The Order 81 "Controversy": Tales Told By Idiots

For some reason, about two months ago we here at Law Down On The Farm started seeing an increase of mail in the mailbag on the subject of Coalition Provisional Authority Order 81. As you know already, CPA81 was instituted by the Coalition Provisional Authority in April 2004. It's a revision of Iraqi law concerning protection of intellectual property.

You can read CPA81 here.

In particular, Chapter three quater was singled out for scrutiny as it institutes some protection for plant breeders.

The discourse was about like the following snippet:

Iraqi Order 81 is of special interest because it goes a long way in affecting every living being on the planet. This order prohibits Iraqi farmers from using the methods of agriculture that they have used for centuries. The common worldwide practice of saving heirloom seeds from one year to the next is now illegal in Iraq. Order 81 wages war on Iraqi farmers. They have lost the freedom and liberty to choose their own methods of agriculture

Pretty strong stuff. But it didn't stop there.

Jeremy Smith in The Ecologist called Order 81 "the ultimate war crime". Galil Hassan says of Iraqi farmers "the fate of their food sources and agricultural heritage is being looted behind closed doors."

"B-b-but Sparky! What does it do? What in the hell is going on here?!" you say.

Good question.

It seems that Iraq's farmers have a tradition of saving seed from year to year-like many farmers the world over, even a few here in the United States.

It also seems that Iraq's agricultural sector is in decline.

Galil Hassan blames it on 'criminal sanctions' -that's Newspeak for the U.N.'s Oil for Food Program and the sanctions imposed after Iraq's brutal invasion of Kuwait....didja forget that, Mr. Hassan?

It's quite likely that the decline of Iraqi agriculture began a few years before the sanctions. A cruise through the FAOs website suggests that desertification, salinization, and mismanagement on a governmental level are as much to blame as sanctions and war for the parlous state of the agricultural system in Iraq. In addition, Iraqi farmers were forced to sell the wheat and barley they grew to the old regime's government trading monopoly at artifically low prices. There's a universal principle at work here-nobody likes to work for free, either here, in Iraq, or any place else.

The UN's Food and Agricultural Organization says that 97 per cent of Iraqi farmers saved seed in 2002, and their report indicates that productivity declined steeply in the 1990s because of lack of machinery, low use of inputs (presumably fertilizer and herbicides), and deteriorating soil quality and irrigation infrastructure.

In an effort to increase Iraqi agricultural productivity, high yield plant varieties are being sent to Iraqi farmers in an effort to increase production of foodstuffs.

These include varieties of wheat that are used to produce pasta.

Somehow or other, because Iraqis do not generally eat pasta products, this is seen as the thin end of a wedge that's going to force GMOs on Iraqi farmers and make them pay for seed that replaces that which they used to save and rope them into some sort of subjugation to Monsanto for herbicides and patented seed varieties.

Nonsense. It's an effort to produce more food to eat, and to produce plant varieties that can be marketed and exported.

So....back to Order 81, in particular Article 3.

It allows for registration of plant varieties that have an identifiable genotype that is developed by selection or presumably by genetic engineering, and it prohibits propagation of a registered variety without the assent of the breeder. It also prohibits using saved seed from protected varieties. Protection will last 20 years from the date of registration.

That's it. No big plot to shanghai poor farmers in their loincloths. Nothing compels farmers to buy what they would not otherwise use. Nothing prohibits farmers from planting any existing variety, or saving seed, or doing any of the things that farmers have done in the region since time out of mind.

Quite the opposite seems true. Since 2004, when the Ministry of Agriculture was handed back to Iraqis to run, there is a consistent theme of transfer of farming expertise and technology to struggling farmers in Iraq. It's in the great tradition of farmers helping farmers that is one of the bright spots in an otherwise dismal decade of American foreign policy.

We've seen similar complaints from the same people concerning the Green Revolution. One time I was at a symposium where Nobel Prize winner Dr. Norman Borlaug spoke. A woman in the audience got up and started taking him to task for similar reasons. Borlaug interrupted her in mid tirade and said "Ma'am, we were concerned with feeding as many people as possible. If you can't do that, you can't do any of the other things."

Borlaug has said "If you desire peace, cultivate justice, but at the same time cultivate the fields to produce more bread. Otherwise, there will be no peace."

A moral for our times? No doubt about it.


And that leads us back to the words of the Bard which seem appropriate to this manufactured controversy concerning Order 81. This story truly is "...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

And the idiots are easily identifiable.