Agribusiness Conference
In March of this year the post of president of the Chicago Board of Trade was filled by Henry W. Wilson Jr. The Wall Street Journal commented at the time that Mr. Wilson was especially suited to head the nation’s largest commodity exchange as it “is becoming more vocal in national and international matters concerning the world’s food problems” and is therefore in need of “an articulate spokesman around government.” Mr. Wilson had been one of two administrative assistants to President Lyndon B. Johnson, was known as an “effective behind the scenes operator” and was “particularly close” to the Southerners who chair the House and Senate Agricultural Committees.
Wilson’s first project at the Board of Trade was the “First Agribusiness Conference” held in mid-May at the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel. The conference focused upon the problem of the rapidly approaching “food crisis” in the “lesser developed countries,” or LDC’s” (foreign aid jargon for exploited non-industrialized societies). The solution advocated was a massive use of the industrial farming techniques practiced in the United States. The importation of these techniques would naturally fall to U.S. agribusines companies such as W.R. Grace, Standard Oil (N.J.), International Harvester, Ralston Pur-ina and Corn Products Co. In other words, the conference highlighted a new market area with great profit potential for U.S. companies. As explicitly reported in Forbes magazine, U.S. agribusiness can “make millions by feeding the world’s starving billions.”
A set of papers and speeches delivered at this conference reveal that the “War on Hunger” contemplated by agribusiness and the U.S. government entails not only the technical “solution” of the food shortage problem experienced by those nations whose people are not receiving a reasonable share of the world’s wealth, but also their internal reorganization around large-scale integrated agricultural systems. In one of the conference papers, R. Hal Dean, President of the Ralston Purina Company and one of the leading spokesmen for the agribusiness “Hunger Lobby” asserted that ” it is our total agricultural complex embracing the systems which fit together all of our agricultural resources and enterprises. It includes the informal organization which meshes together the efforts of all the people involved in our food production and distribution complex; our vast pool of knowledge in agronomy, animal agriculture, commodities trading, grain and oil seed processing, transportation and storage, and all aspects of end product food processing and marketing through the retailer… In short, it is the essence of the total manner in which we manage our agricultural resources at all stages of food production from land to mouth. This is the real strength of American agriculture and constitutes the basis for the hope of exporting our knowhow of the total agricultural infrastructure for extending self-help to emerging nations…
Adapting these technical skills to local situations in the developing countries constitutes the bread and butter aspects of instituting agricultural systems. It also represents one of the major challenges because it involves the changing of habits and traditions of long standing. Convincing these people of the advantages of such changes is often equally or more difficult than was introducing innovations to American farmers 50 years ago. A genuine desire on the part of the people to accept innovation, related to their personal betterment, must be generated…
In attempting to teach parts or the whole of this agricultural infrastructure in developing countries we are exporting and adapting American ideas and attitudes which are the essence of American free enterprise, profit-oriented business.
In another conference speech Eugene V. Rostow, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (and brother of W. W. Rostow, the State Department planner and CIA-backed proponent of the “Stages of Economic Growth” thesis) also stressed the need for a “systems” approach to agriculture in the “LDCts.” He recited the many steps being taken by the Agency for International Development to smooth the path for agribusiness investors and called for an increase in programs aimed at winning acceptance for American-style agribusiness methods and mentality.
Agribusiness Brainwashing
In the months since the Chicago Conference, the program for winning acceptance of the agribusiness offensive has been accelerated. Its main approaches are spelled out by Luis Ramire Beltran. (Beltran was head of the Organization of American States’ agricultural communications program and is now studying for a doctorate at iichigan State University. He served the OAS in Costa Rica, Uruguay and Peru and worked as a newspaperman and advertising man in Bolivia. His work is similar to many other efforts at “intercultural communication” research conducted in support of U.S. government and business policies toward Latin America and other Third World societies.) In a special communications
issue of International Agricultural Development, a publication of the International Agricultural Development Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Beltran asserts that there has been a neglect of “communications — the fundamental social process and the art and science of engineering change in human behavior” and calls for communication to be employed in the “service of development.” In order to prevent revolutions, he says, it is necessary for the ruling elites to encourage “managed change” in which mass propaganda is to play a large part. He calls upon ruling elites to “incorporate communications development into the master national development plan so that it serves all other development activities”; to “induce and help universities and other top-level institutions to establish, on a national scale, professional training in communications principles and techniques for specialists and technical field agents”; to “organize and foster research in communication so that planners have reliable information about which developmental messages, transmitted through which channels, are more likely to be effective with which audiences.
