Iraq Alert

11 November 2004
Seeds are becoming big transnational business in Iraq

As violence rages on in Iraq under the US-led military coalition, the occupation's corporate backers are waging a less visible but as deadly economic war against the Iraqi population.

In the frontline of this assault, less visible than the butchery of Fallujah, are the country's subsistence farmers who are losing the rights to use saved seed and their right to produce their local food.

A recent report issued by the two international NGOs, GRAIN and Focus on the Global South (footnote 1), scrutinises the Plant Variety Protection (PVP) rules. These were included in a new patent "order", one of 100 orders that were imposed on Iraq by the Coalition Provisional Authority of Paul Bremer, in April 2004, with the aim of opening the country to the full onslaught of globalised "free for all trade".

The PVP provisions are designed to suppress traditional seed-saving and exchange practices that go back to the neolithic era ten thousand years ago in favour of commercial rights that presage a takeover of Iraq's agriculture and food supply by transnational agricultural pesticide and seed corporations. The FAO estimated in 2002 that 97% of Iraqi farmers used their own saved seed or bought seed from local markets (2).

Their main crops are wheat, barley, date and pulses which are a large part of their diet and very much at the base of their food network. But under the new regime, states the report, "farmers can neither freely legally plant nor save for re-planting seeds of any "protected plant variety" that enters the country.

The rights of corporate plant breeders, (seed corporations who develop seed using genetic engeneering, who own the seed, all or part of their gene sequences, lease genes and seeds as a software, and shamelessly harvest royalties worldwide), extend to harvested material, including plants product obtained from the protected variety. For instance, if the protected variety is a type of wheat, a registered cultivar, that requires less kneading as flour to make bread, then the seed company could claim rights over the final product, in this case it could be a "copyrighted" french stick, brioche, croissant, or pizza base.

The unstated purpose of PVP is to allow the interests of industrialised agriculture to appropriate plant genetic material, apply scientific breeding techniques including genetic engineering, and come up with "new" varieties that meet commercial criteria. These are laid out by the UPOV convention as "new, distinct, uniform and stable" (3).

At Seed Savers in Australia we know from having grown thousands of farmers' varieties, that their seeds cannot meet these criteria. of uniformity. Even if indigenous people without formal education or even pen and paper, wanted to - or could afford to - they don't stand a chance of registering their seeds because their varieties are cross-pollinating, loaded with genes and very diverse.

The reason farmers keep these local food varieties is because they are very resilient, adapted to local conditions, and are more likely to give a crop then the modern hightech seeds that need pesticides, fertilisers and irrigation. These land race or farmers' varieties are the genetic base of todays food for all of us. This crop diversity is not rewared by the formal sector only used by corporate breeders for their specialised complex genes sequences that are the base of modern patented varieties.

We share the misgivings of GRAIN and other groups supporting biodiversity and food sovereignty, that other vulnerable countries such as Cambodia and Afghanistan we have recently visited, are being coerced by the US to accept PVP regimes similar to Iraq's, which go beyond the rules even of the WTO. Inevitably included in such bilateral trade "agreements" is the obligation to accept GE crops.

GRAIN also warns of the potential of biopiracy fuelled by IPR regimes that pander to corporate profiteering. The report mentions that Iraq's national seed bank, established in the 1970s, is feared lost, although samples of Iraqi varieties are held in trust at an agricultural institute in Syria. "These comprise the agricultural heritage of Iraq ... and ought now to be repatriated," the report urges (4).

The security of seed banks in Third World countries is of concern to Seed Savers subscribers. We are appealing for help from specialists in Intellectual Property law to advise us and advocate for our partner seed and food networks, in the Solomons, Ecuador, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Now is the time for people of goodwill not only to oppose the war on Iraq but also to support indigenous populations everywhere to resist those who are profiteering from war by naming them and boycotting their products. That was the drift of Arundhoti Roy's (author of The God of Small Things) speech in accepting the Sydney Peace Prize.

1 Iraq's New Patent Law: A Declaration of War Against Farmers, 15 Oct. 2004, www.grain.org/articles/?id=6

2 Modern Iraq is located in the Fertile Crescent where some of the food plants that we take for granted were first domesticated.

3 UPOV, the International Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties, www.upov.org

4 GRAIN Press Release, 15 Oct. 2004, www.grain.org/nfg/?id=23