http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7915.htm

This incredible act of the US is not exactly the Marshall Plan unfolding.
Monsanto and Dow will control most of the seeds. What exactly motivates
people like this? This seems to be most insensitive measure, using poor
people to extract some even more cash from them, only so long as they have
no vote or input into the law? The US is acting like the world's most
feared and authoritarian regimes of the past did? Go wonder? The US is
acting as though they own Iraq and can use it as a 'slave' colony for it's
private pursuits. Imagine if this law was passed in the US?

john



Snippet from news article.


Under the new US Order, the saving and planting of seeds will be illegal
and market will only offer plant material produced by transactional
agribusiness corporations. The US Order introduces a system of private
monopoly rights over seeds and will force Iraqi farmers to relay on big US
corporations to buy its yearly crop seeds for planting. The term of the
monopoly is 20 years for crop varieties and 25 for trees and vines. During
this time the protected variety de facto becomes the property of the
breeder, and nobody can plant or otherwise use this variety without
compensating the breeder.

Iraqi farmers will have to buy and plant so-called "protected" crop
varieties brought into Iraq by mostly American transactional corporations
such as Monsanto and Dow Chemical. According to Focus on the Global South,
a Bangkok-based policy research and advocacy centre, "the new patent law
also explicitly promotes the commercialisation of genetically modified (GM)
seeds in Iraq", which will have detrimental effects on the environment and
people's health, and increase farmers' dependency on agribusiness.
Furthermore, 'commercial agriculture places a real premium on genetic
uniformity. It is not an adequate genetic reservoir for the future, they
rest on a very narrow genetic base, and it's been selected solely for the
goal of maximising production' and profits, said Hope Shand, Research
Director of Erosion, Technology and Concentration Group.

This is a "new US war against Iraqi farmers" said GRAIN, the
non-governmental organisation (NGO) which promotes sustainable use of
agricultural biodiversity and people's control over genetic resources and
local knowledge. The recent report by GRAIN and Focus on the Global South
has found that the new legislation has been carefully put in place by the
US administration in order to prevent Iraqis farmers from saving their
seeds and effectively hands over the seed market to transactional
corporations [2]. For example, Monsanto controls over 90% of the total
world area sown to transgenic seeds. "The US has been imposing patents on
life around the world through trade deals. In this case, they invaded
[Iraq] first, and then imposed their patents. This is both immoral and
unacceptable", writes Shalini Bhutani, one of the report's authors. The new
Order is an extension of the old genocidal economic sanctions.

Since 1990 the US imposed harsh conditions on Iraq through the
UN-supervised economic sanctions regimes. The sanctions restricted Iraq's
ability to export oil and more importantly to import vital commodities such
as food and medicines. Under the sanctions regime, Iraq's food security and
agricultural activities are severely threatened. Agricultural inputs such
as seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, farm machineries and other necessary
items for food production are not available under the dual-use policy thus
undermining food availability. The sanctions has damaged Iraq's
agricultural sector and caused the death of hundreds of thousand of Iraqis.

Reliable estimates from humanitarian aid organisations and UN officials
estimated that the total number of Iraqi deaths caused by the sanctions'
impact on food, medicines, water treatment and other health-related factors
is about 1.5 million, a third of them children under the age of 5 years. It
was a deliberate mass atrocity [3].

During the 13 years of UN-sponsored sanctions, Iraq's was barred from
importing important items such as agricultural fertilisers, pesticides,
foodstuff and many other agricultural tools essential for the production of
food for the Iraqi population. "You kill people without blood or organs
flying around, without angering American public opinion. People are dying
silently in their beds. If 5,000 children are dying each month, this means
60,000 a year. Over eight years, we have half a million children. This is
equivalent to two or three Hiroshimas", Ashraf Bayoumi, former head of the
World Food Programme Observation Unit, in charge of monitoring food
distribution in Iraq told Al-Ahram Weekly on 24 December 1998.

According to several credible reports, food shortages and malnutrition was
a lesser problem before the sanctions. "I went to Iraq in September 1997 to
oversee the U.N.'s 'oil for food' program. I quickly realized that this
humanitarian program was a Band-Aid for a U.N. sanctions regime that was
quite literally killing people. Feeling the moral credibility of the U.N.
was being undermined, and not wishing to be complicit in what I felt was a
criminal violation of human rights, I resigned after 13 months", Denis
Halliday, former humanitarian aid coordinator for Iraq told an audience at
Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts on November 05, 1998.

We know now that the pretexts for the US-Britain wars and sanctions on Iraq
are utter lies. Iraq had no WMD since 1991 and Iraq had no relations with
terrorist groups. The war on Iraq was initiated on the basis of overall
strategic goals that include the control of Iraq's natural resources,
including Iraq's oil. We also know that the invasion of Iraq in 2003
'constitutes blatant aggression by the US and Britain outside the bounds of
the UN Charter' and international law. US wars and the sanctions against
Iraq have severely damaged Iraq's ability to produce food for its
population.

The US Order 81 will complete this deliberate and illegal destruction of
Iraq's agricultural sector. By illegally invading Iraq and robbing Iraq of
its plant varieties, and depriving it of food security, the US is in
violation of international law. Iraq's plant varieties comprise the
agricultural heritage of Iraq belonging to the Iraqi farmers. Iraq
sovereignty including food sovereignty for the Iraqi people is paramount.

Only an end to US occupation and the return of Iraq's natural resources,
including biological resources, will ensure Iraq's freedom and liberation
from foreign forces.