seed-saving now illegal in iraq

someone from my CSA's list posted this. this, to me, is horrible beyond words, not that everything that is happening over there right now isn't. i am reminded of the conquistadors forbidding the aztecs to grow amaranth. this sickens me.

This Friday, Peacework Farm will be hosting a seed saving workshop and soil health program. If they were in Iraq, this would be illegal.

-Debby
*****************************************************
10/17/2004
American Multinational Firms Stealing Iraqi Grain Seeds
Staff of GRAIN

When the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) celebrated
biodiversity on World Food Day on October 16, Iraqi farmers will be
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.

 

The US is out of control...I almost wish some body would put us in our place. We're a big spoiled child.

 

I can't believe the shit that is happening over there in the name of PEACE!!

It is messing up sooooo many people in sooooo many countries. What do the governments think they are doing? They have let this drag on for too long. Now I see some poor reservists are the ones getting their asses kicked of all the crap in the prison there. I think they need to look far higher in the ranks for the true cause of all the bullshit that is going on there and has gone on there.

How can anything that has happened there equal peace!!!!

*steps back off her soap box and slowly walks away*

Love & Anger
EnonEmouse

 

the governments of the world couldn't care less about peace, not when so many of them are getting wealthier through war and destruction. they don't want peace, they don't want food security for the people of iraw, or anywhere else, they want nothing less than total control over the world's food supply. why aren't more people enraged about this? where is the outcry?

 

And when I said clearly from the start that this invasion had everything to do with long planned geo-political control and corporate hegemonic dominance and nothing at all to do with the continually changing rhetorical claims of WMDs, Saddam's alleged genocides (never once proven to any satisfactory evidentiary standard), "terrorism" or the exportation of democracy (which in politcal doublespeak means nothing more than the export of MNC capitalistic control), I was continually attacked by our warloving contingent as a conspiracy theorist.

With each passing month, and each new revelation, my allieged "conspiracy theories" are vindicated.

So once again, for any who really wish to truly know why we invaded Iraq AND Afghanistan (and dare I reiterate, why 9/11 occurred in the first place as a traumatising catastrophic justification for an endless war for corporate profit), I suggest you read the PNAC blueprint (demonstrable being pursued by its very architects currently in power) "Rebuilding America's Defenses" and the later (but even more arrogantly explicit work of Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1998).

This is the hijacking of US unilateral military might for the pursuit of 18th century-minded imperialistic notions of empire.

 

wtf.... it grows more everyday into a black hole.

 

Funny how this kind of rot goes unnoticed as long as it is buried within an acceptably anti-Bush post.


Tell that to the Kurds you pathetic apologist.

 

Nice way to ignore the ENTIRE POINT OF THE THREAD, Pointbreak.

 

It has everything to do with the thread. If Lickherish makes a claim that the genocides never happened, Pointbreak is certainly entitled to respond to it. I also have to wonder why you would not oppose what Lick said, or do you actually beleive that?

 

The point of the thread is in the first post, not Lick's. This thread is about seed-saving being made illegal in iraq.

 

I said that the "genocides" were never proven, merely circulated by testimony of those with well known political opposition to Saddam and who also quite demonstrably sided with the Iranians during the Iran Iraq War (which by our standards of warfare would make any deaths during that war "collateral damage" not "genocide".

Far from proven

Until you warmongers learn to apply consistent standards and indeed begin demanding more than widely broadcast "claims" as "proof", you will continue to be shown utterly and willfully blind to the actual objectives (and causal factors) of our renewed Middle Eastern militancy.

You go ahead and continue railing, as I said above, I have continue to be vindicated as correct as the mask slips further from this charade day after day, week after week, month after month.

 

Dont mean to burst your bubble, but genocides were proven. They are still digging up Mass Gravesites. I know this because ive seen it on CNN, (I dont ever believe them) Fox news (never believe them) New York times (So so)
Heard it from american soldiers (I half assed believe most of them) And lastly Iraqi soldiers. (I think I can trust them because they hate our government anyway to an extent.)

Oh and heres a BBC link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3738368.stm

CNN link
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/13/iraq.graves/

Fox news
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,135243,00.html

The official Mass graves website
http://massgraves.info/

Didnt the Nazi's have mass graves? What they did back then was called genocide right? Im not saying its at that magnitude, but the intent was there.

Im still against the war in iraq by the way.

 

I suggest you read those articles again Andrew and pay more careful attention to the reports made by CNN (Fox News isnt even a credible source so I wouldn't bother relying on them if I were you) which I too have seen. None of these reports can nor have offered (once again) more than the standard status quo reaffirmation for previously established false paradigms and filters (established as previously shown by my links, by Chalabi/Allawi and their INC/INA cohorts in their lust to return and reclaim political power and prestige lost at the overthrow of Faisal II in the 1950's).

Even the reports you link to have indicated "bullet wounds", not mass death by gassing (and certainly no gas consistent with what Iraq was known to possess in that period.

I suggest, as it seems i must constantly do with you who prefer to continue blind allegiance to corporate fed tv lies and misinformation, that you read the link I provided which examines and annotates the arguments exhaustively.

What was used to justify our illegal invasion for geostrategic and corporate dominance of the region is inflated propaganda, just as has always been the case when Washington has needed to gull the public into support for their warmongering. The Pentagon Papers are testimony to just how systemically a web of utter deceit and falsehood can be established whilst the public's sentiments are manipulated with decontextualised images.

Fact the "mass" graves do not match the rhetoric of 100's of thousands, nor of the victims of gas attacks. They are rather every bit consistent with what our own Pentagon insists on calling "collateral damage" from a brutal and protracted war with Iran which Saddam fought in proxy for the US.

How many more years of revealed duplicities will it take before you pro-war yahoos realise the extent to which you have been duped. Even at this point, you show yourselves a used car salesman's dream in just how many times youll return to the sources of the lies and misinformation for vindication that just wont materialise.

Wake the fuck up!

 

Please forgive me for diverting the debate in order to make the "minor" point that LickHerIsh has denied the genocide of the Kurds. Of course his post had absolutely nothing to do with seed saving either, NOT THAT YOU SEEM TO GIVE A DAMN FOR SOME MYSTERIOUS REASON.

I promise that if in the future people deny genocides which really did happen, I shall let such statements go unchallenged unless it is the topic of the thread, because why dwell on such unimportant things?

Seed saving is not illegal in Iraq, this is just more hysteria. If some US company sells patented GM seeds in Iraq some day, and you buy their seeds, you can't save THOSE seeds. Big freaking deal. Save all the seeds you want.

 

Let it be known that all who bother to actually read, that I stated the genocides as woefully "unsubstantiated" by demonstrable documented and or forensic evidence as required by any court of law.

PB, as is his wont and underscoring once again his desperate dependence on mainstream media-fed groupthink and denial, has once again merely regurgitated a "belief" - according to which he prefers to subscribe in order to maintain his necessary self-justification for his support of a patently illegal foreign invasion and occupation (aka conquest) of a sovereign state.

The articles supplied by Andrew again fail to do more than reiterate the paradigm first introduced (as it has again been long exposed see previous links provided) by Chalabi/Allawi and their own politically grasping cohorts in a long ongoing effort to rally the military might of the US to usher them back into positions of power and control lost to their families in the 1950's.

Thus PB, like all of his ilk, offer no substantiation (and certainly none which has not alsready been addressed and cited as mere heresay again see link provided above) but yet presumes to indict those who rightly demand a body of evidence as required by any legitimate court or prosecutory authority. They will not for they cannot and they certainly dare not lest their last purely emotional (and feigned emotion at that) refuge of self deception be removed, leaving such warmongers to face the duplicity of their position.

But PB isnt content to merely adhere to unproven claims, he once again seeks to deny what is, in fact, documented reality, and dismiss it as hype.

http://www.grain.org/bio-ipr/?id=419

http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20040426_CPAORD_81_Patents_Law.pdf

or see: http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/#Orders (order 81) if the above does not open in your browser.

I leave it to those who actually care to do more than bury their head in the sand and derive their comprehension of Washington's intents and purposes (and those of its corporate backers) from sanitised, decontextualised mainstream corporate news reports and broadly distributed innuendo, to reconcile for themselves who is seeing the truth and who is continuing to adhere to claims of the known liars in power.

This act against Iraqi farmers is not new nor without precedent as it also was done against farmers in India, prompting a years-long struggle by grassroots consumer and biodiversity activists against megacorporations like Monsanto.

One can expect that in the ongoing chaos Washington has bequeathed to Iraq, no such mass organisation will be possible for many many years if not decades. The entrenchment of US corporate interests, sector by sector, over Iraq is thus extended a free hand for the foreseeable future.

 

Im translating this from prude to english: "The articles don't say what I want them to say."

 

You have a faulty translation then andrew and only continue to delude yourself without bothering to read what is clearly written and what is clearly absent by way of any legitimate evidence of "genocide".

Again I submit to you that mass graves of hundreds (certainly not the 10's nor 100's of thousands used as the case to visit our own destructions and injustices upon an already brutalised nation) "with bullet wounds" are equally and (when addressing oft made claims of genocide by gassing) far more likely the fallout of the barbarities of the protracted Iran Iraq War, fought by Saddam at Washington's behest and for Washington's agenda against the Ayatollah for unseating their own murderous tyrant The Shah. Such civilian dead, I would again remind you, which by the Pentagon's own duplicitous standards are to be deemed "collateral damage".

Continued insubstantial retorts from you and other groupthink denial artists such as PB only attest to the fact that indeed not only do you not bother reading the links you provide, but you certainly have failed to read the links provided for you.

 

Well I guess you right, since everyone else is always wrong and your always right. I will just blindly believe everything you say.... Because you are the holder of all knowledge, forgive me for my blatent disrespect sir.

Have A nice day....

 

Childish and self justifying quips such as that only make you look all the more entrenched in what you wish to believe rather than what the actual facts of the matter bear out.

If you dont have the maturity to go back, read the materials provided, weigh what you have heard regurgitated in the mainstream media without concrete empirical proof, and reassess your presumtpions based on empirical data, then of course we don't have anything left to discuss.

Such evasive and dismissive posturing is precisely how the right wing has systematically killed any real public debate in our country over the past 4 years. You seem little more than a living testimony to their efforts in that regard, Bravo!

 

You are the only person I can't take seriously on here. You're too wrapped up and consumed by YOUR reality. No ones opinion (let me reiterate OPINION) is ever correct to you. No ones facts are ever good enough. Your OPINION always seems to take priority over others.

Your no different than any other senile old man who tries to use their age as a measure of intellegence. Your snide responces have no effect on me, mainly because I know your a lonely old unemployed man who sits at home and reads a dictionary all day, while beating off to the new conspiracy theorist newsletter.

Bravo old man, go get a life..... please.

Anyways.... Now back to seed saving!
"Seed saving is not illegal in Iraq, this is just more hysteria. If some US company sells patented GM seeds in Iraq some day, and you buy their seeds, you can't save THOSE seeds. Big freaking deal. Save all the seeds you want."
*Good point pointbreak.

(By the way lick, I read your damn article about 3 posts ago.)