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SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION
withstand droughts, resist pests, and grow in every climate imaginable, all without the help of biotechnology. They had created an incredible biological diversity with over 140,000 varieties.24 The Rockefeller Foundation had its eyes on Asia's rice bowl well before the 1984 IPRB project on rice. A prime target of the foundation's Green Revolution had been Asian rice production. The Green Revolution process had significantly destroyed the rich rice diversity over a period of thirty years, with the so-called HighYielding Varieties. This drew Asia's peasantry into the vortex of the world trade system and the global market for fertilizer, high-yielding seeds, pesticides, mechanisation, irrigation, credit and marketing schemes packaged for them by Western agribusiness. The core driver of that earlier rice revolution had been the Philippines-based Rockefeller Foundation-created International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) . It was not surprising then, that the IRRI, with a gene bank containing more than one-fifth of the world's rice varieties, became the prime vehicle to proliferate the Rockefeller Foundation's new gene revolution in rice; They banked every significant rice variety known. IRRI had been used by the backers of the Green Revolution to gather control of the irreplaceable seed treasure of Asia's rice varieties, under the ruse that they would thereby be "protected." The IRRI was put under the umbrella of the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research, CGIAR, after its creation in 1960 by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations during the Green Revolution in Asia. CGIAR was the same agency which also controlled the pre-war Iraqi seed bank. CGIAR operated out of the World Bank headquarters in Washington, also with Rockefeller Foundation funding. 25 In this manner, the World Bank, whose political agenda was defined by Washington policy, held the key to Asia's rice seed bank. Over three-quarters of the American rice genetic makeup or germplasm came originally from the IRRI seed bank. That rice was then pressed on Asian countries by the US Government demanding that Asian countries remove "unfair trade barriers" to US rice imports.