history

From Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos, pages 142-150.

BE ST PR ACTICES IN T WENTY- FIRST- CENTURY IRAQI AGRICULTURE

In 2003, months after Saddam Hussein was toppled, Paul Bremer, the American-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, declared Iraq “open for business” and spelled out a set of 100 orders that came to be known as the Bremer Orders. 58 These mandated sell- ing off several hundred state-run enterprises, permitting full owner- ship rights of Iraqi businesses by foreign firms and full repatriation of profits to foreign firms, opening Iraq’s banks to foreign ownership and control, and eliminating tariffs — in short, making Iraq a new playground of world finance and investment. At the same time, the Bremer Orders restricted labor and throttled back public goods and services. They outlawed strikes and eliminated the right to unionize in most sectors, mandated a regressive f lat tax on income, lowered the corporate rate to a f lat 15 percent, and eliminated taxes on profits repa- triated to foreign-owned businesses.

Many of these orders were in violation of the Geneva and Hague Conventions concerning war, occupation, and international relations, which mandate that an occupying power must guard, rather than sell off the assets of the occupied country. But if illegal under interna- tional law, the orders could be implemented by a sovereign Iraqi gov- ernment. To that end, an interim government was appointed by the United States in late 2003 and was pressed to ratify the orders when it was pronounced “sovereign” in 2004. And lest future elected govern- ments not be so pliable, one order declares that no elected Iraqi gov- ernment will have the power to alter them. 59

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Bremer Order 81, the “Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law,” includes a prohibition against “the re-use of crop seeds of protected varieties.”62 Why a law against seed saving and reuse? The protected varieties named in the order refer to genetically modified seed produced by Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, and other agribusiness giants, and at first blush, the prohibition seems mainly designed to protect the intellec- tual property rights of these firms — farmers cannot just buy the seed once and then pirate its offspring: ruthless, perhaps, but hardly uneth- ical or uncommon. And hardly relevant to best practices. However, the story only begins with the letter of the law.

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For millennia, Fertile Crescent farmers informally shared and traded seeds at harvest and planting time. In the twentieth century, they shifted to storing and retrieving seed from a national seed bank, located, alas, in Abu Ghraib, where the entire bank vanished after the bombings and occupation. This calamity, following war and epi- sodes of draught since 1991 and combined with the embargo by the United States and United Kingdom that limited access to agricul- tural equipment, caused Iraqi wheat production to drop dramati- cally and become unable to sustain the population for the first time in centuries. 65 The production crisis opened the door for the agri- business giants to move in: the seed bank destroyed, the harvest yield dramatically down due to natural disaster and years of war, Iraqi farmers were vulnerable, desperate, exploitable. They needed seed, and agribusiness-backed relief efforts were there to provide it. Bremer Order 81 sealed the farmer’s permanent dependence on the agribusiness giants.

The U.S. government handout of genetically modified seed in 2004 was like offering heroin to a desperate single mother out of a job, facing eviction, and despairing of the future. Not only did it promise relief, but the first bag was free. It permanently attached the recipi- ent to the supplier, and the addiction was deadly — to sustainable Iraqi farming, Iraqi self-sufficiency, and even the farmers themselves.

As the ink dried on the Bremer Orders, the U.S. Agency for Inter- national Development began delivering thousands of tons of wheat seed to the Iraq Agricultural Ministry, which distributed it at little or no cost to Iraqi farmers. 66 An Arizona agriresearch firm, the World Wide Wheat Company, provided thousands more bags of free seed. 67 These donations were combined with demonstration plots, run by Texas A&M for USAID and aimed at teaching Iraqi farmers how to grow the new high-yield crops. Thousands of farmers were lured into the new agricultural techniques, which also required the use of spe- cialized fungicides, pesticides, and herbicides. Free seed, the prom- ise of soaring production levels, and their teachers’ insistence that the uniform crops and accompanying chemicals represented modernity, wealth, and the future — together, these transformed centuries of Iraqi agriculture almost overnight. Bremer Order 81 secured that trans- formation. Prohibited from saving seeds of protected varieties, Iraqi farmers are now permanently bound to their foreign dealers, whose seed is ubiquitous in their fields, intermixed with all the heritage seed. Organic, diversified, low-cost, ecologically sustainable wheat produc- tion in Iraq is finished. 68

Half the free wheat seeds distributed in post-Saddam Iraq were for bread wheat; the other half was for pasta wheat, and pasta is no part of the Iraqi diet. 69 Thus, in addition to making Iraqi farmers dependent on giant corporations whose seeds, licensing, and chemi- cals they must now purchase annually (and for which state subsidies are available, while other farm subsidies were eliminated), they were being transformed from multicrop local food providers into monocrop participants in global import-export markets.70 Today, Iraqi farmers generate profits for Monsanto by supplying pasta to Texas school caf- eterias, while Iraq has become an importer of staples formerly grown on its own soil.

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Order 81 is reputed to have been drafted by Monsanto and emerges from the Bush administration’s close ties to agribusiness (and the extensive presence in the Bush cabinet of those ties), yet these facts are almost beside the point. The orders expressed and executed Bremer’s purpose in Iraq, which was not to democratize it, but to neoliberalize it. In this regard, even more significant than Monsanto’s direct inf lu- ence is that the orders fostering economic deregulation, privatization, and the structuring of competition preceded the building of democratic institutions; orders first, then constitutions, parliaments, councils, elections, and civil liberties. It is also noteworthy that the provisional government authorizing them, whose members were handpicked by the Bremer team and subject in all their actions to Bremer’s veto, con- sisted only of those who supported the U.S. occupation. In turn, this government proposed a process for ratifying the permanent constitu- tion that excluded all political parties not supporting the occupation. 77