Plowing Iraq for Profits

Iraq's Fertile Crescent, the fabled birthplace of ancient grains and agricultural civilization, is emerging as a new market opportunity for American agribusiness. Even as U.S. officials tout gracious shipments of food aid and technical assistance to thankful Iraqi farmers, the agenda articulated by government agencies and industry groups is clear – Iraq's fragile food sector, battered by decades of war and sanctions, is open for business.

U.S. exports of wheat, rice, soybean products and poultry to Iraq all ballooned in 2003 after sanctions were lifted. Freshly minted contracts show American wheat exporters are expanding sales (albeit still small) to Iraq, and congressional testimony by industry groups shows their keen interest in recapturing what was once, through the late '80s, a profitable destination for U.S. crops.

And the American project extends beyond prying this revived market away from Australia and other nations that did agricultural business with Saddam Hussein during the sanction decade. The broader agricultural plan includes privatizing state-run food companies, phasing out farm subsidies, boosting food prices and, possibly, introducing genetically altered seeds that are patented and not reusable – all moves that dovetail with an overall neoliberal strategy to open up and deregulate Iraq's markets.

This broader push for privatization is reflected in the language of Order 81, one of among 100 legal orders left behind by U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer's departed regime. This order, which covers patents and copyrights, including "protected plant varieties," calls for a "transition from a non-transparent centrally planned economy to a free-market economy."

Patenting the future

Order 81 paves the way for genetically modified crops (GMOs), stating: "Farmers shall be prohibited from reusing seeds of protected varieties." The order, exposed by Focus on the Global South and GRAIN in an October 2004 report, does not require Iraqi farmers to use GMOs. But it etches into Iraqi law WTO-style patent protections for genetically engineered crops – assuring U.S. GMO-producing firms a legally protected niche in the country's future.

Agricultural giant Monsanto, for one, claims to have no interest. "For the record, Monsanto has no plans to introduce biotechnology in Iraq," insists company spokesman Chris Horner. "It doesn't fit with our business plans." If security and other factors improve, Horner says, "there could be opportunities for conventional seeds and chemicals. ... I would not characterize it as an emerging market." The outcry about Order 81 has "no basis in fact," says Horner. "How many new patented seed varieties are there in Iraq? Zero."

But the law was enacted only last April, and activists say its implications are far-reaching. "If seeds had to be patented, there would have to be significantly more money in the farmer sector," says Antonia Juhasz, former program director for the International Forum on Globalization, who is writing a book about Iraq. "Only those who can afford to patent or buy patented seeds would remain farmers." At the same time, she suggests, the order establishes an economic beachhead into the rest of the region for the GMO industry.

Deborah James, global economy director at Global Exchange, calls seed-saving prohibitions like Order 81 "one of the biggest assaults on food security." Farmers, she explains, would be forced "to buy from multinational corporations like Monsanto, instead of doing what farmers have done throughout the millennia: guaranteeing food security by saving seed varieties."

Despite Monsanto's assurances, James cautions, "corporations never announce their plans to flood markets with genetically-modified food." Under NAFTA, "there wasn't supposed to be genetically modified corn coming to Mexico," yet GMO corn from the United States was discovered there in 2001. This February, a coalition of 70 groups from six Central American and Caribbean countries announced that GMOs – specifically, the infamous StarLink maize not authorized for human consumption – had been detected in U.N. food aid and commercial imports from the United States.