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["Wendy" <crazygardens AT nationi.net>]

Has anybody heard anything about this?   This kind of stuff makes me sick.
Wendy



As part of sweeping "economic restructuring" implemented by the Bush 
Administration in Iraq, Iraqi farmers will no longer be permitted to save 
their seeds. Instead, they will be forced to buy seeds from US 
corporations -- including seeds the Iraqis themselves developed over 
hundreds of years. That is because in recent years, transnational 
corporations have patented and now own many seed varieties originated or 
developed by indigenous peoples. In a short time, Iraq will be living under 
the new American credo: Pay Monsanto, or starve.

When the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) celebrated biodiversity on 
World Food Day on October 16, Iraqi farmers were mourning its loss.

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.

The new law in question [2] heralds the entry into Iraqi law of patents on 
life forms - this first one affecting plants and seeds. This law fits in 
neatly into the US vision of Iraqi agriculture in the future - that of an 
industrial agricultural system dependent on large corporations providing 
inputs and seeds.
In 2002, FAO estimated that 97 percent of Iraqi farmers used saved seed from 
their own stocks from last year's harvest or purchased from local markets. 
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. The new law totally ignores all the contributions Iraqi 
farmers have made to development of important crops like wheat, barley, date 
and pulses. Its consequences are the loss of farmers' freedoms and a grave 
threat to food sovereignty in Iraq. In this way, the US has declared a new 
war against the Iraqi farmer.

"If the FAO is celebrating 'Biodiversity for Food Security' this year, it 
needs to demonstrate some real commitment", says Henk Hobbelink of GRAIN, 
pointing out that the FAO has recently been cosying up with industry and 
offering support for genetic engineering [3]. "Most importantly, the FAO 
must recognise that biodiversity-rich farming and industry-led agriculture 
are worlds apart, and that industrial agriculture is one of the leading 
causes of the catastrophic decline in agricultural biodiversity that we have 
witnessed in recent decades. The FAO cannot hope to embrace biodiversity 
while holding industry's hand", he added.