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.
