[iDC] seed patents, Indian farmer suicides, and the future of Iraq

[Nancy Scola]

All--
I'm new to the list and very pleased to be here. Trebor kindly invited to
pass along a story I wrote and that just went live on the patented seed
system that the Coalition Provisional Authority imposed upon Iraq in 2004.
The twist, if you will, of the piece is that the U.S. introduced Iraq to the
same GM-driven agricultural world that is driving farmers in India's cotton
belt to commit suicide at a pretty remarkable rate. (One estimate is one
farmer death every eight hours.)

I love being able to share this story with you all because people with an
interest in iDC make up exactly the audience I hope a piece like this would
find. I'm of the opinion that the modern political sphere only starts to
make sense when we start connecting disparate dots -- thinking about things
from a cross-cultural and even cross-discipline perspective. At least,
that's the only way it makes any sense to me.

Without further ado, the story is below. It's also available online at
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62273/. I'd love to hear what you think
about it or, more importantly of course, the issues and ideas it raises.


-Nancy

--
Nancy Scola
nancyscola.com


Why Iraqi Farmers Might Prefer Death to Paul Bremer's Order 81

By Nancy Scola <http://www.alternet.org/authors/8263/>,
AlterNet<http://www.alternet.org/>.
Posted September 19,
2007<http://www.alternet.org/ts/archives/?date%5BF%5D=09&date%5BY%5D=2007&date%5Bd%5D=19&act=Go/>
.

Anyone hearing about central India's ongoing epidemic of farmer
suicides<http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-07-06T163214Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_India-283485-1.xml>,
where growers are killing themselves at a terrifying clip, has to be
horrified. But among the more disturbed must be the once-grand poobah of
post-invasion Iraq, U.S. diplomat L. Paul Bremer.

Why Bremer? Because Indian farmers are choosing death after finding
themselves caught in a loop of crop failure and debt rooted in genetically
modified and patented agriculture -- the same farming model that Bremer
introduced to Iraq during his tenure as administrator of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, the American body that ruled the "new Iraq" in its
chaotic early days.

In his 400 days of service as CPA administrator, Bremer issued a series of
directives known collectively as the "100 Orders." Bremer's orders set up
the building blocks of the new Iraq, and among them is Order 81
[PDF]<http://www.export.gov/iraq/pdf/cpa_order_81.pdf>,
officially titled *Amendments to Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed
Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law,* enacted by Bremer
on April 26, 2004.

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<http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=6>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.

What Order 81 did was to establish the strong intellectual property
protections on seed and plant products that a company like the St.
Louis-based Monsanto -- purveyors of genetically modified (GM) seeds and
other patented agricultural goods -- requires before they'll set up shop in
a new market like the new Iraq. With these new protections, Iraq was open
for business. In short, Order 81 was Bremer's way of telling Monsanto that
the same conditions had been created in Iraq that had led to the company's
stunning successes in India.

In issuing Order 81, Bremer didn't order Iraqi farmers to march over to the
closest Monsanto-supplied shop and stock up. But if Monsanto's experience in
India is any guide, he didn't need to.

Here's the way it works in India. In the central region of Vidarbha, for
example, Monsanto salesmen travel from village to village touting the
tremendous, game-changing benefits of Bt cotton, Monsanto's genetically
modified seed sold in India under the Bollgard(r) label. The salesmen tell
farmers of the amazing yields other Vidarbha growers have enjoyed while
using their products, plastering villages with posters detailing "True
Stories of Farmers Who Have Sown Bt Cotton." Old-fashioned cotton seeds pale
in comparison to Monsanto's patented wonder seeds, say the salesmen, as much
as an average old steer is humbled by a fine Jersey cow.

Part of the trick to Bt cotton's remarkable promise, say the salesmen, is
that Bollgard(r) was genetically engineered in the lab to contain *bacillus
thuringiensis*, a bacterium that the company claims drastically reduces the
need for pesticides. When pesticides are needed, Bt cotton plants are
Roundup(r) Ready -- a Monsanto designation meaning that the plants can be
drowned in the company's signature herbicide, none the worse for wear.
(Roundup(r) mercilessly kills nonengineered plants.)

Sounds great, right? The catch is that Bollgard(r) and Roundup(r) cost real
money. And so Vidarbha's farmers, somewhat desperate to grow the anemic
profit margin that comes with raising cotton in that dry and dusty region,
have rushed to both banks and local moneylenders to secure the cash needed
to get on board with Monsanto. Of a $3,000 bank loan a Vidarbha farmer might
take out, as much as half might go to purchasing a growing season's worth of
Bt seeds.

And the same goes the next season, and the next season after that. In
traditional agricultural, farmers can recycle seeds from one harvest to
plant the next, or swap seeds with their neighbors at little or no cost. But
when it comes to engineered seeds like Bt cotton, Monsanto owns the tiny
speck of intellectual property inside each hull, and thus controls the
patent. And a farmer wishing to reuse seeds from a Monsanto plant must pay
to relicense them from the company each and every growing season.

But farmers who chose to bet the farm, literally, on Bt cotton or other GM
seeds aren't necessarily crazy or deluded. Genetically modified agricultural
does hold the tremendous promise of leading to increased yields --
incredibly important for farmers feeding their families and communities from
limited land and labor.

But when it comes to GM seeds, all's well when all is well. Farming is a
gamble, and the flip side of the great potential reward that genetically
modified seeds offer is, of course, great risk. When all goes badly, farmers
who have sunk money into Monsanto-driven farming find themselves at the
bottom of a far deeper hole than farmers who stuck with traditional growing.
Farmers who suffer a failed harvest may find it nearly impossible to secure
a new loan from either a bank or local moneylender. With no money to dig him
or herself out, that hole only gets deeper.

And that hole is exactly where farmers have found themselves in India's
Vidarbha region, where crop failure -- especially the failure of Bt cotton
crops -- has reached the level of pandemic.

In may be that Bt cotton isn't well-suited to central India's rain-driven
farming methods; Bollgard(r) and parched Vidarbha may be as ill-suited as
Bremer's combat boots and Brooks Brothers suits. It may be the unpredictable
and unusually dry monsoon seasons that have plagued India of late. But in
any case, the result is that more and more of India's farmers are finding
themselves in debt, and with little hope for finding their way out.

And the final way out that so many of them -- thousands upon thousands --
have chosen is death, and by their own hands. Firm statistics are difficult
to come by, but even numbers on the low end of the scale are downright
horrifying. The Indian government and NGOs have estimated that, so far this
year, at last count more than a thousand
farmers<http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-07-06T163214Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_India-283485-1.xml>have
killed themselves in the state of Maharashtra alone. The
*New York Times* pinned it as 17,000 Indian farmers in 2003
alone<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/world/asia/19india.html?ex=1189656000&en=025df5acd4ef3e36&ei=5070>.
A PBS special that aired last month, called "The Dying
Fields<http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/vidarbha/index.html>,"
claimed that one farmer commits suicide in Vidarbha every eight hours.

But let's not be so pessimistic for a moment, and say that Iraqi farmers see
the risks of investing in unproven GM seeds. Let's say they reject the idea
that the intellectual property buried inside the seeds they plant is "owned"
not by nature, but by Monsanto. Let's say they decide to keep on keeping on
with nonengineered, nonpatented agriculture.

The fact is, they may not have a choice.

Here is where Order 81 starts to look a lot like the forced and mandatory
GM-driven agricultural system that cynics tagged it as when it was first
announced. Read the letter of the law, and the impact of Order 81 seems
limited to using public policy to construct an architecture that's simply
favorable to a company like Monsanto. The directive promotes a corporate
agribusiness model a lot like the one we have in the United States today,
but it doesn't really and truly put Monsanto in the driver's seat of that
system.

Actually handing the keys to Monsanto is instead biology's job.

Biology -- how so? That's a good question for Percy Schmeiser, the
Saskatchewan farmer featured in the film *The Future of
Food<http://www.thefutureoffood.com/>
*, who found himself tangled with Monsanto in a heated
lawsuit<http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/12/schmeiser.html>over
the presence of Roundup(r) Ready canola plants on the margins of his
fields.

The Canadian farmer argued that he had purchased no Monsanto canola seeds,
had never planted Monsanto seeds, and was frankly horrified to find that the
genetically modified crops had taken hold in his acreage. Perhaps, suggested
Schmeiser, the plants in question were the product of a few rogue GM seeds
blown from a truck passing by his land?

Monsanto was uninterested in Schmeiser's theory on how the Roundup(r) Ready
plants got there. As far as the company was concerned, Schmeiser was in
possession of an agricultural product whose intellectual property belonged
to Monsanto. And it didn't matter much how that came to pass.

Monsanto's interpretation of the impact of seed contamination is, of course,
a good one if its goal is to eventually own the rights to the world's seed
supply. And that goal may well be in sight. In fact, a 2004 study by the
Union of Concerned
Scientists<http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0311/p14s01-sten.html>found
that much of the
U.S. seed pool is already contaminated by GM seeds. If that contamination
continues unabated, eventually much of the world's seeds could labor under
patents controlled by one agribusiness or another.

In one agricultural realm like Iraq's, GM contamination could in short order
give a company like Monsanto a stranglehold over the market. Post-Order 81
Iraqi farmers who want to resist genetically modified seeds and stick to
traditional farming methods may not have that choice. Future generations of
Iraqi growers may find that one seed shop in Karbala is selling the same
patented seeds as every other shop in town.

And when that happens, what had been a traditional farming community --
where financial risk is divided and genetic diversity multiplied through the
simple interactions between neighboring farmers -- finds itself nothing more
than the home to lone farmers caught up in the high-stakes world of
international agribusiness.

It's a world not unfamiliar to former CPA honcho Bremer, if the company he
keeps is any indication. Robert Cohen, author of the book *Milk
A-Z<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0965919684/dorwaybookshelf>
*, talks about the Bush administration as the "Monsanto Cabinet."

Among the many connections between that company and the current White House:
Former Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman served on the board of directors of
Calgene, a Monsanto subsidiary; one-time Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld
had an eight-year stint as president of Searle, another Monsanto subsidiary;
Clarence Thomas worked as an attorney in Monsanto's pesticide and
agriculture division before coming to the Supreme Court as a George H.W.
Bush appointee.

Those connections, as much as anything else, might help to explain the
impetus behind and timing of Order 81. Let's suppose for a minute that
GM-driven globalized agriculture is, indeed, in the long-term best interests
of the new Iraq. Even in the best of circumstances, such a significant
policy shift in so core an economic sector can be expected to cause
short-term pain. When Bremer issued the directive, Iraq was hardly in a good
place: It had recently been invaded, its government dismantled. Considering
the desperate need for immediate stability in Iraq in April 2004, Order 81
begins to look like the triumph of connections and ideology over
clear-headed policymaking.

In India, seed activists like Vandana Shiva are working to weaken the
connection between that world of U.S. agribusiness and the farmers in
villages and towns across India. Shiva, featured in the PBS special *The
Dying Fields,* implores local farmers to stop forking over their money to
commercial seed producers and return to the days of homegrown seeds. While
Monsanto sells seeds that become India's corn, rice, potatoes, and tomatoes,
it's cotton where Monsanto is king, as Shiva well knows. "You have become
addicted to Bt cotton," she chides farmers. Though if the perpetuation of
the GMO-seed/crop-failure cycle is any indication, few Indian farmers are
listening.

Will Iraqi farmers making their way in the new post-Order 81 agricultural
world fare any better? Maybe. Can they manage to reap the benefits of
genetically modified farming, trading their newfound dependence on Monsanto
and other corporate behemoths for the increased yield their patented and
IP-protected seeds promise? Hopefully.

But it's possible that Iraq's farmers will indeed find themselves in the
same predicament that India's farmers have ended up in -- a world where
growers no longer rely upon their fields and their communities to meet their
needs but in a world in which, when hard times strike, the only way out
seems like the final exit. A world in which, in a twist perhaps worthy of
Shakespeare, the farmer borrows one last time from whatever bank or
moneylender will hand over a few last rupees, buys one last bottle of
Roundup(r), and -- as has happened so many times in India -- ends it all by
drinking it down.

Monsanto to the end.

*****
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