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.
