War, Food and Hunger

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST MILITARISM IS THE STRUGGLE AGAINST HUNGER

Seattle, WA. I have been reading a new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (available from Beacon Press). The book was written by author and food justice activist, Claire Hope Cummings, a long-time contributor to Pacifica Radio's "Against the Grain" radio series.

One of the more fascinating aspects of this book is the links it reveals between the current war in Iraq and the destruction of local food systems across the globe.

Precious antiquities are not the only part of Iraq's heritage that has been destroyed or pilfered in the wake of the U.S. invasion and continued occupation of Iraq. Cummings begins the book by emphasizing how the war and occupation have led to the destruction of Iraq's seed bank.

Iraq as a Wounded Vavilov Center

Iraq is one of the critical sources of Middle Eastern biodiversity and is of course considered the heart of the Mesopotamian "Vavilov Center." Named after the Russian scientist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, this refers to a center that is one of the original geographic locales for human domestication of wild relatives of our existing food and medicine crops.

The fertile lands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers created ideal conditions for the domestication and cultivation of wheat, one of the landrace cultivars Iraqi farmers developed more than 10,000 years ago. The Mesopotamians developed the rich land race diversity of wheat, a grain that has spread across the world. Seed-saving and local experimentation with wild relatives endemic to the bioregion were the key to this process. It could be said that the Iraqis gave the world the gift of bread.

Often overlooked in the outcry against the ecological atrocity of the Iraq War is the destruction of the habitat for countless native plants and animals and the displacement of the people that have nurtured and protected these species. Cummings forces us to acknowledge and recognize this ecological apocalypse.

Indeed, the entire structure and organization of agriculture in Iraq has been devastated. The country is now largely dependent on U.N. food aid and transnational corporations. Iraq's food self-sufficiency has been decimated by the war and the policies of occupation and "nation-building" that still drive the quotidian violence are continuing to affect the ability for people to end the conditions that perpetuate the violence of hunger and malnutrition.

This represents a threat to the millions of Iraqi people, especially children, who have faced increasing hunger and malnutrition ever since the aftermath of the first Gulf War waged by Bush I and the policies involving an "economic boycott" of Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait. Under Clinton, hunger and malnutrition increased despite the corrupt "Oil for Food" program.

This pattern represents a threat to all humanity as the violence against people and their plants continues to escalate across the world. The destruction by militarism of local food systems is more than just a symptom of a world gone mad in times of war and profiteering. It is a continuation of a process that Karl Marx had the good wisdom to call "the bloody primitive accumulation." We might recall that when the U.S. military waged war against the Dine Nation (Navajo), Kit Carson burned the peach orchards at Canyon de Chelly. Indeed, the purposeful destruction of food supplies and of local systems of food production has long been standard military strategy.

Cummings' book is a brilliant indictment of the neoliberal empire forged by the USA in the bloody aftermath of the collapse of the old Soviet regime that accelerated after 9/11.

Order 81: Planting the seeds of democracy?

In 2005, F. William Engdahl wrote an essay in Current Concerns with the intriguing title, Iraq and Washington's 'seeds of democracy.' This was a play on the words of George W. Bush, who declared that "the reason we are in Iraq is to plant the seeds of democracy..." Less obvious to most people is the irony in this statement given Paul Bremer's "Order 81."

Engdahl gives us a different take on "seeds" and "democracy" by focusing on Bremer's Order 81. I offer an extended quote from Engdahl's essay on this moment of neoliberal charm and logic:

The CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] explicitly defined the legal importance of the 100 Orders to leave no doubt that they were, indeed, orders. An Order was defined as, ‘binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people that create penal consequences or have a direct bearing on the way Iraqis are regulated, including changes to Iraqi law.’ In other words, Iraqis were told, ‘do it or die.’ The law of occupation was supreme.

Buried deep among the Bremer laws was Order 81, ‘Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law’.

At the heart of Order 81 was the Plant Variety Protection (PVP) provision. Order 81, states: ‘Farmers shall be prohibited from re-using seeds of protected varieties or any variety mentioned in items 1 and 2 of paragraph (C) of Article 14 of this Chapter.’

In plain English, this gives holders of patents on certain plant varieties, i.e. large foreign multinationals, absolute rights for 20 years over use of their seeds in Iraqi agriculture. The protected plant varieties are Genetically Modified or Gene Manipulated (GM) plants, and an Iraqi farmer who chose to plant such seeds must sign an agreement with the seed company holding the patent that he would pay a ‘technology fee’ and an annual license fee for planting the patented seeds.

Any Iraqi farmer seeking to take a portion of those patented seeds to replant in following harvest years would be subject to heavy fines from the seed supplier. Iraqi farmers would become vassals, not of Saddam Hussein, but of multinational GM seed giants.

Engdahl goes on to describe how the "Iraqis had held samples of such precious natural seed varieties in a national seed bank." The Iraqi seed bank "was located in Abu Ghraib, the city made infamous as a US military torture prison site in 2004. Following the US occupation and various bombing campaigns, the historic and invaluable seed bank in Abu Ghraib vanished, a possible further casualty of the Iraq war." An NPR report of 23 May 2007 stated that some Iraqi scientists had earlier (1996) moved a portion of the collection to Syria.

A bit of an explanation is perhaps in order. Paul Bremer was Bush's pencil pusher and policy-crafter on the ground in Iraq. His Pentagon advisers, Engdahl tells us, "had very different plans for Iraq’s food future." One wonders if any of this collection was already under the control of ex situ seed banks that could be readily accessed by corporations to modify and patent transgenic varieties.

This has been a very familiar story ever since the 1950s and when the Green Revolution was promoted by the USA to impose an American model of agricultural modernization on the rest of the world as a technological solution to famine and hunger. The anti-hunger line is a well-known neoliberal ruse meant to veil a strategy to maintain and extend control of food systems by transnational corporations.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Bremer, developed Order 81 in order to hand control of Iraq's food systems over to a handful of transnational corporations. According to reports cited by Engdahl, "the specific details of Order 81 on plants were written for the US Government by Monsanto Corporation, the world’s leading purveyor of GMO seeds and crops."

The people of the United States need to know the details of Order 81 and the destruction or theft of the collection of native landrace seeds kept at the Abu Ghraib seed bank. The reconstruction of Iraq requires rebuilding the local food systems and restoring the environmental conditions that have nurtured and sustained a vital center of agricultural innovation and experimentation for thousands of years. This requires that the wake of any immediate US military withdrawal include policies for the return and revival of displaced farming communities. If the US military knows the fate of the Abu Ghraib seeds, then it must see to it that the truth comes out and the seed collections returned to the rightful heirs.

The people of the USA need to recognize that our aggressive militarism inevitably involves acts of "structural violence," actions that create conditions that deny non-combatant civilian populations access to food, water, sanitation, shelter, medical care, and other basic necessities of human life. This is also fertile ground for justified anger and resentment toward our policies.

This violence is connected to our nation's leaders who seem to have a political desire to maintain the dominant position of the USA as the world's largest economic power. To me, these are the desperate actions of a teetering empire that refuses to face the challenge of a transition to a post-Peak Oil world. Instead of lashing about at the world, we might consider pursuing a peace-making foreign policy that plants the seeds of democracy by simply allowing the people to plant their own seeds.