All--<br>I'm new to the list and very pleased to be here. Trebor kindly invited to pass along a story I wrote and that just went live on the patented seed system that the Coalition Provisional Authority imposed upon Iraq in 2004. The twist, if you will, of the piece is that the
U.S. introduced Iraq to the same GM-driven agricultural world that is driving farmers in India's cotton belt to commit suicide at a pretty remarkable rate. (One estimate is one farmer death every eight hours.)<br><br>
I love being able to share this story with you all because people with an interest in iDC make up exactly the audience I hope a piece like this would find. I'm of the opinion that the modern political sphere only starts to make sense when we start connecting disparate dots -- thinking about things from a cross-cultural and even cross-discipline perspective. At least, that's the only way it makes any sense to me.
<br><br>Without further ado, the story is below. It's also available online at <a href="http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62273/">http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62273/</a>. I'd love to hear what you think about it or, more importantly of course, the issues and ideas it raises.
<br><br><br>-Nancy<br><br>--<br>Nancy Scola<br><a href="http://nancyscola.com">nancyscola.com</a><br><br><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><p style="font-weight: bold;" class="storyheadline"><font size="4">Why Iraqi Farmers Might Prefer Death to Paul Bremer's Order 81
</font></p>
<p style="font-style: italic;" class="storybyline">
By
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/8263/" title="View all stories by Nancy Scola">Nancy Scola</a>, <a href="http://www.alternet.org/">AlterNet</a>. Posted <a href="http://www.alternet.org/ts/archives/?date%5BF%5D=09&date%5BY%5D=2007&date%5Bd%5D=19&act=Go/" title="View all stories published on September 19, 2007">
September 19, 2007</a>.</p></div><p style="margin-left: 40px;">
Anyone hearing about <a href="http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-07-06T163214Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_India-283485-1.xml">central India's ongoing epidemic of farmer suicides</a>
,
where growers are killing themselves at a terrifying clip, has to be
horrified. But among the more disturbed must be the once-grand poobah
of post-invasion Iraq, U.S. diplomat L. Paul Bremer.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Why Bremer?
Because Indian farmers are choosing death after finding themselves
caught in a loop of crop failure and debt rooted in genetically
modified and patented agriculture -- the same farming model that Bremer
introduced to Iraq during his tenure as administrator of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, the American body that ruled the "new Iraq" in
its chaotic early days.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">In his 400 days of service as CPA
administrator, Bremer issued a series of directives known collectively
as the "100 Orders." Bremer's orders set up the building blocks of the
new Iraq, and among them is <a href="http://www.export.gov/iraq/pdf/cpa_order_81.pdf">Order 81 [PDF]</a>, officially titled <i>Amendments to Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law,
</i> enacted by Bremer on April 26, 2004.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Order
81 generated very little press attention when it was issued. And what
coverage it did spark tended to get the details wrong. Reports claimed
that what the United States' man in Iraq had done was no less than tell
each and every Iraqi farmer -- growers who had been tilling the soil of
Mesopotamia for thousands of years -- that from here on out they <a href="http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=6">could not reuse seeds</a>
from their fields or trade seeds with their neighbors, but instead they
would be required to purchase all of their seeds from the likes of U.S.
agriculture conglomerates like Monsanto.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">That's not quite right.
Order 81 wasn't that draconian, and it was not so clearly a colonial
mandate. In fact, the edict was more or less a legal tweak.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">What
Order 81 did was to establish the strong intellectual property
protections on seed and plant products that a company like the St.
Louis-based Monsanto -- purveyors of genetically modified (GM) seeds
and other patented agricultural goods -- requires before they'll set up
shop in a new market like the new Iraq. With these new protections,
Iraq was open for business. In short, Order 81 was Bremer's way of
telling Monsanto that the same conditions had been created in Iraq that
had led to the company's stunning successes in India.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">In issuing
Order 81, Bremer didn't order Iraqi farmers to march over to the
closest Monsanto-supplied shop and stock up. But if Monsanto's
experience in India is any guide, he didn't need to.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Here's the
way it works in India. In the central region of Vidarbha, for example,
Monsanto salesmen travel from village to village touting the
tremendous, game-changing benefits of Bt cotton, Monsanto's genetically
modified seed sold in India under the Bollgard® label. The salesmen
tell farmers of the amazing yields other Vidarbha growers have enjoyed
while using their products, plastering villages with posters detailing
"True Stories of Farmers Who Have Sown Bt Cotton." Old-fashioned cotton
seeds pale in comparison to Monsanto's patented wonder seeds, say the
salesmen, as much as an average old steer is humbled by a fine Jersey
cow.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Part of the trick to Bt cotton's remarkable promise, say the
salesmen, is that Bollgard® was genetically engineered in the lab to
contain <i>bacillus thuringiensis</i>, a bacterium that the company
claims drastically reduces the need for pesticides. When pesticides are
needed, Bt cotton plants are Roundup® Ready -- a Monsanto designation
meaning that the plants can be drowned in the company's signature
herbicide, none the worse for wear. (Roundup® mercilessly kills
nonengineered plants.)</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Sounds great, right? The catch is that
Bollgard® and Roundup® cost real money. And so Vidarbha's farmers,
somewhat desperate to grow the anemic profit margin that comes with
raising cotton in that dry and dusty region, have rushed to both banks
and local moneylenders to secure the cash needed to get on board with
Monsanto. Of a $3,000 bank loan a Vidarbha farmer might take out, as
much as half might go to purchasing a growing season's worth of Bt
seeds.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">And the same goes the next season, and the next season
after that. In traditional agricultural, farmers can recycle seeds from
one harvest to plant the next, or swap seeds with their neighbors at
little or no cost. But when it comes to engineered seeds like Bt
cotton, Monsanto owns the tiny speck of intellectual property inside
each hull, and thus controls the patent. And a farmer wishing to reuse
seeds from a Monsanto plant must pay to relicense them from the company
each and every growing season.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">But farmers who chose to bet the farm, literally, on Bt cotton or
other GM seeds aren't necessarily crazy or deluded. Genetically
modified agricultural does hold the tremendous promise of leading to
increased yields -- incredibly important for farmers feeding their
families and communities from limited land and labor.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">But when it
comes to GM seeds, all's well when all is well. Farming is a gamble,
and the flip side of the great potential reward that genetically
modified seeds offer is, of course, great risk. When all goes badly,
farmers who have sunk money into Monsanto-driven farming find
themselves at the bottom of a far deeper hole than farmers who stuck
with traditional growing. Farmers who suffer a failed harvest may find
it nearly impossible to secure a new loan from either a bank or local
moneylender. With no money to dig him or herself out, that hole only
gets deeper.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">And that hole is exactly where farmers have found
themselves in India's Vidarbha region, where crop failure -- especially
the failure of Bt cotton crops -- has reached the level of pandemic.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">In
may be that Bt cotton isn't well-suited to central India's rain-driven
farming methods; Bollgard® and parched Vidarbha may be as ill-suited as
Bremer's combat boots and Brooks Brothers suits. It may be the
unpredictable and unusually dry monsoon seasons that have plagued India
of late. But in any case, the result is that more and more of India's
farmers are finding themselves in debt, and with little hope for
finding their way out.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">And the final way out that so many of them
-- thousands upon thousands -- have chosen is death, and by their own
hands. Firm statistics are difficult to come by, but even numbers on
the low end of the scale are downright horrifying. The Indian
government and NGOs have estimated that, so far this year, at last
count <a href="http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-07-06T163214Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_India-283485-1.xml">more than a thousand farmers</a> have killed themselves in the state of Maharashtra alone. The
<i>New York Times</i> pinned it as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/world/asia/19india.html?ex=1189656000&en=025df5acd4ef3e36&ei=5070">17,000 Indian farmers in 2003 alone</a>. A PBS special that aired last month, called "
<a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/vidarbha/index.html">The Dying Fields</a>," claimed that one farmer commits suicide in Vidarbha every eight hours.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">But
let's not be so pessimistic for a moment, and say that Iraqi farmers
see the risks of investing in unproven GM seeds. Let's say they reject
the idea that the intellectual property buried inside the seeds they
plant is "owned" not by nature, but by Monsanto. Let's say they decide
to keep on keeping on with nonengineered, nonpatented agriculture.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">The fact is, they may not have a choice.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Here
is where Order 81 starts to look a lot like the forced and mandatory
GM-driven agricultural system that cynics tagged it as when it was
first announced. Read the letter of the law, and the impact of Order 81
seems limited to using public policy to construct an architecture
that's simply favorable to a company like Monsanto. The directive
promotes a corporate agribusiness model a lot like the one we have in
the United States today, but it doesn't really and truly put Monsanto
in the driver's seat of that system.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Actually handing the keys to Monsanto is instead biology's job.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Biology -- how so? That's a good question for Percy Schmeiser, the Saskatchewan farmer featured in the film
<i><a href="http://www.thefutureoffood.com/">The Future of Food</a></i>, who found himself tangled with Monsanto in <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/12/schmeiser.html">a heated lawsuit</a> over the presence of Roundup® Ready canola plants on the margins of his fields.
</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">The
Canadian farmer argued that he had purchased no Monsanto canola seeds,
had never planted Monsanto seeds, and was frankly horrified to find
that the genetically modified crops had taken hold in his acreage.
Perhaps, suggested Schmeiser, the plants in question were the product
of a few rogue GM seeds blown from a truck passing by his land?</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Monsanto
was uninterested in Schmeiser's theory on how the Roundup® Ready plants
got there. As far as the company was concerned, Schmeiser was in
possession of an agricultural product whose intellectual property
belonged to Monsanto. And it didn't matter much how that came to pass.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Monsanto's
interpretation of the impact of seed contamination is, of course, a
good one if its goal is to eventually own the rights to the world's
seed supply. And that goal may well be in sight. In fact, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0311/p14s01-sten.html">a 2004 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists</a>
found that much of the U.S. seed pool is already contaminated by GM
seeds. If that contamination continues unabated, eventually much of the
world's seeds could labor under patents controlled by one agribusiness
or another.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">In one agricultural realm like Iraq's, GM contamination could in
short order give a company like Monsanto a stranglehold over the
market. Post-Order 81 Iraqi farmers who want to resist genetically
modified seeds and stick to traditional farming methods may not have
that choice. Future generations of Iraqi growers may find that one seed
shop in Karbala is selling the same patented seeds as every other shop
in town.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">And when that happens, what had been a traditional
farming community -- where financial risk is divided and genetic
diversity multiplied through the simple interactions between
neighboring farmers -- finds itself nothing more than the home to lone
farmers caught up in the high-stakes world of international
agribusiness.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">It's a world not unfamiliar to former CPA honcho
Bremer, if the company he keeps is any indication. Robert Cohen, author
of the book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0965919684/dorwaybookshelf">Milk A-Z</a></i>, talks about the Bush administration as the "Monsanto Cabinet."</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Among
the many connections between that company and the current White House:
Former Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman served on the board of
directors of Calgene, a Monsanto subsidiary; one-time Secretary of
Defense Don Rumsfeld had an eight-year stint as president of Searle,
another Monsanto subsidiary; Clarence Thomas worked as an attorney in
Monsanto's pesticide and agriculture division before coming to the
Supreme Court as a George H.W. Bush appointee.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Those connections,
as much as anything else, might help to explain the impetus behind and
timing of Order 81. Let's suppose for a minute that GM-driven
globalized agriculture is, indeed, in the long-term best interests of
the new Iraq. Even in the best of circumstances, such a significant
policy shift in so core an economic sector can be expected to cause
short-term pain. When Bremer issued the directive, Iraq was hardly in a
good place: It had recently been invaded, its government dismantled.
Considering the desperate need for immediate stability in Iraq in April
2004, Order 81 begins to look like the triumph of connections and
ideology over clear-headed policymaking.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">In India, seed activists
like Vandana Shiva are working to weaken the connection between that
world of U.S. agribusiness and the farmers in villages and towns across
India. Shiva, featured in the PBS special <i>The Dying Fields,</i>
implores local farmers to stop forking over their money to commercial
seed producers and return to the days of homegrown seeds. While
Monsanto sells seeds that become India's corn, rice, potatoes, and
tomatoes, it's cotton where Monsanto is king, as Shiva well knows. "You
have become addicted to Bt cotton," she chides farmers. Though if the
perpetuation of the GMO-seed/crop-failure cycle is any indication, few
Indian farmers are listening.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Will Iraqi farmers making their way
in the new post-Order 81 agricultural world fare any better? Maybe. Can
they manage to reap the benefits of genetically modified farming,
trading their newfound dependence on Monsanto and other corporate
behemoths for the increased yield their patented and IP-protected seeds
promise? Hopefully.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">But it's possible that Iraq's farmers will
indeed find themselves in the same predicament that India's farmers
have ended up in -- a world where growers no longer rely upon their
fields and their communities to meet their needs but in a world in
which, when hard times strike, the only way out seems like the final
exit. A world in which, in a twist perhaps worthy of Shakespeare, the
farmer borrows one last time from whatever bank or moneylender will
hand over a few last rupees, buys one last bottle of Roundup®, and --
as has happened so many times in India -- ends it all by drinking it
down.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">Monsanto to the end.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;">*****<br></p><p style="margin-left: 40px;"><br></p><br>