Juan Cole linked this weekend to a story I wrote for AlterNet last fall about Order 81, Paul Bremer's directive that established a seed patenting regime for the "new Iraq," and a commenter with boot-on-the-ground experience in Iraq wrote in critique Juan's link:
The small report about Bremer dictating that Iraqi farmers cannot use their seed from year to year is utter nonsense. It is not true. Iraqi farmers save seed for planting in the next year as they have done for many millenia and as farmers in other countries do.
Indeed. As I wrote:
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 could not reuse seeds 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.
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.
It's hot and sticky in New York City, making me more blunt than normal: we gotta stop doing this -- upping the crazy on stories that are already bad enough when taken at face value. No, Bremer didn't tell Iraqi farmers that they can only use patented seeds -- the world community probably would have mustered a little indignation over that.
What Bremer et al did was to create a pro-agribusiness environment in Iraq that, as is the main point of that AlterNet piece, has caused a fair amount of havoc in India. Juan's commenter offers an interesting defense of way Iraq's no India when it comes to ag:
The good news in Iraq is that the ag authorities are much more engaged with farmers and are more likely to tamp down Monsanto's or any other agribusiness' aggressive tactics. There is nothing wrong with using a patented seed provided the user is completely aware of what s/he is getting into. The other good news is that the crops most common in Iraq, wheat, barley, and rice are open pollinated crops and not subject to patent protection. These are saved from year to year, though it is customary to purchase new seed every five years or so. Hybrid maize is common in Iraq. The seed of hybrid maize cannot be grown in the following season, and all farmers are aware of that. And if an Iraqi farmer wants open pollinated maize, no problem, it is easy to find.
Fair enough -- but the argument stands that post-invasion Iraq was really not the time or place to be upending the agricultural system that had gotten the country as far as it had, and given what we know about seed creep when it comes to GMOs, Iraq farmers might not always have a choice about whether to go the genetically-modified route. That's bad enough, no? That's problem enough, caused by the U.S. through the mess we made of Iraq. There's no need to make it worse than it is.
A few correspondents asked, in response to my Order 81 story from last week, why India had let Monsanto to start selling genetically-modified seeds in-country when they had kept them out for so long. My response, somewhat to my embarrassment, was largely "dunno." But an anthropologist by the name of Keith Hart, who I'm hoping won't mind being cited here, sketched out a possible answer: India passed the Patents Amendments Act in 1999 to conform to the WTO's TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement -- partly because it really wanted to enter into a nuclear deal with the U.S. Seems plausible to me.
Thom Hartmann spent a little bit of time on his show today discussing my Order 81 article, which was of course completely awesome. The mp3 of that is here. There's also a good and informative discussion going on in the comments over on AlterNet, and it's not too late to Digg the story if you find it worthy.
AlterNet has a story up today that I wrote about Order 81, which is the directive issued by Paul Bremer back in 2004 establishing the legal framework for the respect of patented genetically-modified seeds in Iraq. I'm all into patents, and am newly obsessed with the future of food, so had been intrigued by Order 81 for a while now. But alas, there hasn't been too much to learn about it; the great Molly Ivins called it "one of the 10 biggest stories ignored or under-covered by mainstream media."
Then I started hearing about how Indian farmers were killing themselves by the thousands, when I started digging into it, it turned out that they were responding to same sort of Monsanto-driven, genetically-modified agricultural system that Bremer had introduced to Iraq. GM seeds promise great rewards, but when crops fail and harvests are smaller than promised, farmers find themselves in far deeper debt than they would have been had they stuck with traditional farming.
So that's the story I wrote, making the connection between the patented seeds we introduced to Iraq and how a similar scheme in India is driving farmers there to death. Again, it's up now and I'm hoping that you'll read it and keep the conversation going by offering your thoughts in the comments. And if your so inclined, go ahead and give it a Digg. (I swear, I didn't put it there nor do I know who did.)
As for the image above -- I'm calling it a "story card." It was a design exercise for myself but also a protest against the fact that so much of what we on the political left do is visually boring or just plain ugly. But I tend to think in pictures, even though I prefer to express what I'm thinking by writing it down. Consider it a challenge to better designers than me to come up with better ways of showing to go along with all our telling.
