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Undermining Iraq’s Food Security
By Ghali Hassan
01/31/05
"ICH" -- The US Occupation
Authority has imposed legislation, which could have detrimental
and lasting impact on Iraqis farmers and Iraq’s 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 Iraq’s 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 Iraq’s 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 it’s 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 report’s 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
Iraq’s ability to export oil and more importantly to import
vital commodities such as food and medicines. Under the sanctions
regime, Iraq’s 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 Iraq’s 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, Iraq’s 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 Iraq’s natural resources, including
Iraq’s 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 Iraq’s ability
to produce food for its population.
The
US Order 81 will complete this deliberate and illegal destruction
of Iraq’s 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. Iraq’s 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 Iraq’s
natural resources, including biological resources, will ensure
Iraq’s freedom and liberation from foreign forces.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia. He can be contacted on:
G.Hassan@exchange.curtin.edu.au
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.
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