USA mandates Iraq must open to GM seed multis

by F. William Engdahl

Iraq as not only lost its political sovereignty to foreign occupiers. It has lost its very sovereign right to produce and grow its own essential food crops. Just before arranging the so-called "transfer of authority" in June 2004, US Coalition Provisional Administrator, Paul Bremer III, imposed a list of 100 laws on Iraq which insure that the US dictates every feature of Iraq economic life according to Washington free market wishes. This includes governing of an Iraqi central bank, an essential aspect of national sovereignty. It includes rules on Iraqi trade unions. And most significantly, it mandates the future rules of Iraqi agriculture production to conform to the wishes of Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow Chemical and other US-tied agri-business giants that are aggressively pushing for control of world food production through Gentically-Modified (GM) seeds and plants.

Bremer imposed Order 81 on "Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety." This Order 81 or law, has the status of binding law. The US puppet regime of the hand-picked former CIA asset, Allawi, has made no outcry against this or any other of the 100 laws. What does Order 81 do?

For generations and generations, farmers in Iraq as in most of the world have run an informal, unregulated seed supply system in which they experiment and breed the optimal seeds for essential food crops. Farmers traditionally save a portion of their seeds for the next plantings. Now, that will be forbidden. Monsanto and other foreign corporations now hold an Intellectual Property Right (IPR) which gives them an exclusive monopoly on all GM altered seeds and "similar" plant varieties. Iraqi farmers now not only have to cope with Allied bombing of their fields and streams. They have to pay foreign corporations for the right to plant what they have planted for hundreds of years.

Order 81 is a cleverly written law, with the deceptive title, "protection of new varieties of plants," or PVP. PVP is an Intellectual Property Right such as Washington and other major G7 countries got into the WTO rules, even though Iraq is not a WTO member. The Iraqi PVP law gives Monsanto and other international seed giants patent rights over plant seeds which they claim to have "discovered." The patent, under procedures of GM bio-engineering, is typically for a tiny alteration of the DNA or gene sequence of a given existing seed or plant such as soybean, cotton, rice or potato. Of course to do that alteration, Monsanto and others take the product of Iraqi farmers' own successful breeding and development, and, of course, without paying. There is strong suspicion that Monsanto and the other giant GM firms have secretly tapped the seed bank of Iraq, held in trust for farmers during the recent years by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in their center in Syria. CGIAR was established with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and World Bank to spread use of GM seeds across the developing sector countries.

According to the NGO, GRAIN.org, this Iraqi law insures that Iraqi farmers must pay foreign multinationals like Monsanto, to get seeds each year for planting. Using their own seeds will be illegal. Royalty fees to Monsanto or Syngenta for GM seeds will be necessary to "protect" the Intellectual Property Rights of Monsanto and friends. Their monopoly is exclusive and valid for 20 years for crops. The US State Department claims the new law will "ensure the supply of good quality seeds" for Iraq and pave the way for Iraq to enter the WTO. In effect it opens the country, one of the most fertile lands in the world, to total control by foreign corporations tied to Washington strategic interests.

The Iraqi Order 81 is joined by Order 39 which gives foreign investors rights equal to Iraqis in exploiting Iraq's domestic markets. Iraq has no chance to impose defenses, protection of its own industry or agriculture. Washington explicitly states this all is necessary for Iraq's "transition from a non-transparent, centrally-planned economy to a free market economy..."

The question is, "free" for whom? Monsanto and other foreign firms? The example of Order 81 in Iraq underscores the unacceptable nature of the effort by large multinationals to claim patent on biological species or plant varieties. Seeds and the right of a nation to hold them in trust for its people is a fundamental human right, like the right to life. To open the Pandora's Box by allowing private commercial interests to patent small modifications to those seeds and thereby impose monopoly on entire seed species, extends the 'marketization' or what some call 'globalization' of the world economy to the very essence of life processes. By this logic, the air we breathe will soon be patented.

Seed corn is not like an invention of a new computer or a turbine generator. The marketization or commoditization of seeds, is an ominous trend. Oil and the petrodollar system imposed by Washington in the 1970's, after Washington freed the dollar from the gold standard, is the model for this perverse new chapter on "globalization." Under the fraudulent banner of George W. Bush's "democracy in the Middle East," Iraq has now lost the very basis of feeding its own population. It in effect is a form of neo-colonial control vastly more ruthless and efficient than ever during the British colonial era.