Food As a Weapon to Control People

Food As a Weapon to Control People

On Dec. 10, 1974, the U.S. National Security Council under Henry Kissinger completed a classified 200-page study, “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The study falsely claimed that population growth in the so-called Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) was a grave threat to U.S. national security. Adopted as official policy in November 1975 by President Gerald Ford, NSSM 200 outlined a covert plan to reduce population growth in those countries through birth control, and also, implicitly, war and famine. Brent Scowcroft, who had by then replaced Kissinger as national security adviser (the same post Scowcroft was to hold in the Bush administration), was put in charge of implementing the plan. CIA Director George Bush was ordered to assist Scowcroft, as were the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture.

The bogus arguments that Kissinger advanced were not original. One of his major sources was the Royal Commission on Population, which King George VI had created in 1944 “to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population.” The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since “a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production.” The combined effects of increasing population and industrialization in its colonies, it warned, “might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West,” especially effecting “military strength and security.”

NSSM 200 similarly concluded that the United States was threatened by population growth in the former colonial sector. It paid special attention to 13 “key countries” in which the United States had a “special political and strategic interest”: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. It claimed that population growth in those states was especially worrisome, since it would quickly increase their relative political, economic, and military strength.

For example, Nigeria: “Already the most populous country on the continent, with an estimated 55 million people in 1970, Nigeria’s population by the end of this century is projected to number 135 million. This suggests a growing political and strategic role for Nigeria, at least in Africa.” Or Brazil: “Brazil clearly dominated the continent demographically.” The study warned of a “growing power status for Brazil in Latin America and on the world scene over the next 25 years.”

Food as a weapon

There were several measures that Kissinger advocated to deal with this alleged threat, most prominently, birth control and related population-reduction programs. He also warned that “population growth rates are likely to increase appreciably before they begin to decline,” even if such measures were adopted.

A second measure was curtailing food supplies to targeted states, in part to force compliance with birth control policies: “There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID (U.S. Agency for International Development) and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.”

“Mandatory programs may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now,” the document continued, adding, “Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can’t/won’t control their population growth?”

Kissinger also predicted a return of famines that could make exclusive reliance on birth control programs unnecessary. “Rapid population growth and lagging food production in developing countries, together with the sharp deterioration in the global food situation in 1972 and 1973, have raised serious concerns about the ability of the world to feed itself adequately over the next quarter of a century and beyond,” he reported.

The cause of that coming food deficit was not natural, however, but was a result of western financial policy: “Capital investments for irrigation and infrastructure and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many LDCs. For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food.”

“It is questionable,” Kissinger gloated, “whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis.” Consequently, “large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades — a kind the world thought had been permanently banished,” was foreseeable — famine, which has indeed come to pass.

Propaganda in the Movies

At the time of the Kissinger Report Soylent Green was being shown in the movie theatres. The movie was most interesting in its depiction of a terrible  society of the future. Set in the year 2022 – not so far in the future now - Soylent Green depicts dystopia, a Malthusian catastrophe that has occurred because humanity has failed to pursue sustainable development and has not halted population growth. The film portrays New York City's population as 40,000,000, with more than half of it unemployed. Pollution has produced a "year-round heatwave"—identified in the film, presciently, as due to a "greenhouse effect"—and a thin, yellow, daytime smog.

Food and fuel are scarce resources because of animal and plant decimation and soil poisoning, housing is dilapidated and overcrowded, and rioting in the streets is managed with huge scoopers that dumps protestors into a bin like a garbage truck. 

It’s hot all the time, energy must be recharged through the pedaling of stationary bikes, and food is at a premium. Meat, bread, cheese, fruit, vegetables, and alcoholic beverages are scarce and extremely expensive; for example, a six-ounce jar of strawberry jam is 150 "Ds" (US Dollars). Like the soylent food factories, the farms producing foodstuffs are heavily guarded and off-limits to civilians. For most of the populace, natural foods are a rarely, if ever, enjoyed luxury. The government dispenses rations of synthetic food — soylent yellow, soylent red — made by the Soylent Corporation; their newest and most popular version, soylent green, is made from plankton, according to the food firm. Soylent's food products are mostly distributed as brightly colored wafers which may be eaten with margarine, although they are also seen being sold as bread-like buns and in crumb form.

Specific Soylent products are distributed to the populace on different days of the week, yet even then those supplies are limited and there is much competition among people to get their rations early. The competition is such that if the supply is exhausted, rioting for food is common. To deal with this problem, the distribution centers are heavily guarded by police who deal with rioters very heavy-handedly, using "scoops" — half-loader, half-garbage truck vehicles which scoop up rioters and dump them in rear storage units; such callous, violent treatment is presumably fatal to some rioters.

Charlton Heston plays the lead role as Robert Thorn, a New York City detective lives in a one-room tenement apartment. in a horribly overpopulated New York City. He lives with his assistant Sol played by Edward G. Robinson in his final acting role. In a world that no longer has actual books the elderly Sol acts as a living history text for Thorn.  Long before, Sol was a college professor, but now is employed as a police researcher. Unlike most people in A.D. 2022, including Thorn, Sol received a formal education and is literate. Education of any sort is available only to the wealthy elite. Sol and people such as he are known as "books", because real books are out of print, as there is no wood for paper, along with electricity, water, food, and printing press shortages.

A rich, privileged man named William Simonson (Joseph Cotten), a director of the Soylent Corporation, is assassinated because he’s become “unreliable”. The murder occurs while his bodyguard Tab Fielding played by a sleazy Chuck Connors and Simonson's live-in prostitute Shirl played by Leigh Taylor-Young shop for food on the black market. She comes with the apartment and is referred to as “furniture”. She’ll remain as furniture for the

The cynical, hard-boiled Thorn leads the investigation to find out who killed Simonson, but not until he lifts some prize food and other materials from the dead man’s luxury flat. When he checks into the bodyguard’s flat he meets the bodyguard’s “furniture” Martha Phillips (Paula Kelly) and discovers that Fielding seems to be living beyond his means.

As Thorn investigates the case, he gets to know Shirl better, and an inevitable romance develops. Thorn has a brief romance with Shirl, (Leigh Taylor-Young), a "furniture girl", essentially a prostitute, attached to a rich apartment's owner in Chelsea. At one point in the film, Shirl wanted to move in with Thorn, but Thorn insisted she stay in the apartment because life was so much better there.

Thorn slowly starts to discover the corruption behind the system. He finds a book that Simonson had hidden about Oceanography and the History of the Soylent Corporation.  Reading the book, Sol is shocked to discover that the oceans from which Soylent Green is harvested have been dying and are now dead. The last food source on the planet is too poisoned to support life. This is the last straw for Sol and he chooses to "go home" by voluntarily submitting himself to euthanasia. Thorn follows him but is too late to prevent Sol's death.

At Sol's bedside as he slowly drifts away, Thorn is able to hear classical music and watch motion pictures of the beautiful Earth of former times, shown only to those being euthanised. Discovering what has been lost brings him to tears. In Sol's final moments, Sol whispers the truth about Soylent Green to Thorn and tells him that proof is needed to expose the Soylent Corporation to the World Council.

After Sol's death, Thorn follows the truck hauling away Sol's body. At a heavily guarded waste-management plant, Thorn confirms with his own eyes that Soylent green is made from the recycled cadavers brought in from the government-sponsored euthanasia centers.

The film culminates in a battle between Thorn and Tab, who shoot each other. After a desperate struggle Thorn gains the upper hand and kills Tab. Thorn is left barely standing and badly wounded. As help arrives, a visibly distraught Thorn desperately confides in his police superior, Hatcher (Brock Peters), about the real ingredients of soylent green. As the stretcher bearers take away Thorn, Hatcher looks only half-able to believe and comprehend Thorn's revelation: "Soylent Green is people!"

This is one of many films that were clearly intended to do more than entertain: they were propaganda films to prepare people for the world that was being choreographed for them and to instill fear about the future. This emotion can be visited again and again by the propagandists to elicit the marketing response that the New World Order desires. Films go hand in hand with government policy-makers to mold and shape a society that is engineered to their specifications.