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[Roze]

Anyone hearing about central India's ongoing epidemic of farmer suicides? where growers are killing themselves at a terrifying clip, has to be horrified. But among the more disturbed must be the once-grand poobah of post-invasion Iraq, U.S. diplomat L. Paul Bremer.

Why Bremer? Because Indian farmers are choosing death after finding themselves caught in a loop of crop failure and debt rooted in genetically modified and patented agriculture -- the same farming model that Bremer introduced to Iraq during his tenure as administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American body that ruled the "new Iraq" in its chaotic early days.

In his 400 days of service as CPA administrator, Bremer issued a series of directives known collectively as the "100 Orders." Bremer's orders set up the building blocks of the new Iraq, and among them is Order 81 , officially titled Amendments to Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law, enacted by Bremer on April 26, 2004.

Order 81 generated very little press attention when it was issued. And what coverage it did spark tended to get the details wrong. Reports claimed that what the United States' man in Iraq had done was no less than tell each and every Iraqi farmer -- growers who had been tilling the soil of Mesopotamia for thousands of years -- that from here on out they could not reuse seeds from their fields or trade seeds with their neighbors, but instead they would be required to purchase all of their seeds from the likes of U.S. agriculture conglomerates like Monsanto.

What Order 81 did was to establish the strong intellectual property protections on seed and plant products that a company like the St. Louis-based Monsanto -- purveyors of genetically modified (GM) seeds and other patented agricultural goods -- requires before they'll set up shop in a new market like the new Iraq. With these new protections, Iraq was open for business. In short, Order 81 was Bremer's way of telling Monsanto that the same conditions had been created in Iraq that had led to the company's stunning successes in India.



This is just sick 

1 Like LIBERTYNY likes this.

[Mangrove]

I kant help butt wonder how those pigs'll be able to enforce this mountain of warm, wet, sticky grade-A buffalo dung in that modern-day hell on earth Iraq

[TBM]

Yet another example of Monsanto's horrid and destructive control... I think everyone here is in agreement about Monsanto's products and business methods. Even farmers in America are growing tired of Monsanto crops, people are finally beginning to win lawsuits involving the destruction of crops and their pesticide induced problems here in US, but just like these unfortunate suicides of famers in other countries, you won't see that televised or in the news much... it's a slow steep climb to stop Monsanto, but the movement has started to gain momentum here in the US. Even after we end Monsanto's control on seeds and the like, it will take years for their pesticides to break down in the soils and things start to return to normal.