Leave it to the
Kiwis to uncover this litle nugget of corporate imperialism in our Iraq "redestruction" policy:
Order 81, put in place by US official Paul Bremer, refers to seed-saving and patents. It is legally binding unless repealed by a future Iraqi Government... Seed companies can charge royalties for the seeds, and perhaps most importantly, Iraqi farmers are forbidden to save them... NGOs fear that American companies will supply Iraqi farmers with free seeds for a season or two, and then lock them into a system where they will have to pay for new seeds every year.
Irony of ironies? Iraq was the birthplace of wheat farming, and now the farmers there (an oppressed class in any country) are going to be turned into sharecroppers in a market fundamentalist
circle-jerk.
This fits the larger mission of the neo-cons in Iraq, which was to fashion a free-market paradise as a laboratory for all their anti-government laissez faire fantasies. Naomi Klein outlined these in her outstanding Harper's Magazine piece,
Baghdad Year Zero (September 2004):
The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.