Undermining
Iraqs Food Security
By Ghali Hassan
01 February, 2005
Countercurrents.org
The
US Occupation Authority has imposed legislation, which could have detrimental
and lasting impact on Iraqis farmers and Iraqs ability to produce
food for the Iraqi people. One of the orders left by administrator Paul
Bremer, is Order 81 on Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed
Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety[1]. Unless
an independent sovereign Iraqi government repeals it, it will override
Iraq's original patent law of 1970, which in accordance with the Iraqi
constitution prohibited private ownership of biological resources, and
undermine Iraqs food security.
Iraq is home to
the oldest agricultural traditions in the world. Historical, genetic
and archaeological evidence, including radiocarbon dating of carbon-containing
materials at the site, showed that the Fertile Crescent, including modern
Iraq, was the first region where sheep were domesticated and wheat crops
were cultivated around 9000-8000 B.C. Since then, the inhabitants of
Mesopotamia have used informal seed supply system to plant their crops.
While much has changed in the ensuing millennia, agriculture remains
an essential part of Iraqs heritage.
Traditionally, Iraqi
farmers used farm-saved seed and the free innovation with
and exchange of planting materials among farming communities has long
been the basis of agricultural practice. According to the Food Agriculture
Organisation (FAO), 97 percent of Iraqi farmers used farm-saved seeds
from their own stocks from last year harvest or purchased from local
market. The new law deprives Iraqi farmers of their innovation and development
of important crops such barley, wheat, pulses and the famous Iraqi date.
Despite extreme aridity, characterised by low rainfalls and soil salinity,
Iraq had a world standard agricultural sector producing good quality
food for generations.
Under the new US
Order, the saving and planting of seeds will be illegal and market will
only offer plant material produced by transactional agribusiness corporations.
The US Order introduces a system of private monopoly rights over seeds
and will force Iraqi farmers to relay on big US corporations to buy
its yearly crop seeds for planting. The term of the monopoly is 20 years
for crop varieties and 25 for trees and vines. During this time the
protected variety de facto becomes the property of the breeder, and
nobody can plant or otherwise use this variety without compensating
the breeder.
Iraqi farmers will
have to buy and plant so-called protected crop varieties
brought into Iraq by mostly American transactional corporations such
as Monsanto and Dow Chemical. According to Focus on the Global South,
a Bangkok-based policy research and advocacy centre, the new patent
law also explicitly promotes the commercialisation of genetically modified
(GM) seeds in Iraq, which will have detrimental effects on the
environment and people's health, and increase farmers dependency
on agribusiness. Furthermore, commercial agriculture places a
real premium on genetic uniformity. It is not an adequate genetic reservoir
for the future, they rest on a very narrow genetic base, and its
been selected solely for the goal of maximising production and
profits, said Hope Shand, Research Director of Erosion, Technology and
Concentration Group.
This is a new
US war against Iraqi farmers said GRAIN, the non-governmental
organisation (NGO) which promotes sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity
and people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge. The
recent report by GRAIN and Focus on the Global South has found that
the new legislation has been carefully put in place by the US administration
in order to prevent Iraqis farmers from saving their seeds and effectively
hands over the seed market to transactional corporations [2]. For example,
Monsanto controls over 90% of the total world area sown to transgenic
seeds. The US has been imposing patents on life around the world
through trade deals. In this case, they invaded [Iraq] first, and then
imposed their patents. This is both immoral and unacceptable,
writes Shalini Bhutani, one of the reports authors. The new Order
is an extension of the old genocidal economic sanctions.
Since 1990 the US
imposed harsh conditions on Iraq through the UN-supervised economic
sanctions regimes. The sanctions restricted Iraqs ability to export
oil and more importantly to import vital commodities such as food and
medicines. Under the sanctions regime, Iraqs food security and
agricultural activities are severely threatened. Agricultural inputs
such as seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, farm machineries and other necessary
items for food production are not available under the dual-use policy
thus undermining food availability. The sanctions has damaged Iraqs
agricultural sector and caused the death of hundreds of thousand of
Iraqis.
Reliable estimates
from humanitarian aid organisations and UN officials estimated that
the total number of Iraqi deaths caused by the sanctions impact
on food, medicines, water treatment and other health-related factors
is about 1.5 million, a third of them children under the age of 5 years.
It was a deliberate mass atrocity [3].
During the 13 years
of UN-sponsored sanctions, Iraqs was barred from importing important
items such as agricultural fertilisers, pesticides, foodstuff and many
other agricultural tools essential for the production of food for the
Iraqi population. You kill people without blood or organs flying
around, without angering American public opinion. People are dying silently
in their beds. If 5,000 children are dying each month, this means 60,000
a year. Over eight years, we have half a million children. This is equivalent
to two or three Hiroshimas, Ashraf Bayoumi, former head of the
World Food Programme Observation Unit, in charge of monitoring food
distribution in Iraq told Al-Ahram Weekly on 24 December 1998.
According to several
credible reports, food shortages and malnutrition was a lesser problem
before the sanctions. I went to Iraq in September 1997 to oversee
the U.N.'s oil for food program. I quickly realized that
this humanitarian program was a Band-Aid for a U.N. sanctions regime
that was quite literally killing people. Feeling the moral credibility
of the U.N. was being undermined, and not wishing to be complicit in
what I felt was a criminal violation of human rights, I resigned after
13 months, Denis Halliday, former humanitarian aid coordinator
for Iraq told an audience at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts
on November 05, 1998.
We know now that
the pretexts for the US-Britain wars and sanctions on Iraq are utter
lies. Iraq had no WMD since 1991 and Iraq had no relations with terrorist
groups. The war on Iraq was initiated on the basis of overall strategic
goals that include the control of Iraqs natural resources, including
Iraqs oil. We also know that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 constitutes
blatant aggression by the US and Britain outside the bounds of the UN
Charter and international law. US wars and the sanctions against
Iraq have severely damaged Iraqs ability to produce food for its
population.
The US Order 81
will complete this deliberate and illegal destruction of Iraqs
agricultural sector. By illegally invading Iraq and robbing Iraq of
its plant varieties, and depriving it of food security, the US is in
violation of international law. Iraqs plant varieties comprise
the agricultural heritage of Iraq belonging to the Iraqi farmers. Iraq
sovereignty including food sovereignty for the Iraqi people is paramount.
Only an end to US
occupation and the return of Iraqs natural resources, including
biological resources, will ensure Iraqs freedom and liberation
from foreign forces.
Ghali Hassan lives
in Perth, Western Australia. He can be contacted on:
[email protected]
Notes:
[1] Patent, Industrial
Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety
Law of 2004, CPA Order No. 81, http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/
20040426_CPAORD_81_Patents_Law.pdf
[2] http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=6.
[3] Gideon Polya,
Australasian Science June 2004.