanding loans and deposits, it can simply borrow the reserves it needs from the money market or its Federal Reserve Bank.

A 2002 article posted on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York noted that today, few banks are constrained by reserve requirements at all: “Since the beginning of the last decade, required reserve balances have fallen dramatically. The decline stems in part from regulatory action: the Federal Reserve eliminated reserve requirements on large time deposits in 1990 and lowered the requirements on transaction accounts in 1992. But a far more important source of the decline in required reserves has been the growth of sweep accounts.

In the most common form of sweeping, funds in bank customers’ retail checking accounts are shifted overnight into savings accounts exempt from reserve requirements and then returned to customers’ checking accounts the next business day. Largely as a result of this practice, today only 30 percent of banks are bound by a reserve balance requirement.”3 Even without official reserve requirements, however, banks must keep enough money on hand to meet withdrawals or checks written against the accounts of their depositors; and that generally means about 10% of outstanding deposits and loans, as moneylenders discovered centuries ago. But if the banks come up short, they can borrow this money from the money market or the Federal Reserve; and if the Fed comes up short, it can create new reserves.4

So why the current credit crunch? What is limiting bank lending? One answer is that borrowers are simply “tapped out” and not in a position to take out as many loans as they used to. When housing and the stock market crashed, consumers no longer had home or stock equity to borrow against.5 But to the extent that the blockage is with the banks themselves, it is not caused by the reserve requirement. Something else is putting the squeeze on credit . . . .

The Real Tourniquet:
Capital Adequacy and the Mark-to-Market Rule
What actually constrains bank lending is the capital adequacy requirement, something that is imposed not by our own central bank but by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Called “the central bankers’ central bank,” the BIS pulls the strings of the private international banking system from Basel, Switzerland.

How the capital requirement is determined is even more complicated than the reserve requirement, but it needs to be understood to understand why banks with the power to create money are going bankrupt. So here is a simplified version. A bank’s “capital” consists of its assets minus its liabilities. Under the capital adequacy rule imposed by the Basel Accords, assets are “risk-weighted,” with some being considered riskier than others. Ordinary loans have a “risk weighting” of 1. The capital adequacy rule requires that the ratio of a bank’s capital to its assets with a risk-weighting of 1 be at least 8%.

That means the bank must have $8 in capital for every $100 in ordinary loans. Federal bonds have a risk-weighting of zero: they are considered to be as safe as dollars and don’t need any extra capital backing them. Mortgage loans (which are secured by real estate) have a risk weighting of .5. That means they need only $4 of capital per $100 of loans. Other bank exposures given risk weightings include such things as derivatives and foreign exchange contracts.6 (Interestingly, the $700 billion committed by Congress to bailing out the financial system is approximately 8% of the $8.5 trillion the Fed has now promised in loans and commitments. Even the Federal Reserve evidently feels constrained by the BIS capital requirement.)

A very controversial accounting rule imposed on banks for their capital ratio calculations is the “mark to market” rule. This rule requires banks to revalue all of their assets each day as if the assets had to be sold that day. Capital calculations thus fluctuate with the market; and in today’s volatile market, all asset classes have plunged at the same time. Since assets get marked to market but liabilities don’t, a bank may suddenly find that its assets are insufficient to support its liabilities, rendering it insolvent and unable to make new loans. Banks have gotten around the capital adequacy requirement by reducing risk on their balance sheets with a form of private bet known as “derivatives.” At least, they thought they had gotten around the rule. But this unregulated form of insurance proved to be based on faulty mathematical models. (See Ellen Brown, “”Credit Default Swaps: Derivative Disaster Du Jour,” and “It’s the Derivatives, Stupid!,” www.webofdebt.com/articles.)

“Credit default swaps” (CDS) are a form of derivative widely sold as insurance against default. When AIG, the world’s largest insurance company, ventured into CDS in the late 1990s, the presumption was that “housing always goes up” and that the risk of default was so remote that selling “credit protection” was virtually “free money”.7 But this free money turned into a serious liability to the protection sellers when the “remote” actually happened and a flood of defaults struck. The value of the derivatives protecting securitized mortgages became so questionable that they were unmarketable at any price. Banks counting them as assets on their books then had to “mark them to market” effectively at zero, reducing the banks’ capital below the levels called for in the Basel Accords and rendering the banks officially insolvent.

When AIG went broke in September 2008, banks heavily involved in derivatives faced double jeopardy: not only would they have to write down the derivative protection they had sold to others and counted as assets on their books, but they could no longer count on the derivative insurance they had bought to minimize the risk of default on their other assets. AIG got a massive bailout from the Fed in return for most of its equity, but even that bailout money is not expected to be enough to get it out of its derivative nightmare and keep it afloat.

Derivatives have introduced a lack of transparency into bank portfolios, creating fear and uncertainty on the part of lenders, depositors and investors alike. This uncertainty has prevented banks from raising capital by selling stock, or meeting reserve requirements by getting interbank loans; and it has discouraged investors from investing in the money market. Banks don’t know whether the money they lend to each other will be repaid, since they don’t have a clear view of the value of the assets carried on bank balance sheets. The result is a crisis of confidence: the players are all eying each other suspiciously and holding their cards close to the chest.

Going Local
Fortunately, according to a recent study using the Treasury Department’s own data, the banking crisis is not widespread but is limited to only “a few big, vocal banks.”8 The real credit problem lies with the financial institutions with significant derivative exposure, and most of this liability is carried by only a handful of Wall Street giants. In early 2008, outstanding derivatives on the books of U.S. banks exceeded $180 trillion. However, $90 trillion of this was carried on the books of JPMorgan Chase alone, while Citibank and Bank of America each had $38 trillion on their books.9 Needless to say, these are also the banks that are first in line for the Treasury’s bailout money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Rather than excising the relatively contained derivative tumor, the Treasury and the Fed are feeding it with trillions in taxpayer money; and this money is being used, not to unfreeze credit by making loans, but to buy up smaller banks.10 That means the derivative cancer, rather than being excised, is liable to spread. We the people and our representatives in Congress have allowed Wall Street to call the shots because we think we are dependent on their credit system, but we aren’t. There are other ways to get credit — ways that are fair, efficient, transparent, and don’t encourage greed. Public credit could be generated by a system of public banks.

Precedent for this solution is to be found in the state-owned Bank of North Dakota, which has been generating credit for North Dakota since 1919, keeping the state fiscally sound when other states are floundering. (See Ellen Brown, “Sustainable Government: Banking for a ‘New’ New Deal,” webofdebt.com/articles, December 8, 2008.) The credit crunch could be avoided by “going local” not just in the United States but around the world. Countries that have been seduced or coerced into funneling their productive assets into serving foreign markets and foreign investors could become self-sustaining, using their own credit and their own resources to feed and serve their own people. There is much more to be said on this subject, but it will be saved for future articles. Stay tuned.

Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from “the money trust.” Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com.

Notes
1. Kathleen Pender, “Government Bailout Hits $8.5 Trillion,” San Francisco Chronicle (November 26, 2008).
2.Modern Money Mechanics: A Workbook on Bank Reserves and Deposit Expansion (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Public Information Service, 1992, available at http://www.rayservers.com/images/ModernMoneyMechanics.pdf.
3.Paul Bennett, Savros Peristiani, “Are Reserve Requirements Still Binding?”, Economic Policy Review (May 2002).
4.Modern Money Mechanics, op. cit.
5. Joshua Holland, “Was the ‘Credit Crunch’ a Myth Used to Sell a Trillion-Dollar Scam?”, AlterNet (December 29, 2008).
6.”Capital Requirement,” Wikipedia.
7.Robert O’Harrow Jr., Brady Dennis, “Complex Deals Led to AIG’s Undoing,” Los Angeles Times (January 1, 2009).
8.J. Holland, op. cit.
9.Comptroller of the Currency, “OCC’s Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities Third Quarter 2008,” www.occ.treas.gov; “US Bank Derivative Exposure,” FDIC/IRA Bank Monitor, chart reproduced on The Big Picture (blog), August 2008.
10. Joe Nocera, “So When Will Banks Give Loans?”, New York Times (October 25, 2008).

Ellen Brown is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Ellen Brown

by Jeremy Lee

“We have before us the greatest question that has yet been submitted for our consideration. It involves Australia’s national supremacy in finance, and the peace, good government and prosperity of generations yet unborn….” — King O’Malley M.H.R. speaking on the need for the Commonwealth Bank as a ‘peoples’ bank’, House of Representatives, September 1909.

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up round the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.…” —Thomas Jefferson, former US President, 1802

The Prime Minister of the UK, Mr. Gordon Brown, in an article in the Washington Post, (Friday October 17, 2008) advocated that “The Financial Crisis is also an Opportunity to Create new Rules for Our Global Economy.” There it is! Now out in the open! President Bush’s swan song in mid-November will be to host a Global Conference (150 nations) to establish a World Money System! There’ll be plenty of dire warnings about the consequences if we fail to take this last chance for humanity!

WHICH WAY FOR RUDD?

Prime Minister Rudd, and his Treasurer Wayne Swan, will naturally be there. Statements they have made so far indicate that they also favour a globally-enforced solution; but perhaps this is being unfair. Surely they are aware of the prolonged and dramatic history of their own party – the A.L.P. – in seeking to defend Australia’s financial and economic sovereignty? Would the same Party which founded the Commonwealth Bank after Federation end up sacrificing our Nation’s sovereignty to a New World Order 100 years later?

FISHER SETS THE SCENE

The Fisher Labor Government in 1910, at the instigation of Tasmanian Member King O’Malley, founded the Commonwealth as a “peoples’ bank”. Almost immediately it showed its value and potential. Among other items, it funded expenditure on World War 1 to the tune of $700 million at an interest rate of five-eights of one percent! Sir Dennison Miller, the single Director of the Bank, claimed shortly after the war that his bank had the capacity, not only to finance the war all over again had it been needed, but that it could save Australia untold millions in peacetime projects as well.

As King O’Malley had foretold, the need for foreign borrowing and compounding debt had been averted for future generations.

THE ‘BANKSTERS’ MOVE IN

By 1924 disaster struck! A young Dennison Miller unexpectedly died. A federal election saw Lord Bruce, a London banker, become a Liberal Prime Minister. The Commonwealth Bank was put under a Board selected from the private world of finance, and was increasingly crippled from there on. The Great Depression, which struck five years later, could have been averted had the Commonwealth still been a “peoples’ bank”. There were no physical shortages in Australia. The causes were financial, as they are now.

MANY REMEMBER …

Five years after the Depression started, with untold misery and unemployment up to 27 per cent at one point, a young Labor candidate stood for Fremantle in the federal election – John Curtin. A traditional Labor man, he was destined to become a great wartime leader. Curtin’s election platform was to return the Commonwealth Bank to its original position – as the “peoples’ bank”. His platform said:

“…Legislation will be passed restoring the management to a Governor of the Bank, as was originally the case when it was established by the Fisher government. Outside control by private interests will thus be removed and the bank will function in the public interest only. The progress made under Sir Dennison Miller, without interference by directors from outside, justifies the restoration of similar control…. The main purpose of securing national control of banking and credit is to utilize the credit of the nation for the benefit of the people ….”

TURMOIL AND CONFUSION

Arguments about the causes of Depression waxed and waned during the thirties. The faulty concept that it was due to “too much money chasing too few goods”, gained credence among orthodox economists, resulting in the Premiers’ Plan, whereby wages were cut by 10 percent. This increased public misery. Finally, in 1937 a Royal Commission was held into Banking, where it was conceded that the Commonwealth Bank had the constitutional authority to create and lend money on any terms it considered necessary including the waiving of repayments and interest! Had the outbreak of war not occurred a short time later, it is almost certain that genuine reform of the financial system would have occurred. It only remains to say that the Depression disappeared in three days, once unlimited finance was made available for war!

THE SUBTLE NEW IDEA

As the post-war period of peace occurred a new change overtook the Labor Party. Ben Chifley was the last genuine working Prime Minister. By the time Whitlam came to power in 1972 the Fabian dream of internationalism as outlined by Marx’s Socialist International took hold. The remnants of the traditional working man’s Labor Party were steadily weeded out. By the time Hawke, and then Keating, came to power the Fabian takeover was all but complete. Keating himself sold the Commonwealth Bank which Old Labor had striven so hard to establish.

Its biggest single shareholders – as with the other three of the Big Four – are Listed nominees of New York. Australia’s financial policies were shaped far away, in the lavish halls of the International Monetary Fund and the OECD. The creation of credit became a private banking monopoly. Only the growth of marvelous technical, industrial and electronic innovation held at bay the final onslaught of ‘debt slavery’. It has now caught up with a vengeance.

BAILING OUT THE BANKS

With scant knowledge of Australia’s financial history, and intoxicated with the idea that the New World Order is the only way to go, Australia’s politicians are now assuring us that banker-driven globalism is the solution. To reach this solution the perpetrators of the world-wide crisis must be ‘bailed out” with the peoples’ money, so they can resume their debt-creation business. Once handed over to a New World Order regime there is no turning back.

Australia’s national sovereignty is gone forever. Surely there must be a few – even one or two – politicians, no matter what party, who will speak out now for Australia’s own constitutional authority and integrity; for the people rather than the banks; for our farmers, manufacturers and workers, who have been the grist through the mill.

THE REAL AUSTRALIA

The real Australia was described by a World Bank Survey of over 150 nations in 1995 as “the richest per capita nation in the world.” But only a portion of the Australian people see that wealth. Ten per cent – 2 million people – live in poverty. Many are now being dispossessed. Debt has robbed the people of what truly belongs to them. Can this be reversed before it is too late?

The most URGENT task is to prevent our weak-kneed Parliament from surrendering to the seduction of the New World Order. If this can be done, we can then examine how to return to Australians the benefits, robbed by the banks, to which they are rightfully due.

Global Research Articles by Jeremy Lee

Excellent holiday entertainment for the child inside all of us at the Courtyard Studio this month. Who doesn’t remember A.A. Milne’s Pooh-bear, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Tigger, Roo and Christopher Robin and their wonderful adventures in 100-acre Wood? The original story of Winnie the Pooh was first published in 1926 and has endured for the past 73 years. See Pooh magic come to life in this wonderful Free Rain production live on stage.

Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre. Fri 16th at 10.30am and 2.00pm; Sat 17th and Sun 18th at 2.00pm and 5.00pm; Wed 21st, Thu 22nd, Fri 23rd at 10.30am and 2.00pm and Sat 24th at 2.00pm and 5.00pm Bookings on 62752700 or at the door. 1 Hour 10 Minutes Prices: Adults: $18 Concession:* $18 Family (Group of 4) $65.00

By F. William Engdahl

One thing Microsoft founder Bill Gates can’t be accused of is sloth. He was already programming at 14, founded Microsoft at age 20 while still a student at Harvard. By 1995 he had been listed by Forbes as the world’s richest man from being the largest shareholder in his Microsoft, a company which his relentless drive built into a de facto monopoly in software systems for personal computers.

In 2006 when most people in such a situation might think of retiring to a quiet Pacific island, Bill Gates decided to devote his energies to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest ‘transparent’ private foundation as it says, with a whopping $34.6 billion endowment and a legal necessity to spend $1.5 billion a year on charitable projects around the world to maintain its tax free charitable status. A gift from friend and business associate, mega-investor Warren Buffett in 2006, of some $30 billion worth of shares in Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway put the Gates’ foundation into the league where it spends almost the amount of the entire annual budget of the United Nations’ World Health Organization.

So when Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some $30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth looking at. No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world’s most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see map).

On this God-forsaken island Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what is called the ‘doomsday seed bank.’ Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group.

Doomsday Seed Vault

The seed bank is being built inside a mountain on Spitsbergen Island near the small village of Longyearbyen. It’s almost ready for ‘business’ according to their releases. The bank will have dual blast-proof doors with motion sensors, two airlocks, and walls of steel-reinforced concrete one meter thick. It will contain up to three million different varieties of seeds from the entire world, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future,’ according to the Norwegian government. Seeds will be specially wrapped to exclude moisture. There will be no full-time staff, but the vault’s relative inaccessibility will facilitate monitoring any possible human activity.

Did we miss something here? Their press release stated, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future.’ What future do the seed bank’s sponsors foresee, that would threaten the global availability of current seeds, almost all of which are already well protected in designated seed banks around the world? Anytime Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto and Syngenta get together on a common project, it’s worth digging a bit deeper behind the rocks on Spitsbergen. When we do we find some fascinating things.

The first notable point is who is sponsoring the doomsday seed vault. Here joining the Norwegians 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 (GMO) plant seeds and related agrichemicals; Syngenta, the Swiss-based major GMO seed and agrichemicals company through its Syngenta Foundation; the Rockefeller Foundation, the private group who created the “gene revolution with over $100 million of seed money since the 1970’s; CGIAR, the global network created by the Rockefeller Foundation to promote its ideal of genetic purity through agriculture change.

CGIAR and ‘The Project’

As I detailled in the book, Seeds of Destruction, in 1960 the Rockefeller Foundation, John D. Rockefeller III’s Agriculture Development Council and the Ford Foundation joined forces to create the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, the Philippines.1 By 1971, the Rockefeller Foundation’s IRRI, along with their Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and two other Rockefeller and Ford Foundation-created international research centers, the IITA for tropical agriculture, Nigeria, and IRRI for rice, Philippines, combined to form a global Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR).

CGIAR was shaped at a series of private conferences held at the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference center in Bellagio, Italy. Key participants at the Bellagio talks were the Rockefeller Foundation’s George Harrar, Ford Foundation’s Forrest Hill, Robert McNamara of the World Bank and Maurice Strong, the Rockefeller family’s international environmental organizer, who, as a Rockefeller Foundation Trustee, organized the UN Earth Summit in Stockholm in 1972. It was part of the foundation’s decades long focus to turn science to the service of eugenics, a hideous version of racial purity, what has been called The Project.

To ensure maximum impact, CGIAR drew in the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Development Program and the World Bank. Thus, through a carefully-planned leverage of its initial funds, the Rockefeller Foundation by the beginning of the 1970’s was in a position to shape global agriculture policy. And shape it did.

Financed by generous Rockefeller and Ford Foundation study grants, CGIAR saw to it that leading Third World agriculture scientists and agronomists were brought to the US to ‘master’ the concepts of modern agribusiness production, in order to carry it back to their homeland. In the process they created an invaluable network of influence for US agribusiness promotion in those countries, most especially promotion of the GMO ‘Gene Revolution’ in developing countries, all in the name of science and efficient, free market agriculture.

Genetically engineering a master race?

Now the Svalbard Seed Bank begins to become interesting. But it gets better. ‘The Project’ I referred to is the project of the Rockefeller Foundation and powerful financial interests since the 1920’s to use eugenics, later renamed genetics, to justify creation of a genetically-engineered Master Race. Hitler and the Nazis called it the Ayran Master Race.

The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet. Now this is getting really intriguing. The same Rockefeller Foundation created the pseudo-science discipline of molecular biology in their relentless pursuit of reducing human life down to the ‘defining gene sequence’ which, they hoped, could then be modified in order to change human traits at will. Hitler’s eugenics scientists, many of whom were quietly brought to the United States after the War to continue their biological eugenics research, laid much of the groundwork of genetic engineering of various life forms, much of it supported openly until well into the Third Reich by Rockefeller Foundation generous grants.2

The same Rockefeller Foundation created the so-called Green Revolution, out of a trip to Mexico in 1946 by Nelson Rockefeller and former New Deal Secretary of Agriculture and founder of the Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Company, Henry Wallace. The Green Revolution purported to solve the world hunger problem to a major degree in Mexico, India and other select countries where Rockefeller worked. Rockefeller Foundation agronomist, Norman Borlaug, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work, hardly something to boast about with the likes of Henry Kissinger sharing the same.

In reality, as it years later emerged, the Green Revolution was a brilliant Rockefeller family scheme to develop a globalized agribusiness which they then could monopolize just as they had done in the world oil industry beginning a half century before. As Henry Kissinger declared in the 1970’s, ‘If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.’ Agribusiness and the Rockefeller Green Revolution went hand-in-hand. They were part of a grand strategy which included Rockefeller Foundation financing of research for the development of genetic engineering of plants and animals a few years later.

John H. Davis had been Assistant Agriculture Secretary under President Dwight Eisenhower in the early 1950’s. He left Washington in 1955 and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business, an unusual place for an agriculture expert in those days. He had a clear strategy. In 1956, Davis wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review in which he declared that “the only way to solve the so-called farm problem once and for all, and avoid cumbersome government programs, is to progress from agriculture to agribusiness.” He knew precisely what he had in mind, though few others had a clue back then— a revolution in agriculture production that would concentrate control of the food chain in corporate multinational hands, away from the traditional family farmer.3

A crucial aspect driving the interest of the Rockefeller Foundation and US agribusiness companies was the fact that the Green Revolution was based on proliferation of new hybrid seeds in developing markets. One vital aspect of hybrid seeds was their lack of reproductive capacity. Hybrids had a built in protection against multiplication. Unlike normal open pollinated species whose seed gave yields similar to its parents, the yield of the seed borne by hybrid plants was significantly lower than that of the first generation. That declining yield characteristic of hybrids meant farmers must normally buy seed every year in order to obtain high yields. Moreover, the lower yield of the second generation eliminated the trade in seed that was often done by seed producers without the breeder’s authorization. It prevented the redistribution of the commercial crop seed by middlemen. If the large multinational seed

companies were able to control the parental seed lines in house, no competitor or farmer would be able to produce the hybrid. The global concentration of hybrid seed patents into a handful of giant seed companies, led by DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto’s Dekalb laid the ground for the later GMO seed revolution.4 In effect, the introduction of modern American agricultural technology, chemical fertilizers and commercial hybrid seeds all made local farmers in developing countries, particularly the larger more established ones, dependent on foreign, mostly US agribusiness and petro-chemical company inputs. It was a first step in what was to be a decades-long, carefully planned process.

Under the Green Revolution Agribusiness was making major inroads into markets which were previously of limited access to US exporters. The trend was later dubbed “market-oriented agriculture.” In reality it was agribusiness-controlled agriculture. Through the Green Revolution, the Rockefeller Foundation and later Ford Foundation worked hand-in-hand shaping and supporting the foreign policy goals of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and of the CIA.

One major effect of the Green Revolution was to depopulate the countryside of peasants who were forced to flee into shantytown slums around the cities in desperate search for work. That was no accident; it was part of the plan to create cheap labor pools for forthcoming US multinational manufactures, the ‘globalization’ of recent years. When the self-promotion around the Green Revolution died down, the results were quite different from what had been promised. Problems had arisen from indiscriminate use of the new chemical pesticides, often with serious health consequences. The mono-culture cultivation of new hybrid seed varieties decreased soil fertility and yields over time.

The first results were impressive: double or even triple yields for some crops such as wheat and later corn in Mexico. That soon faded. The Green Revolution was typically accompanied by large irrigation projects which often included World Bank loans to construct huge new dams, and flood previously settled areas and fertile farmland in the process. Also, super-wheat produced greater yields by saturating the soil with huge amounts of fertilizer per acre, the fertilizer being the product of nitrates and petroleum, commodities controlled by the Rockefeller-dominated Seven Sisters major oil companies.

Huge quantities of herbicides and pesticides were also used, creating additional markets for the oil and chemical giants. As one analyst put it, in effect, the Green Revolution was merely a chemical revolution. At no point could developing nations pay for the huge amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. They would get the credit courtesy of the World Bank and special loans by Chase Bank and other large New York banks, backed by US Government guarantees. Applied in a large number of developing countries, those loans went mostly to the large landowners. For the smaller peasants the situation worked differently. Small peasant farmers could not afford the chemical and other modern inputs and had to borrow money.

Initially various government programs tried to provide some loans to farmers so that they could purchase seeds and fertilizers. Farmers who could not participate in this kind of program had to borrow from the private sector. Because of the exorbitant interest rates for informal loans, many small farmers did not even get the benefits of the initial higher yields. After harvest, they had to sell most if not all of their produce to pay off loans and interest.

They became dependent on money-lenders and traders and often lost their land. Even with soft loans from government agencies, growing subsistence crops gave way to the production of cash crops.5

Since decades the same interests including the Rockefeller Foundation which backed the initial Green Revolution, have worked to promote a second ‘Gene Revolution’ as Rockefeller Foundation President Gordon Conway termed it several years ago, the spread of industrial agriculture and commercial inputs including GMO patented seeds.

Gates, Rockefeller and a Green Revolution in Africa

With the true background of the 1950’s Rockefeller Foundation Green Revolution clear in mind, it becomes especially curious that the same Rockefeller Foundation along with the Gates Foundation which are now investing millions of dollars in preserving every seed against a possible “doomsday” scenario are also investing millions in a project called The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

AGRA, as it calls itself, is an alliance again with the same Rockefeller Foundation which created the “Gene Revolution.” A look at the AGRA Board of Directors confirms this. It includes none other than former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as chairman. In his acceptance speech in a World Economic Forum event in Cape Town South Africa in June 2007, Kofi Annan stated, ‘I accept this challenge with gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and all others who support our African campaign.’

In addition the AGRA board numbers a South African, Strive Masiyiwa who is a Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. It includes Sylvia M. Mathews of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Mamphela Ramphele, former Managing Director of the World Bank (2000 – 2006); Rajiv J. Shah of the Gates Foundation; Nadya K. Shmavonian of the Rockefeller Foundation; Roy Steiner of the Gates Foundation. In addition, an Alliance for AGRA includes Gary Toenniessen the Managing Director of the Rockefeller Foundation and Akinwumi Adesina, Associate Director, Rockefeller Foundation.

To fill out the lineup, the Programmes for AGRA includes Peter Matlon, Managing Director, Rockefeller Foundation; Joseph De Vries, Director of the Programme for Africa’s Seed Systems and Associate Director, Rockefeller foundation; Akinwumi Adesina, Associate Director, Rockefeller Foundation. Like the old failed Green Revolution in India and Mexico, the new Africa Green Revolution is clearly a high priority of the Rockefeller Foundation.

While to date they are keeping a low profile, Monsanto and the major GMO agribusiness giants are believed at the heart of using Kofi Annan’s AGRA to spread their patented GMO seeds across Africa under the deceptive label, ‘bio-technology,’ the new euphemism for genetically engineered patented seeds. To date South Africa is the only African country permitting legal planting of GMO crops. In 2003 Burkina Faso authorized GMO trials. In 2005 Kofi Annan’s Ghana drafted bio-safety legislation and key officials expressed their intentions to pursue research into GMO crops.

Africa is the next target in the US-government campaign to spread GMO worldwide. Its rich soils make it an ideal candidate. Not surprisingly many African governments suspect the worst from the GMO sponsors as a multitude of genetic engineering and biosafety projects have been initiated in Africa, with the aim of introducing GMOs into Africa’s agricultural systems. These include sponsorships offered by the US government to train African scientists in genetic engineering in the US, biosafety projects funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank; GMO research involving African indigenous food crops.

The Rockefeller Foundation has been working for years to promote, largely without success, projects to introduce GMOs into the fields of Africa. They have backed research that supports the applicability of GMO cotton in the Makhathini Flats in South Africa. Monsanto, who has a strong foothold in South Africa’s seed industry, both GMO and hybrid, has conceived of an ingenious smallholders’ programme known as the ‘Seeds of Hope’ Campaign, which is introducing a green revolution package to small scale poor farmers, followed, of course, by Monsanto’s patented GMO seeds. 6

Syngenta AG of Switzerland, one of the ‘Four Horsemen of the GMO Apocalypse’ is pouring millions of dollars into a new greenhouse facility in Nairobi, to develop GMO insect resistant maize. Syngenta is a part of CGIAR as well.7

Move on to Svalbard

Now is it simply philosophical sloppiness? What leads the Gates and Rockefeller foundations to at one and the same time to back proliferation of patented and soon-to-be Terminator patented seeds across Africa, a process which, as it has in every other place on earth, destroys the plant seed varieties as monoculture industrialized agribusiness is introduced? At the same time they 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’ to restate their official release?

It is no accident that the Rockefeller and Gates foundations are teaming up to push a GMO-style Green Revolution in Africa at the same time they are quietly financing the ‘doomsday seed vault’ on Svalbard. The GMO agribusiness giants are up to their ears in the Svalbard project. Indeed, the entire Svalbard enterprise and the people involved call up the worst catastrophe images of the Michael Crichton bestseller, Andromeda Strain, a sci-fi thriller where a deadly disease of extraterrestrial origin causes rapid, fatal clotting of the blood threatening the entire human species. In Svalbard, the future world’s most secure seed repository will be guarded by the policemen of the GMO Green Revolution–the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, Syngenta, DuPont and CGIAR.

The Svalbard project will be run by an organization called the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT). Who are they to hold such an awesome trust over the planet’s entire seed varieties? The GCDT was 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.

Global Crop Diversity Trust Donors or financial angels include as well, in the words of the Humphrey Bogart Casablanca classic, ‘all the usual suspects.’ As well as the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, the Donors include GMO giants DuPont-Pioneer Hi-Bred, Syngenta of Basle Switzerland, CGIAR and the State Department’s energetically pro-GMO agency for development aid, USAID. Indeed it seems we have the GMO and population reduction foxes guarding the hen-house of mankind, the global seed diversity store in Svalbard. 8

Why now Svalbard?

We can legitimately ask why Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation along with the major genetic engineering agribusiness giants such as DuPont and Syngenta, along with CGIAR are building the Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic.

Who uses such a seed bank in the first place? Plant breeders and researchers are the major users of gene banks. Today’s largest plant breeders are Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and Dow Chemical, the global plant-patenting GMO giants. Since early in 2007 Monsanto holds world patent rights together with the United States Government for plant so-called ‘Terminator’ or Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT). Terminator is an ominous technology by which a patented commercial seed commits ‘suicide’ after one harvest. Control by private seed companies is total. Such control and power over the food chain has never before in the history of mankind existed.

This clever genetically engineered terminator trait forces farmers to return every year to Monsanto or other GMO seed suppliers to get new seeds for rice, soybeans, corn, wheat whatever major crops they need to feed their population. If broadly introduced around the world, it could within perhaps a decade or so make the world’s majority of food producers new feudal serfs in bondage to three or four giant seed companies such as Monsanto or DuPont or Dow Chemical.

That, of course, could also open the door to have those private companies, perhaps under orders from their host government, Washington, deny seeds to one or another developing country whose politics happened to go against Washington’s. Those who say ‘It can’t happen here’ should look more closely at current global events. The mere existence of that concentration of power in three or four private US-based agribusiness giants is grounds for legally banning all GMO crops even were their harvest gains real, which they manifestly are not.

These private companies, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical hardly have an unsullied record in terms of stewardship of human life. They developed and proliferated such innovations as dioxin, PCBs, Agent Orange. They covered up for decades clear evidence of carcinogenic and other severe human health consequences of use of the toxic chemicals. They have buried serious scientific reports that the world’s most widespread herbicide, glyphosate, the essential ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide that is tied to purchase of most Monsanto genetically engineered seeds, is toxic when it seeps into drinking water.9 Denmark banned glyphosate in 2003 when it confirmed it has contaminated the country’s groundwater.10

The diversity stored in seed gene banks is the raw material for plant breeding and for a great deal of basic biological research. Several hundred thousand samples are distributed annually for such purposes. The UN’s FAO lists some 1400 seed banks around the world, the largest being held by the United States Government. Other large banks are held by China, Russia, Japan, India, South Korea, Germany and Canada in descending order of size. In addition, CGIAR operates a chain of seed banks in select centers around the world.

CGIAR, set up in 1972 by the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation to spread their Green Revolution agribusiness model, controls most of the private seed banks from the Philippines to Syria to Kenya. In all these present seed banks hold more than six and a half million seed varieties, almost two million of which are ‘distinct.’ Svalbard’s Doomsday Vault will have a capacity to house four and a half million different seeds.

GMO as a weapon of biowarfare?

Now we come to the heart of the danger and the potential for misuse inherent in the Svalbard project of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller foundation. Can the development of patented seeds for most of the world’s major sustenance crops such as rice, corn, wheat, and feed grains such as soybeans ultimately be used in a horrible form of biological warfare?

The explicit aim of the eugenics lobby funded by wealthy elite families such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and others since the 1920’s, has embodied what they termed ‘negative eugenics,’ the systematic killing off of undesired bloodlines. Margaret Sanger, a rapid eugenicist, the founder of Planned Parenthood International and an intimate of the Rockefeller family, created something called The Negro Project in 1939, based in Harlem, which as she confided in a letter to a friend, was all about the fact that, as she put it, ‘we want to exterminate the Negro population.’ 11

A small California biotech company, Epicyte, in 2001 announced the development of genetically engineered corn which contained a spermicide which made the semen of men who ate it sterile. At the time Epicyte had a joint venture agreement to spread its technology with DuPont and Syngenta, two of the sponsors of the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault. Epicyte was since acquired by a North Carolina biotech company. Astonishing to learn was that Epicyte had developed its spermicidal GMO corn with research funds from the US Department of Agriculture, the same USDA which, despite worldwide opposition, continued to finance the development of Terminator technology, now held by Monsanto.

In the 1990’s the UN’s World Health Organization launched a campaign to vaccinate millions of women in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines between the ages of 15 and 45, allegedly against Tentanus, a sickness arising from such things as stepping on a rusty nail. The vaccine was not given to men or boys, despite the fact they are presumably equally liable to step on rusty nails as women.

Because of that curious anomaly, Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization became suspicious and had vaccine samples tested. The tests revealed that the Tetanus vaccine being spread by the WHO only to women of child-bearing age contained human Chorionic Gonadotrophin or hCG, a natural hormone which when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier stimulated antibodies rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. None of the women vaccinated were told.

It later came out that the Rockefeller Foundation along with the Rockefeller’s Population Council, the World Bank (home to CGIAR), and the United States’ National Institutes of Health had been involved in a 20-year-long project begun in 1972 to develop the concealed abortion vaccine with a tetanus carrier for WHO. In addition, the Government of Norway, the host to the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault, donated $41 million to develop the special abortive Tetanus vaccine. 12

Is it a coincidence that these same organizations, from Norway to the Rockefeller Foundation to the World Bank are also involved in the Svalbard seed bank project? According to Prof. Francis Boyle who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by the US Congress, the Pentagon is ‘now gearing up to fight and win biological warfare’ as part of two Bush national strategy directives adopted, he notes, ‘without public knowledge and review’ in 2002. Boyle adds that in 2001-2004 alone the US Federal Government spent $14.5 billion for civilian bio-warfare-related work, a staggering sum.

Rutgers University biologist Richard Ebright estimates that over 300 scientific institutions and some 12,000 individuals in the USA today have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare. Alone there are 497 US Government NIH grants for research into infectious diseases with biowarfare potential. Of course this is being justified under the rubric of defending against possible terror attack as so much is today.

Many of the US Government dollars spent on biowarfare research involve genetic engineering. MIT biology professor Jonathan King says that the ‘growing bio-terror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population.’ King adds, ‘while such programs are always called defensive, with biological weapons, defensive and offensive programs overlap almost completely.’ 13

Time will tell whether, God Forbid, the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Bank of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation is part of another Final Solution, this involving the extinction of the Late, Great Planet Earth.

F. William Engdahl is the author of Seeds of Destruction, the Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation just released by Global Research. He also the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd.. To contact by e-mail: [email protected].

William Engdahl is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). His writings can be consulted on www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net and on Global Research.

YOU MIGHT HELP INFLUENCE A KEY ALBERTA MINISTER WHO IS TOURING AUSTRALIA RIGHT NOW.
PLEASE HELP PROTECT CANADA’S GRIZZLIES, WOLVES, CARIBOU …. and AUSTRALIA’S CLIMATE!
Minister Ted Morton in Australia from January 11 to January 24.

Good afternoon, Friends and Colleagues

Until last week, two episodes connected me to your wonderful country. The first was our fantastic visits a number of yeas ago to Kakadu, the Blue Mountains, Tasmania, Kangaroo Island, the Little Desert, Lamington, Grampians and other places, communities and people too numerous to mention. Needless to say, we long for a return to the sights, sounds, smells, experiences and people we remember so dearly.

The second was a visit from a Wilderness Society campaigner here in Canada a few years back. We discussed mutual challenges and occasional successes. Clearly we have a lot in common.

Now, a third connection as Alberta’s Minister for Sustainable Resource Development — Mr. Ted Morton — travels to Australia to “gather information on a wide array of natural resource management and land-use practices.” Of course, it’s brutal winter here and height of summer there, so the party of officials and spouses likely will be enjoying other aspects of your countryside as well…

And this is the rub. Minister Morton has on his desk today, a large stack of official government plans and recommendations, proposals from stakeholder groups, suggestions from conservation, landowner and civic organizations regarding wildlife, land use, water conservation, etc. To date, most of these recommendations largely have been ignored.

For example, the government waited for a full TEN years before “accepting” it’s own government panel’s recommendations on mountain caribou recovery. Even then it deliberately and publicly disregarded the sections that indicted roadbuilding as the central factor in caribou declines. So roads for oil, gas, timber and recreation continue to reach into caribou habitat, while this government brags about its killing of 200-300 wolves and its paltry caribou calf protection program as Alberta’s contributions to caribou recovery. More at: http://www.sierraclub.ca/national/programs/biodiversity/wilderness/endangered-species/woodland-caribou.pdf .

The government has been similarly indifferent to the plight of the province’s remaining imperilled grizzly bear population. Less than a decade ago, official numbers placed Alberta’s provincial grizzly bear population at more than 1,000 animals. Recent studies find fewer than 500. Other than suspending the annual grizzly bear hunt, nothing significant has been done to protect the province’s grizzly bears or their habitat. The plan was completed and submitted to government in February of 2005, but not “accepted” until more than three years later. In the meantime, habitat loss, roadbuilding, delays and missed opportunities were the main markers of “recovery.” More at http://actiongrizzlybear.ca/ .

The story is much the same for overall land use practices, water conservation, habitat protection, assessment of cumulative effects, and cost-benefit analyses of resource development proposals here in Alberta. Yes, I suppose this litany may well apply to virtually every jurisdiction on the planet, including many of the places and treasures you are working so hard to protect. The irony of course — and the element that brings us together — is the simple fact that while Minister Morton has a tall stack of official plans and public recommendations at his disposal, yet he wanders off to Australia for a winter holiday under the guise of investigating other solutions to Alberta’s land management problems.

Of course, the 2,000 pound water buffalo in the room is Alberta’s shameful record on oil sand development and carbon emissions contributing to global warming. Suffice it to say that the province has no intention to reduce carbon emissions, and that Australia’s dry interior and low coastlines will be among the first to suffer because of our indifference and arrogance. More at: http://www.oilsandswatch.org/

Bottom line, the Minister has plenty of recommendations regarding caribou recovery, grizzly bear recovery, wolf conservation and management, and a host of other issues on his desk right now. Most are official, commissioned by provincial government. Most are NOT implemented, funded, or taken seriously.

If there might be any way you could deliver our concerns to colleagues who might be meeting with Minister Morton (itinerary below), or might have the opportunity to pose these questions on your own, we very much would value your help. We realize that your plates are full, but this may be a chance to leverage a little effort for a lot of good. Hope you might take a minute or two to join us.

Please feel free to contact me (in Canada) at 403-678-0016 or [email protected] for additional information.
Thanks much,

jim

James Pissot, MSc
Canada Field Representative
Defenders of Wildlife

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Resourceful. Responsible.
January 6, 2009

Alberta seeks best practices on natural resources and land use

Edmonton… Australian land-use practices may have application in Alberta under the province’s new Land-use Framework.
Sustainable Resource Development Minister Ted Morton will lead a three-member delegation to Australia January 12-16. The delegation will gather information on a wide array of natural resource management and land-use practices in Australia and assess how they have been used to help address economic, environmental and social pressures in that country.

“Australia has developed world-renowned conservation and stewardship tools to deal with land-use and resource pressures,” said Morton. “Learning these Australian practices first-hand will help us implement the Land-use Framework.”

Travelling with Morton are his Parliamentary Assistant Evan Berger and Grande Prairie-Wapiti MLA Wayne Drysdale.

The Alberta delegation will meet with various levels of government, along with representatives from the farming, forestry and industry sectors and the scientific community. Morton and his colleagues will assess the viability of Australian practices related to water, conservation banks, renewable energy, carbon sequestration projects and public transit initiatives in and around the Sydney and Canberra urban areas.

Total costs for Morton, Parliamentary Assistant Berger and MLA Drysdale are estimated at $26,000.

Costs for spouses travelling with the team and for additional personal time will be covered privately.

-30-

Itinerary attached

Media inquiries may be directed to:

Carol Chawrun
Sustainable Resource Development
Phone: 780-427-8636

http://alberta.ca/home/NewsFrame.cfm?ReleaseID=/acn/200901/25073AD765160-DCFE-F0AA-55B5408E7916140F.html

++++++++++++++++++++++

Minister Ted Morton’s general itinerary*

Sun, Jan. 11
Arrive Sydney, Australia.

Mon, Jan. 12
Meetings include the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists (natural
resource policies), New Forests (discussion of investment programs) and
State Forests of New South Wales.
Drive to Canberra, late afternoon, early evening.

Tues, Jan. 13
Meetings include the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries
and Forestry; the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organization (CSIRO) Division of Land and Water (Murray Darling Basin
discussion), Australian National University; and the Department of
Climate Change.
Tour Parliament Building.
Evening function hosted by Canadian High Commission.

Wed, Jan. 14
Depart Canberra and drive to Yass, visit dryland agriculture, then
carry on to Tumut and visit State Forests of NSW timber plantations,
then carry on to Wagga Wagga for overnight.
Evening dinner with Murrumbidgee Catchment Management Authority (CMA).

Thurs, Jan. 15
Meetings with Murrumbidgee CMA, Wagga Wagga Council, then travel west
to Griffith with one or two stops at points of interest, including farm
visits. Evening in Griffith – dinner with Murrumbidgee Irrigation Corp.

Fri, Jan. 16
Visit Murrumbidgee Irrigation offices and three or four farm properties
to inspect irrigation, vegetation management and new
agriculture/irrigation systems. Travel to Barren Box Storage and
Wetland.
Return to Murrumbidgee Irrigation offices.

Sat, Jan. 24
Return to Canada.

*This itinerary is tentative and subject to change.

-30-
Media inquiries may be directed to: Carol Chawrun
Sustainable Resource Development
Phone: 780-427-8636

re: Visit of the Hon. Minister Ted Morton of Alberta, Canada

Good afternoon, Friends and Colleagues

Until last week, a single episode connected me to your wonderful country. This was our fantastic visits a number of yeas ago to Kakadu, the Blue Mountains, Tasmania, Kangaroo Island, the Little Desert, Lamington, Grampians and other places, communities and people too numerous to mention. Needless to say, we long for a return to the sights, sounds, smells, experiences and people we remember so dearly.

Now, a second connection as Alberta’s Minister for Sustainable Resource Development — Mr. Ted Morton — travels to Australia to “gather information on a wide array of natural resource management and land-use practices.”

The Minister is tackling a broad array of issues. Of course, the 2,000 pound water buffalo in the room will Alberta’s shameful record on oil sand development and carbon emissions contributing to global warming. Suffice it to say that the province has no intention to reduce carbon emissions, and that Australia’s dry interior and low coastlines will be among the first to suffer because of our indifference and arrogance. More at: http://www.oilsandswatch.org/

Please have a look at the following information in preparation for any meetings with Minister Morton and his party:

http://www.oilsandswatch.org/pubs

http://pubs.pembina.org/reports/Taking_the_Wheel-report.pdf

http://pubs.pembina.org/reports/Upgrader_Alley-report.pdf

http://pubs.pembina.org/reports/CatchingUp-Offsets.pdf

We sincerely hope that you will be able to share some promising insights with our Minister.

Please feel free to contact me (in Canada) at 403-678-0016 or [email protected] for additional information.

Best regards,

Jim Pissot

James Pissot, MSc
Canada Field Representative
Defenders of Wildlife

Paddy and his missus are lying in bed listening to the next door neighbor’s
dog barking.

It had been barking for hours and hours.

Suddenly, Paddy jumps out of bed and says, “I’ve had enough of this,” and
goes downstairs.

Paddy finally comes back up to bed and his wife says, “The dog is still
barking. What have you been doing?”

Paddy says, “I’ve put their dog in our yard – now we’ll see how THEY like
it!”

—
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