SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION
for developing Terminator with D&PL, Melvin Oliver, openly admitted: "My main interest is the protection of American technology. Our mission is to protect US agriculture, and to make us competitive in the face of foreign competition. Without this, there is no way of protecting the technology [patented seed]." 16 Together with Delta & Pine Land, the USDA had applied for Terminator patents in 78 countries. The USDA admitted openly, perhaps carelessly so, that the target for Terminator seeds were the populations and farmers of the developing world, precisely the Rockefeller Foundation's long-standing goal of promoting GMO. The coherence between the 1974 Henry Kissinger NSSM 200 population control policies in the developing world, the Rockefeller Foundation's support for introduction of gene technologies in targeted developing countries, and the development of a technology which would allow the private multinationals owning the patents on vital staple seed varieties, was also beginning to dawn on a broader thinking public. The development by Monsanto was increasingly being seen by the world as a kind of Trojan Horse for Western GMO seed giants to get control over Third World food supplies in areas with weak or non-existent patent laws. The Rockefeller-Monsanto public moratorium announcement in October 1999 was a calculated ploy to direct attention elsewhere, while the seed companies continued their perfection of Terminator, Traitor and related technologies. Meanwhile, as the Rockefeller Foundation understood it, the urgent priority for the time was to spread GMO seeds worldwide in order, first, to capture huge markets and to make the use of patented GMO seeds irreversible. In some cases, companies like Monsanto were accused by local farmers of illegally smuggling GMO seeds into regions like Brazil or Poland, in order to later claim that farmers had "illegally" used their patented seed, while demanding they pay royalties. In the case of Brazil, Monsanto was shrewd. Monsanto used the smuggling of GMO soybeans to its advantage, working with the illegal GMO soy producers to pressure the Lula da Silva government to legalise the crop. Once the GMO soy became legal in Brazil,