Iraq Against the Grain

For Americans paying attention, here was some "happy news" from Iraq by way of the United States Central Command, Sept 28:

MOSUL, Iraq – Multi-National Forces, in cooperation with Texas A&M Unviersity, Colorado State University, Kansas State University and the World Wide Wheat Company will distribute more than 1,000 pounds of wheat seeds to Iraqi farmers located in the Ninevah Province by October.

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To help this area’s wheat yields meet demands, leaders from the World Wide Wheat Company in Arizona began meeting with agriculturalists from Texas A&M, KSU and CSU to determine what wheat species would best survive Iraq’s arid climate. They chose several winter wheat variants from Arizona because the state’s climate is very similar to Iraq.

Here's what the Occupier's press release neglects to mention: Iraqi farmers are now forbidden from saving their own seeds, because the market is now the property of the huge transnationals and their genetically-modified, patent-protected product. This, according to Paul Bremer's "100 Orders," which engraved Iraq's economic thralldom into law before the "handover of sovereignty." Specifically, "Coalition Provitional Authority Order 81: Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law."

Here's what GRAIN says about the impact of the patent law upon Iraqi farming:

For generations, small farmers in Iraq operated in an essentially unregulated, informal seed supply system. Farm-saved seed and the free innovation with and exchange of planting materials among farming communities has long been the basis of agricultural practice. This has been made illegal under the new law. The seeds farmers are now allowed to plant - "protected" crop varieties brought into Iraq by transnational corporations in the name of agricultural reconstruction - will be the property of the corporations. While historically the Iraqi constitution prohibited private ownership of biological resources, the new US-imposed patent law introduces a system of monopoly rights over seeds. Inserted into Iraq's previous patent law is a whole new chapter on Plant Variety Protection (PVP) that provides for the "protection of new varieties of plants." PVP is an intellectual property right (IPR) or a kind of patent for plant varieties which gives an exclusive monopoly right on planting material to a plant breeder who claims to have discovered or developed a new variety. So the "protection" in PVP has nothing to do with conservation, but refers to safeguarding of the commercial interests of private breeders (usually large corporations) claiming to have created the new plants.

To qualify for PVP, plant varieties must comply with the standards of the UPOV Convention, which requires them be new, distinct, uniform and stable. Farmers' seeds cannot meet these criteria, making PVP-protected seeds the exclusive domain of corporations. The rights granted to plant breeders in this scheme include the exclusive right to produce, reproduce, sell, export, import and store the protected varieties. These rights extend to harvested material, including whole plants and parts of plants obtained from the use of a protected variety.

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The new law is presented as being necessary to ensure the supply of good quality seeds in Iraq and to facilitate Iraq's accession to the WTO. What it will actually do is facilitate the penetration of Iraqi agriculture by the likes of Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow Chemical - the corporate giants that control seed trade across the globe. Eliminating competition from farmers is a prerequisite for these companies to open up operations in Iraq, which the new law has achieved. Taking over the first step in the food chain is their next move.

This is disastrous for Iraqi farmers and potentially calamatous for Iraq's food security, and is another sad blow to global biodiversity. The neoliberals - imperial fellow travellers with the neoconservatives - are remaking Iraq into a laboratory for Chicago School economic theory. Not since the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Pen has a gang of such bloody-minded ideologues experimented unfettered on a national scale.

Nearly two million Cambodians died under Pol Pot. In Iraq, it's early days.