Iraqi agriculture

Jay has sent some links recently that I'm trying to get posted for you. Catching up is hard work.

For the first topic....

It seems we're planning on imposing a new law in Iraq on agriculture. The law makes it illegal for a farmer to save seed from a given crop and plant a new crop from it the following year. Large corporations that are selling seed might be disadvantaged by such practice.

A new report [1] by GRAIN and Focus on the Global South has found that new legislation in Iraq has been carefully put in place by the US that prevents farmers from saving their seeds and effectively hands over the seed market to transnational corporations. This is a disastrous turn of events for Iraqi farmers, biodiversity and the country's food security. While political sovereignty remains an illusion, food sovereignty for the Iraqi people has been made near impossible by these new regulations.

"The US has been imposing patents on life around the world through trade deals. In this case, they invaded the country first, then imposed their patents. This is both immoral and unacceptable", said Shalini Bhutani, one of the report's authors.

...When the new law - on plant variety protection (PVP) - is put into effect, seed saving will be illegal and the market will only offer proprietary "PVP-protected" planting material "invented" by transnational agribusiness corporations.

  Today's Alternative News article

Yes, of course it's outrageous. Have you seen anything about it on the TV news? How about your favorite newspaper? I don't know what it means that "the market will only offer" proprietary material, because I don' t know how Iraqi farmers are buying seed now.

In case you are not aware of it, that is already the case here in the United States. Farmers cannot save seed from "proprietary material" - crops grown from seed grain purchased from a company selling patented grain (which is pretty much all of it) - since the 1994 amended Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA).

Seed produced from a PVPA variety with 1994 amendments cannot be sold, advertised, offered, delivered, consigned, exchanged, or exposed for sale without explicit authorization by the proprietary seed owner. In addition, a person is prohibited from soliciting an offer to buy the variety or transfer or possess it in any way. It is also illegal to condition the variety to resale for planting purposes. Dealers (retailers), seed cleaners (conditioners) and buyers (consumers) are all liable for these potential violations.

  article

Meanwhile, chemical giant Monsanto has been trying to push through something here in the U.S. that would absolutely prevent farmers from saving seed, without the need for laws. And this is a much more troublesome idea. It would give corporations a stranglehold on America's (and eventually as projected, the world's) food source. The method is called "terminator technology". In Monsanto's view of total control, it would develop seed crops that produce sterile seeds. A farmer could then plant the seed he buys from Monsanto, grow and harvest the crop, but the seeds the crop produces would be sterile, and would not produce another crop. The technology is there, but I believe it is not yet marketed. I haven't heard anything about it for a while, so I Googled the subject and found this terminator page on the Global Issues website, last updated in 2001, saying Monsanto had backed off for a while, presumably to let the furor die down. But, it states...

[E]ven without such terminator technology, under patent laws in Canada, U.S. and a number of other industrialized nations, it is illegal for farmers to re-use patented seed, or to grow Monsanto's GM seed without signing a licensing agreement. Hence the underlying motives behind terminator technologies have still been achieved while being stacked against the farmer. In a prominent case, a Canadian farmer was found guilty of growing patented seeds, even though he did not know of it. The pollen from the patented canola seeds from a nearby farm had pollinated with his and thus he had to pay Monsanto for licensing and profit from the seeds.

...but hey, do what you want...you're Monsanto.