U.S. companies, through influence with the Iraqi government, are trying to corner the market for Iraq's food supply.
Agriculture started in the Fertile Crescent and was the key to the development of fixed settlements - the cornerstone of civilization, essential to man's survival as a species. Over thousands of years, farmers have bred and crossbred different food-yielding plants, invented new farming techniques and new ways of increasing the output of the field. The most basic of these techniques include using seeds from this year's crop for next year's planting and trading seeds with other people.
For the first time since the development of written language, it is illegal in Mesopotamia to replant seeds or to trade seeds from crops farmers have grown. Paul Bremer, former American Administrator of the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority, made a change to Iraq's intellectual property law last April that requires Iraqi farmers to pay a yearly license to North American companies for each year's crops.
Without a renewed license, Iraqi farmers cannot replant each year's seeds, like 97 percent of them currently do. Also, they cannot sell or trade the seeds - because the genetic materials of the crops are patented.
Iraqis could theoretically opt to farm the same, non-patented seeds that they have been farming, assuming that in the violent chaos of post-war Iraq, they can actually find such seeds.
But there are two reasons why that's practically unthinkable. First, it's impossible to tell which seeds are patented without doing expensive genetic testing. A farmer could unwittingly buy patented seeds, or unwittingly sell them. Second, even if the farmer plants non-patented seeds, the wind will blow pollen and seeds from neighboring farmers' fields. Seeds and pollen spread, sometimes hundreds of miles. It's one of the reasons that plant species survive.
Oddly, although the non-patented farmer may not want the patented crops in his field, he can still be liable if patented plants are found growing there. Effectively, all farmers will have to pay the yearly license for the seeds.
Percy Schmeiser, a Saskatchwan farmer, was sued by agribusiness Monsanto, makers of the weed killer Roundup and a type of canola plant immune to Roundup, when the "roundup-ready" canola was found on Schmeiser's farm - blown there by the wind. Although Schmeiser didn't want the plants, and tried to get rid of the plants, he lost the lawsuit. The ruling established a precedent: Even unknowingly having patented crops in your field, no matter how they got there, carries guilt. Canada shares similar agriculture IP laws with the United States and Iraq.
Genetically manipulated food isn't new. Farmers have been throwing away seeds that yield bad crops in favor of seeds that yield good crops for millennia, creating optimum crops through human-guided artificial selection. Even before direct gene modification was possible, genetic engineering was done through splicing and hybridization. What is new is the idea that agribusinesses are able to patent their crops' DNA.
Bremer's order makes it especially hard to work as a farmer in Iraq, and makes a convenient incentive for Iraqi farmers to sell their farms to American interests.
If American agribusiness corporations establish a stranglehold on Iraqi food, Iraqis will essentially live and die at their whim. This decision to place the interests of a powerful American industry above the basic necessities of Iraqis illustrates why so many Iraqis are so desperate to kick the American invaders out of the country and why it is vital for all Iraqis they succeed.
Boyko is a journalism graduate student.
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