Monsanto out to ruin farming in Mesopotamia?

Just as I’m reporting on SPIN farming and efforts to grow our own produce in our backyards, I come across this article describing Monsanto’s efforts to control farming in Mesopotamia.  While we make efforts to collect and harvest heritage seeds, Monsanto is ramming ‘democracy’ down the throats of Iraqi farmers in the form of legalized theft.

This whole thing disgusts me.  I could be wrong, as I’m not an agrarian historian, but how can we sanction this top-down approach to farming, when it was most likely the Mesopotamians that domesticated wheat and other products in the first place, largely out of respect for variety and diversity.

Here are some snapshots from the article:

The 100 Orders [of Paul Bremer] allow multinational corporations to basically privatize an entire nation, and this degree of foreign and private control has not been witnessed since the days of the British East India Company and its extraterritoriality treaties.

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A few examples of the 100 Orders are illuminating:

• Order 39 allows for the tax-free remittance of all corporate profits.
• Order 17 grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, immunity from Iraq’s laws.
• Orders 57 and 77 ensure the implementation of the orders by placing U.S.-appointed auditors and inspector general in every government ministry, with five-year terms and with sweeping authority over contracts, programs, employees and regulations.

Back to one of the most blatant orders of all: Order 81. Under this mandate, Iraq’s commercial farmers must now buy "registered seeds." These are normally imported by Monsanto, Cargill and the World Wide Wheat Company. Unfortunately, these registered seeds are "terminator" seeds, meaning "sterile." Imagine if all human men were infertile, and in order to reproduce women needed to buy sperm cells at a sperm bank. In agricultural terms, terminator seeds represent the same kind of sterility.

Terminator seeds have no agricultural value other than creating corporate monopolies. The Sierra Club, more of a mainstream "conservation" organization than a radical "environmentalist" one, makes the exact same case:

"This technology would protect the intellectual property interests of the seed company by making the seeds from a genetically engineered crop plant sterile, unable to germinate. Terminator would make it impossible for farmers to save seed from a crop for planting the next year, and would force them to buy seed from the supplier. In the third world, this inability to save seed could be a major, perhaps fatal, burden on poor farmers."

What makes this Order 81 even more outrageous is that Iraqi farmers have been saving wheat and barley seeds since at least 4000 BC, when irrigated agriculture first emerged, and probably even to about 8000 BC, when wheat was first domesticated. Mesopotamia’s farmers have now been trumped by white-smocked, corporate bio-engineers from Florida who strive to replace hundreds of natural varieties with a handful of genetically scrambled hybrids.

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Just in case Iraqi farmer can’t read, Order 81 enforces the new monopoly on seeds with the jackboot. Order 81 makes this clear in its own text, buried at the bottom of the document, as is most screw-you fine print:

"The court may order the confiscation of the infringing variety as well as the materials and tools substantially used in the infringement of the protected variety. The court may also decide to destroy the infringing variety as well as the materials and tools or to dispose of them in any noncommercial purpose."

Order 81 is about power and profit, but it disguises itself as humanitarian legislation.

In Canada, we’ve also been inundated with terminator seeds, but all is not lost because of heroes like Percy Schmeiser .  He managed to fight Monsanto and won, in an undisclosed settlement in his favour.