The
Rat In The Grain-
The Looting Of Iraqi Agriculture
By Jeffrey
St. Clair
Counterpunch
09 July, 2003
The war on Iraq couldn't
have come at a more dire time for Iraq's beleaguered farmers. Spring
is harvest time in the barley and wheat fields of the Tigris River valley
and planting time in the vast vegetable plantations of southern Iraq.
The war is over, but the
situation in the fields of Iraq continues to rapidly deteriorate. The
banks, which provide credit and cash, have been looted, irrigation systems
destroyed, road travel restricted, markets closed, warehouses and grain
silos pillaged.
To harvest the grain before
it rots in the fields Iraqi farmers need more than eight million gallons
of diesel fuel to power Iraq's corroding armada of combines and harvesters.
But most of the fuel depots were incinerated by US bombing strikes.
There's no easy way to get the fuel that remains to the farmers who
need it most and no desire to do so by the US forces of occupations.
Even if the crops can be
harvested, there's no clear way for the grain to get stored, marketed,
sold and distributed to hungry Iraqi families. Under the Hussein regime,
the crops were bought by the Baghdad government at a fixed priced and
then distributed through a rationing system. This system, inefficient
as it was, is gone. But nothing has taken its place.
Iraqi farmers are still owed
$75 million for this year's crop, with little sign that the money will
ever arrive. There's speculation throughout the country that one intent
of the current policy is to force many farmers off their farms and into
the cities so that their lands can be taken over by favorites of Ahmed
Chalabi and his US protectors. The post-Saddam Iraq will almost certainly
witness a land redistribution program: more farmland going into fewer
and fewer hands.
Grain farmers aren't alone.
As in the first Gulf War, US bombing raids targeted cattle feed lots,
poultry farms, fertilizer warehouses, pumping stations, irrigation systems
and pesticide factories (the closest thing the US has come to finding
Weapons of Mass Destruction in the country)-the very infrastructure
of Iraqi agriculture. It will take years to restore these operations.
Many fields in southern Iraq
lie fallow, as vegetable farmers have been unable to secure seeds for
this summer's crops of melons, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers and beans-all
mainstays of the Iraqi diet.
"We expect failures,"
said Abdul Aziz Nejefi, a barley farmer from Mosul, in a dispatch from
the Guardian. "We never had this situation before. There is no
government."
Meanwhile, millions of Iraqis
face starvation this summer. A UN staff report from late May paints
a bleak portrait. It notes that Iraq's poultry industry has effectively
been decimated. Millions of chickens perished during the war. Millions
of others face starvation, since nearly of the chicken feed stored in
government warehouses has been looted. Chicken and eggs are staples
of the Iraqi, amounting for more than half of the animal protein consumed
by the population.
Many other farm animals,
including sheep and goats, could be ravaged by disease, since the nation's
stockpiles of veterinary medicines and vaccines have been almost totally
destroyed or looted.
Some 60% of Iraq's 24 million
people depend totally for their food on the food ration system that
was established after the Gulf War. Each week, these Iraqis could count
on a "food basket" consisting of wheat flour, rice, vegetable
oil, lentils beans, milk, sugar and salt. That system is now in shambles
and is scorned at by US policymakers. And promised grain imports have
yet to materialize.
"Before there is unwarranted
military technological triumphalism, let those setting out to manage
the peace think mouths," says Tim Land, professor food policy at
City University in London. "Grumbling stomachs are bad politics
as well as disastrous for the public health. There has to be a food
democracy after decades of food totalitarianism."
Into this dire circumstance
strides Daniel Amstutz, the Bush administration's choice to oversee
the reconstruction of Iraq's agricultural system. Now an international
trade lobbyist in DC with a fat roster of big ag clients, Amstutz once
served as a top executive at Cargill, the food giant which controls
much of the world trade in grain. During Amstutz's tenure at Cargill,
the grain company went on a torrid expansion campaign. It is now the
largest privately held corporation in the US and controls about 94 percent
of the soybean market and more than 50 percent of the corn market in
the Upper Midwest. It also has it's hands on the export market controlling
40 percent of all US corn exports, a third of all soybean exports and
at least 20 percent of wheat exports.
Al Krebs, who edits the Agribusiness
Examiner, a vital publication on US farm policy, unearthed a 1982 questionnaire
on food, politics and morality that vividly illustrates the Cargill
philosophy. The Joseph Project a public policy research group sponsored
by the Senate of Catholic Priests of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis-St.Paul,
asked Cargill executives to explain the company's attitude toward hunger
and famine issues. The executives responded as follows:
"The assumption that
there are moral priorities that are offended in serving world or domestic
markets as economically and efficiently as possible rests on a confusion
about economic facts. It is also a highly objectionable characterization
of business's role. Before one makes moral judgments and advocates economic
actions, one should understand the economic issues that are involved.
"The business of making
moral judgments is both hazardous and potentially irresponsible unless
one is fully satisfied that all the facts and causal relationships have
been explored . . . We are not in a position --- given time and other
constraints --- to provide all the relevant background. Nor are we anxious
to make moral judgments --- or moral defenses --- of our own."
In 2000, the biggest food
companies in the world, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Cenex Harvest
States Co-op, DuPont and Louis Dreyfus, got together to form Pradium
Inc., a kind of secret, internal grain market that offered real-time,
cash commodity exchanges for grains, oilseeds and agricultural by-products
as well as global information services. It also offered ways to fix
price grain prices on a global scale. Amstutz served as Pradium's chairman.
Amstutz is no stranger to
government, either. During the first Bush administration he served as
Undersecretary of Agriculture for International Affairs and Commodity
programs. He was also the chief US negotiator on agricultural issues
for the Uruguay Round of GATT talks, which led to the WTO.
"Daniel Amstutz, an
ex-Cargill executive, is there to push the agribusiness agenda, not
a democratic agenda," says George Naylor, president of the National
Family Farm Coalition. "He will excel in telling the world that
his policy is good for farmers, consumers and the environment when just
the opposite is true."
The small farmers of the
grain belt of the Midwest have a particular loathing for Amstutz. During
his stint in the first Bush administration, Amstutz devised the notorious
Freedom to Farm Bill, which eliminated tariffs and slashed federal farm
price supports-all in an effort to lower grain prices for the benefit
of Amstutz's cronies in the big agricultural conglomerates. As a result,
thousands of American farmers lost their farms and monopolists like
Cargill reaped the benefits.
The contours of Amstutz's
plan for Iraq are familiar: a combination of free-market shock therapy
and predation by multinational corporations. Gliding over a decade of
UN sanctions that have starved the nation and a war that ravaged the
nation's infrastructure, Amstutz announced that the real problem facing
Iraqi agriculture is, naturally, government subsidies. "Iraqi farmers
have had little incentive to increase production because of price controls
that have kept food very inexpensive," Amstutz announced. "With
a transition to a market economy, we can see health returning to agriculture
and incentives to employ good farming practices and modern techniques."
The more likely scenario
is that Amstutz will use destitute condition of Iraq's farmlands as
a lucrative opportunity to dump cheap grain from American companies
like Cargill, all of it paid for by Iraqi oil. If this scenario plays
out, it will spell disaster for Iraq's struggling farmers.
Prior to the 1991 Gulf War,
Iraq imported more than one million metric ton per year of American
wheat. Since then, however, no direct sales of American agricultural
products have occurred. Amstutz is anxious to begin flooding Iraq with
Cargill grain.
Moreover, Iraq owes the US
Department of Agriculture's Commodity Credit Corp. $2 billion on loans
that facilitated pre-1991 ag sales and nearly $2 billion in interest
on the loans. Amstutz will certainly demand that those loans be recouped
through oil sales.
"Someone needs to warn
the Iraqi people that other third world countries can already attest
that the dependence Amstutz will create surely means that Iraq's sovereignty
will be greatly compromised," says Naylor.
And Naylor argues that cash-strapped
American farmers won't see any benefits, either. "Even if there
will be more exports to Iraq, this little drop in the "Amstutz
perpetuates the more exports lie because his agribusiness cronies are
encouraging overproduction all over the world, thus being able to sell
more genetically-modified seeds and chemicals and buying ever cheaper
farm commodities."
Even as millions of Iraqi's
face starvation under the stern hand of their food pro consul, Amstutz's
appointment has excited little commentary in the US. His most virulent
critic has been Kevin Wilkins, Oxfam's policy director in London. Watkins
warns that Amstutz is little more than a carpetbagger seeking to advance
the interests of the same food titans that his lobbying outfit in DC
represents, Cargill, DuPont, Cenex and Archer Daniels Midland.
"This guy is uniquely
well-placed to advance the commercial interests of American grain companies
and bust open the Iraqi market, but singularly ill-equipped to lead
a reconstruction effort in a war torn country," Watkins warns.
"Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in
Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission."
Amstutz was recently spotted
in Iowa, pitching his agricultural reconstruction plan to Iowa feedlot
owners. He told the farmers that they stood to profit handsomely from
his plan to bring modern feedlots to Iraq, those foul-smelling operations
that pack thousands of cattle and hogs into tightly confined pens. "They
are meat eaters," he brayed. "Iraq is not a vegetarian society."
Iowa doesn't have many cattle
or sheep operation. Most of the people in his audience raised hogs.
And unless Amstutz has joined in a partnership with Franklin Graham
to Christianize Iraq, there won't be a big market for pork products
in Baghdad.