Global Food Cartel an Instrument for Starvation - 4

The control apparatus

The control of food for use as a weapon is an ancient practice. The House of Windsor inherited certain routes and infrastructure. One finds the practice in ancient Babylon/Mesopotamia 4,000 years ago. In Greece, the cults of Apollo, Demeter, and Rhea-Cybele often controlled the shipment of grain and other food stuffs, through the temples. In Imperial Rome, the control of grain became the basis of the empire. Rome was the center. Conquered outlying colonies in Gaul, Brittany, Spain, Sicily, Egypt, North Africa, and the Mediterranean littoral had to ship grain to the noble Roman families, as taxes and tribute. Often the grain tax was greater than the land could bear, and areas of North Africa, for instance, were turned into dust bowls.

The evil city-state of Venice took over grain routes, particularly after the Fourth Crusade (1202-04). The main Venetian thirteenth century trading routes had their eastern termini in Constantinople, the ports of the Oltremare (which were the lands of the crusading States), and Alexandria, Egypt. Goods from these ports were shipped to Venice, and from there made their way up the Po Valley to markets in Lombardy, or over the Alpine passes to the Rhône and into France. Eventually, Venetian trade extended to the Mongol empire in the East.

By the fifteenth century, although Venice was still very much a merchant empire, it had franchised some of its grain and other trade to the powerful Burgundian duchy, whose effective headquarters was Antwerp. This empire, encompassing parts of France, extended from Amsterdam and Belgium to much of present-day Switzerland. From this Venetian-Lombard-Burgundian nexus, each of the food cartel's six leading grain companies was either founded, or inherited a substantial part of its operations today.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Levant and East India companies had absorbed many of these Venetian operations. In the nineteenth century, the London-based Baltic Mercantile and Shipping Exchange became the world's leading instrument for contracting for and shipping grain.

The five privately held grain companies were carved out from the centuries-old Mesopotamian-Venetian-Burgundian-Swiss-Amsterdam grain route, which today extends around the world. The Big Five are Cargill, Continental, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and Born, and André. The Continental Grain Company is run by billionaire Michel Fribourg and his son Paul. Simon Fribourg started the company in 1813 in Arlon, Belgium. He moved the company to Antwerp, and then, in the 1920s, to Paris and London. Today, it has a New York office, along with a strong Swiss-French base.

In 1852, Léopold Louis Dreyfus, who was born in Sierentz, France, established wheat-trading operations in Basel, Switzerland. In this century, except during World War II, Louis Dreyfus has been headquartered in Paris (part of the old Lombard-Burgundian route).

Bunge and Born was founded by the Bunge family from Amsterdam in 1752. The company was eventually moved to Antwerp (today it is technically headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil and the Netherlands Antilles). The André Company was founded by Georges André in Nyon, Switzerland, and today is headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Cargill Company, the world's largest grain company, is based in the Minneapolis, Minnesota suburb of Minnetonka. It was founded by Scotsman William Cargill, in Conover, Iowa in 1865, and has been run, since the 1920s, by the billionaire MacMillan family. But the true nexus of Cargill is in Geneva, Switzerland, where Cargill's international trading arm, Tradax, Inc., is headquartered, having been established there in 1956 (technically, Tradax is a Panamanian-registered company). Tradax has divisions all around the world, including in Argentina, Germany, and Japan. It is the major source for Cargill's international trading; Cargill has a lot of money invested in it, and Cargill reaps a large return from Tradax's operations. Tradax also has partial Swiss ownership. The Lombard, Odier Bank, as well as the Pictet Bank, both old, private and very dirty Swiss banks, own a chunk of Tradax. The principal financier for Tradax is the Geneva-based Crédit Suisse, which is one of the world's largest money-launderers.

Archer Daniels Midland's purchase of Töpfer, a Hamburg, Germany-based grain company, vastly increased ADM's presence in the world grain trade. Töpfer's trade is situated within the old Venice-Swiss-Amsterdam-Paris routes, and it has extensive business partnerships with the British Crown jewel, the Rothschild Bank.

Secret intelligence

The manner in which the grain cartel companies operate is highly secretive. All but ADM-Töpfer are private companies, and Bush ally and former Cargill employee Dwayne Andreas runs ADM as his personal fiefdom.

A strategic profile of each of the leading food cartel companies is contained in the following article, but it is worth noting here a few critical points about how they work. Much of their workings is shrouded in mystery, because they release little information to the public. People who have attempted to write books about the grain companies have spent years without getting a single interview from any of the reigning grain company families. Unlike many American companies, where the founding family has long since departed the scene, such as in the case of Morgan bank or Chrysler Corp., the grain cartel companies are run by the same families that have run them for centuries. The inter-married MacMillan and Cargill families run Cargill; the Fribourg family runs Continental; the Louis Dreyfus family runs Louis Dreyfus; the André family runs André; and the Hirsch and Born families run Bunge and Born.

However, the little that has been gleaned is very revealing. In 1979, Dan Morgan wrote The Merchants of Grain, about the world grain trade. He disclosed that Cargill's Geneva-based trading arm, Tradax, operates not only such as to park sales of grain in order to escape taxes in the United States and most countries, but it confounds anyone trying to follow Cargill's grain movements. In his book, Morgan reported:

"When Cargill sells a cargo of corn to a Dutch animal-feed manufacturer, the grain is shipped down the Mississippi River, put aboard a vessel at Baton Rouge and sent to Rotterdam. On paper, however ... its route is more elaborate. Cargill first sells the corn to Tradax International in Panama, which will 'hire' Tradax/Geneva as its agent; Tradax/Geneva then might arrange the sale to a Dutch miller through its subsidiary, Tradax/Holland; any profits would be booked to Tradax/Panama, a tax-haven company, and Tradax/Geneva would earn only a 'management fee' for brokering the deal between Tradax/Panama and Tradax/Holland."

While evading taxes and inspection, Cargill also uses its network to move large shipments of goods anywhere on the globe, on split-second notice. It has an in-house intelligence service that matches the CIA's: It uses global communication satellites, weather-sensing satellites, a database that utilizes 7,000 primary sources of intelligence, several hundred field offices, etc.

Cargill is representative of all of the grain companies, and a brief examination of it gives insight into all the others. Cargill, which had $51 billion in annual sales in 1994, has a dominant position in many aspects of the world food trade. It is the world's and the United States' number-one grain exporter, and has a market share of 25-30% in each of several commodities. It is the world's number-one cotton trader; the number-one U.S. owner of grain elevators (340); the number-one U.S. manufacturer of corn-based, high-protein animal feeds (through subsidiary Nutrena Mills); the number-two U.S. wet corn miller and U.S. soybean crusher; the number-two Argentine grain exporter (10% of market); the number-three U.S. flour miller (18% of market), U.S. meatpacker (18% of market), U.S. pork packer/slaughterer, and U.S. commercial animal feeder; the number-three French grain exporter (15-18% of the market); and the number-six U.S. turkey producer. It also has a fleet of 420 barges, 11 towboats, 2 huge vessels that sail the Great Lakes, 12 ocean-going ships, 2,000 railroad hopper cars, and 2,000 tank cars.

Cargill has been able to place its people in top posts around the world. Daniel Amstutz, a 25-year Cargill man, was U.S. Undersecretary of Agriculture for International Affairs and Commodity Programs in 1983-87, from which post he decided on the export policy of U.S. grains. He later became a leader of the U.S. trade commission in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations on agricultural trade. Meanwhile, the head of Bunge and Born, Nestor Rapanelli, became Argentina's economics minister within weeks of Carlos Menem coming in as Argentine President in 1989. Rapanelli began shifting Argentina from "State intervention to a 'market driven' economy."

Today, Cargill Company is privately owned and run by the MacMillan family. The MacMillan family's collective wealth, at $5.1 billion, according to the July 17, 1994 Forbes magazine, is larger than that of the better-known Mellon family. The MacMillans have always been of service to the British. John Hugh MacMillan, president of Cargill from 1936 to 1957, and then chairman from 1957 through 1960, held the title of "hereditary Knight Commander of Justice in the Sovereign Order of St. John (Knights of Malta)," one of the British Crown's most important orders.

The drive to the East

The food cartel continues to consolidate its worldwide control in the face of the oncoming financial disintegration. In the past four years, the food cartel has bought up many milling-processing plants and bakeries throughout the former Soviet Union and East bloc, bringing these nations under tight food control. Recently, IBP moved to dump cheap Mexican meat there, in order to bankrupt beef producers. The Clinton Agriculture Department has brought them up for investigation.

The food cartel has also built up its control, in the food distribution industries, through such combines as Philip Morris, Grand Metropolitan-Pillsbury, and KKR-RJR-Nabisco-Borden. In the case of Philip Morris, which owns Kraft Foods, General Foods (Post cereals), the Miller Brewing Company, and a host of other brand names, 10¢ of every $1 that an American spends on brand-name food items is for a Philip Morris product.

The food cartel's power must be broken. This year, the U.S. Justice Department's Anti-Trust division launched an investigation into price-fixing in the case of corn-based fructose and lysine, by Archer Daniels Midland and some of the other food cartel companies. The case, if brought to trial, could provide valuable information and help to expose and possibly halt, in a limited way, a few of ADM's practices. But the Anglo-Dutch-Swiss cartel is playing for high stakes—the ability to constrain the supply of raw materials, and above all, food, to turn back the clock of history, and reduce mankind from the 5.6 billion population it currently enjoys to the state of a few hundred million semi-literate souls scratching out a bare existence.

That assault cannot be fought timidly. The full truth about the food cartel must be known.

This article appeared as part of a feature in the December 8, 1995 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. See Feature Introduction and Table of Contents.

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