What on earth are the eugenicists preparing for with the doomsday seed vault? Why does humanity need a backup of millions of seed varieties that have presumably been around (for the most part) throughout human history? What kind of environmental catastrophe could possibly contaminate the gene pool to the point where we would need to repopulate the earth with heirloom, non-GMO seeds?

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Following is an excerpt from “Biotech Billionaires and GMO Doomsday,” one of the twenty essays contained in REPORTAGE: Essays on the New World Order (now available in audiobook!)

TRANSCRIPT

The convergence of corporate, “philanthropic,” governmental, and inter-governmental interests promoting GM crops around the world can be seen in the bewildering array of research institutes, industry associations, and “consultative groups” that have invaded this field. They include the Rockefeller-founded International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the Rockefeller/Monsanto/USAID brainchild International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), the Rockefeller/Ford/World Bank-created Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and dozens of other bland-and-benign-sounding organizations set up for the sole purpose of creating and popularizing GM crops. Through the combined efforts of public and private groups in funding and publicizing GM research, the GM cartel has succeeded in sowing its synthetic seed all across the planet.

One sign, if any were needed, that the ultimate aim of this cartel may not be benign is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Like something out of a James Bond movie, the seed vault is carved into the side of a mountain on a remote archipelago halfway between Norway and the North Pole. And, as the vault’s own website informs us, it is designed “to store duplicates (backups) of seed samples from the world’s crop collections” as “the ultimate insurance policy for the world food supply.” Specifically, the permafrost and thick rock of the Arctic tundra are meant to ensure that the seed samples will remain frozen and preserved even without power, meaning that the vault and its contents will survive in the event of a worldwide disaster.

The vault contains more than 1,000,000 non-GMO seed samples from all over the world and has the capacity to store as many as 4.5 million varieties of crops within its icy walls. It is administered by the Crop Trust, an organization founded by the aforementioned CGIAR and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Dupont/Pioneer Hi-bred, Syngenta AG, and a score of governments, UN-affiliated organizations, and other corporations and foundations.

So, what exactly is the Crop Trust? Long story short, in 2001, the FAO adopted the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (shortened to “the plant treaty”), which “aims to improve global food security by making it easier for scientists and farmers to obtain and use seeds and other plant material for crop improvement, research, and training.” The treaty created a mechanism called the “Multilateral System” to make sixty-four valuable food crops available in “an easily accessible global pool of genetic resources that is freely available to potential users in the Treaty’s ratifying nations for some uses.” To help it reach this lofty goal, the governing body of the plant treaty entered into an agreement with the Global Crop Diversity Trust (aka “the Crop Trust”), an international nonprofit organization charged with raising and disbursing funds to preserve crop diversity, to provide tools and financial support for genebanks worldwide, and to conserve genebank specimens ex situ—i.e., buried in the side of a mountain in Svalbard’s icy Arctic tundra.

Until 2012, the Crop Trust was chaired by Margaret Catley-Carson, a former president of the J. D. Rockefeller III-founded Population Council (the American Eugenics Society by another name). Her connections prove that no matter where you turn in the realm of genetics you always end up back at the doorstep of the same elitist, eugenics-obsessed families and the corporate oligopoly they have nurtured into existence.

What on earth are the eugenicists preparing for with the seed vault? Why does humanity need a backup of millions of seed varieties that have presumably been around (for the most part) throughout human history? What kind of environmental catastrophe could possibly contaminate the gene pool to the point where we would need to repopulate the earth with heirloom, non-GMO seeds?

The answers you receive to these questions depend, as usual, on whom you ask.

The Crop Trust itself has offered some scenarios that appear to justify the existence of the seed vault.

“There are big and small doomsdays going on around the world every day,” the trust’s former executive director, Marie Haga, told TIME in 2017. “Genetic material is being lost all over the globe.” To which one property manager in charge of overseeing the vault’s day-to-day operations added: “It is away from the places on earth where you have war and terror, everything maybe you are afraid of in other places.”

Two years earlier, in 2015, the Crop Trust announced that the Svalbard seed bank had had its first-ever withdrawal that year after a gene bank in war-torn Aleppo was damaged by the US-backed terrorist insurgency in Syria. At the time, Crop Trust spokesman Brian Lainoff opined that “the withdrawal actually serves as proof that such a vault is necessary.”

More recently, the case has even been made by the Independent that the vault is required to protect the world’s genetic heritage “in times of global catastrophe, like the raging Covid-19 pandemic.” Who knew that Covid was such a threat to crop diversity?

War? Terrorism? Covid? True, geopolitical turmoil and natural disasters do present a threat to crop diversity in various locales, but these threats alone could not be the real reason that the multibillion-dollar foundations and NGOs behind the Gene Revolution are creating a disaster-proof seed bank.

No. There must be something more than these concerns to explain their obsession with repopulating the earth with heirloom, non-GMO seeds in the wake of a worldwide catastrophe.

The only logical conclusion is that the very eugenicists who have spearheaded the genetic engineering of the food supply are aware that their Machiavellian machinations threaten life on earth to such an alarming extent that a “backup” of the natural world may be needed to one day “reboot” the planet.

Our first reaction to this sobering information and its implication might be to panic. Then a feeling of helplessness might set in, causing us to simply cave to the seemingly unstoppable GMO takeover. After all, how could there possibly be a solution to an agenda as meticulously planned, massively funded, and monumentally overwhelming as this one?

It has been suggested that governments should be lobbied to institute national bans on the planting or cultivation of GM crops. Yet, given that these national governments are increasingly ensnared in a web of international treaties and organizations—the FAO, the WHO, the UN, the World Trade Organization, the plant treaty, the Crop Trust, etc.—and given that these organizations and agreements are themselves tied in to the biotech agenda through groups like IRRI and ISAAAA and CGIAR, it seems unlikely that individual nation-states will be able to buck the onslaught of the multibillion-dollar, multi-decade, multi-national agenda of the agribusiness giants for very long.

On an even more fundamental level, though, the answer to bad science is not to ban science, any more than the answer to hate speech is to ban speech. Giving governments the power to ban (or, by implication, permit) this or that field of research is to assign the power over the future direction of society to the very eugenicists and corporate fat cats who control the legislatures of each nation-state.

Certainly, by all means, we should be engaged in whatever efforts we can to stop state funds from underwriting this type of research, but lobbying for laws to ban the research altogether would almost certainly backfire. The ban hammer may strike in the direction we want (banning GM crops, for example), but it may just as easily swing in a direction we don’t want (approving GM crops for cultivation). And, given the resources at the disposal of the GMO-crazed eugenicists, it is difficult to imagine how we citizens would ever win that political fight.

So, then, is there a way to stop the scourge of GMOs from taking over the planet? Thankfully, that isn’t a rhetorical question. And, thankfully, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” In fact, it has already been demonstrated that we can win this war by employing one of the simplest weapons at our disposal: the boycott.

Let me explain. Posilac is the trade name for Monsanto’s genetically engineered recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), which is injected into lactating dairy cows to increase milk production. In 1993, Posilac was approved by the FDA for use in the dairy industry despite warnings from medical researchers about the potential dangers it posed to humans who consume the milk from cows treated with these injections.

The milk from Posilac-treated cows was sold unlabeled, despite being chemically, nutritionally, and pharmacologically different from non-treated milk. Not only did the rBGH milk contain significantly higher levels of the cancer-accelerating hormone IGF-1 (Insulin-like Growth Factor) than does regular dairy milk, but it also contained pus and antibiotics from the mastitis caused by the use of the drug.

Multiple FDA insiders were warning in the 1990s that safety data about the rBGH milk was being manipulated by compromised FDA staffers to help Posilac pass the agency’s approval process. Nonetheless—and unsurprisingly—the approval went ahead anyway. Equally unsurprisingly, the whistleblowers who raised these concerns about the process were forced out of the agency and their testimony was disregarded.

But the suppression of this data did not stop there. In a case made famous by the 2003 documentary The Corporation, two investigative reporters at a Fox News channel affiliate television station produced an exposé on the rBGH scandal. After Monsanto put pressure on the network, their story never aired, and the two were fired.

By 2004, however, the public had begun to become informed about the issue and consumers began to put massive pressure on stores to stop selling rBGH milk. This movement scored success after success, with major national retailers—including Kroger, Safeway, Starbucks, and Walmart—and producers—including Breyers, Byrne Dairy, and General Mills—agreeing to stop selling or producing milk from cows treated with artificial growth hormones. Today, rBGH milk, once nearly ubiquitous across America, is a rarity in the dairy section.

This change didn’t come about through sweeping government action. It didn’t come about through violence or coercion. Instead, it came about when consumers educated themselves about the problem, put pressure on the producers to address the problem, and continued that pressure until their demands for rBGH-free milk were met.

Granted, the overall struggle against GM foods will not be won as easily or as straightforwardly as it was in the specific instance of rBGH. Yet we can take the kernel of wisdom found in the story of the struggle against rBGH milk and plant that kernel in the rich seedbed of the struggle against GMOs.

Because it is within our power as consumers to reject products that we have concerns about, whether on health or safety or moral grounds, there is really no one else to blame but ourselves for the fact these GMO foods are so prevalent on our plates today. It is our responsibility to know what is in the products we are eating and to withhold our support from the companies that are using genetically engineered ingredients in their products.

Thankfully, technologies are coming online that will make coordinated consumer action against GMOs easier than it was even a decade ago.

The Buycott app, for example, promises to allow users to join the “buycotting” of non-GMO products—that is, to commit to buying only certified non-GMO goods—and also to join a boycott campaign that targets producers of GMO products. An Organic Consumers group on the Buycott website has organized a “Pro-GMO? Or Pro-Right to Know?” campaign that lists 243 companies to either avoid or back based on those companies’ opposition to or support of GMO labeling laws. Of the million-plus members of the Buycott site who are voting with their wallets, more than half of them are signed up to champion the GMO labeling campaign.

Other initiatives include the Institute for Responsible Technology’s Non-GMO Shopping Guide, which lists thousands of consumer products that have been verified as GMO-free.

There’s also the no-tech solution to GMOs: guerrilla gardening. This approach encompasses a wide variety of actions—from growing food on your own land to participating in a community garden to sourcing organic food from local producers via the local farmer’s market.

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, it is.

If it sounds like the switch to 100 percent non-GMO foods will be a gradual process of weaning yourself off of certain products and sourcing appropriate alternatives, it will.

If it sounds like there’s no one else to blame but ourselves if we don’t start taking these steps toward securing a non-GM world for our children, there isn’t.

In the end, we can’t directly determine what happens in our neighbour’s house (let alone what happens in other countries or on other continents), but the buck stops where it has always stopped: at our own kitchen table.

For the most part, we still have the freedom to choose what we eat—and what we won’t eat. But, unless we start taking that freedom seriously and treating it as the grave responsibility it is, the Gene Revolution just might be the planet-wide disaster that makes the seed vault in the frozen tundra of Norway a necessity.