United States Renounced Food Sovereignty to GATT/London in 1988 at Montreal meeting
(LPAC) In December 1988 at the Montreal Round of
"agriculture reform" globalization talks of the United Nations
GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), a confidential
proposal was made on behalf of the United States, that henceforth
national food security would be re-defined as "access to world
markets," and no longer as food self-sufficiency. Even attempts
at food self-sufficiency were to be opposed and penalized among
nations. Think about it.
In Montreal in 1988, EIR obtained a copy of the stealth U.S.
policy memorandum, and publicized it immediately through the
international networks of the Food-for-Peace division of the
Schiller Institute, founded three months earlier in Chicago, on
the initiative of Lyndon and Helga LaRouche. Quotations from the
1988 U.S. document are given here.
Excerpts—1988 U.S. Food Policy Statement to GATT
The private U.S. food security policy document, December
1988 stated:
"Food security and self-sufficency are not one and the same
objective or goal. Food security is the ability to acquire the
food you need, when you need it. Food self-sufficiency means
producing some portion of one’s own food supply from domestic
resources, regardless of market forces, with deliberate intent of
displacing imports or reducing import dependence.... In some
cases, in fact, self-sufficiency can actually work against food
security goals....
"Throughout human history, up until the technical advances
of the green revolution, a global food shortage due to crop
failures was a conceivable and often real threat. Today... it is
highly improbable." (end quotations)
The Montreal meeting itself dissolved in dissension among
the representatives of the 150 countries attending. But finally,
in 1995, the outcome of the GATT Round of "agriculture reform"
talks—begun originally in Uruguay in 1986—was the establishment
of the WTO (World Trade Organization) under the evil principle
that national governments are subservient to world "markets" for
food.
Under the WTO, it is considered a violation of international
trade rules to even hold national food reserves for disasters or
emergencies. The WTO rationalization is that such stockpiles
"distort" world trade and market functions. Certain nations have
quietly defied the WTO on this, including Japan, with its
"ricebowl" reserve, and China, with grain reserves. But former
potentially nation-serving food reserves, built up and managed
under differing kinds of mechanisms—such as the U.S. Commodity
Credit Corp. program (originating in 1933 under FDR), or the
early days of the Common Agriculture Policy in Europe, are almost
non-existent.
It’s now urgent to nullify the WTO, and restore national
sovereignty over food, agriculture and all economic activity.
Today’s international drive to impose food price controls, and
reinstate a credit system under Glass-Steagall does just that.
The instigators of the anti-food sovereignty policy shift in
Montreal in 1988, in the false name of the United States, and in
general during the GATT rounds, were the global commodities
cartels of the Inter-Alpha financial networks, including even a
Cargill executive personally. These are the networks which today
are perpetrating murderous food control, speculation, genocidal
pseudo-environmentalism, and farm destruction. The Chief U.S.
Agriculture Negotiator in Montreal in 1988 was Daniel Amstutz,
Undersecretary of Agriculture for International Affairs and
Commodity Programs, and a 25-year Cargill top executive. [MGM]
