Gordon Brown and other EU leaders in campaign to promote modified foods
Sunday, 26 October 2008
Gordon Brown and other European leaders are secretly preparing an unprecedented campaign to spread GM crops and foods in Britain and throughout the continent, confidential documents obtained by The Independent on Sunday reveal.
The documents – minutes of a series of private meetings of representatives of 27 governments – disclose plans to "speed up" the introduction of the modified crops and foods and to "deal with" public resistance to them.
And they show that the leaders want "agricultural representatives" and "industry" – presumably including giant biotech firms such as Monsanto – to be more vocal to counteract the "vested interests" of environmentalists.
News of the secret plans is bound to create a storm of protest at a time when popular concern about GM technology is increasing, even in countries that have so far accepted it.
Public opposition has prevented any modified crops from being grown in Britain. France, one of only three countries in Europe to have grown them in any amounts, has suspended their cultivation, and resistance to them is rising rapidly in the other two, Spain and Portugal.
The embattled biotech industry has been conducting a public relations campaign based round the highly contested assertion that genetic modification is needed to feed the world. It has had some success in the Government, where ministers have been increasingly speaking out in favour of the technology, and in the European Commission, with which its lobbyists have boasted of having "excellent working relations".
The secret meetings were convened by Jose Manuel Barroso, the pro-GM President of the Commission, and chaired by his head of cabinet, Joao Vale de Almeida. The prime ministers of each of the EU's 27 member states were asked to nominate a special representative.
Neither the membership of the group, nor its objectives, nor the outcomes of its meetings have been made public. But The IoS has obtained confidential documents, including an attendance list and the conclusions of the two meetings held so far – on 17 July and just two weeks ago on 10 October – written by the chairman.
The list shows that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany sent close aides. Britain was represented by Sonia Phippard, director for food and farming at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
The conclusions reveal the discussions were mainly preoccupied with how to speed up the introduction of GM crops and food and how to persuade the public to accept them.
The modified products have to be approved by the EU before they can be sown or sold anywhere in Europe. But though the Commission officials are generally strongly in favour, European governments are split, causing the Council of Ministers, on which they are represented, to be deadlocked.
In that event the bureaucrats on the Commission wave them through anyway. They are legally allowed to do this, but overruled governments and environmental groups are unhappy.
The conclusions of the first meeting called for the "speeding up of the authorisation process based on robust assessments so as to reassure the public", while the second one added: "Decisions could be made faster without compromising safety."
But the documents also make clear that Mr Barroso is going beyond mere exhortation by trying to get prime ministers to overrule their own agriculture and environment ministers in favour of GM. They report that the chairman "recalled the importance for prime ministers to look at the wider picture", "invited the participants to report the discussions of the group to their heads of governments", and "stressed the importance of drawing their attention to ongoing discussions in the Council [of Ministers]".
Helen Holder of Friends of the Earth Europe said: "Barroso's aim is to get GM into Europe as quickly as possible. So he is going straight to prime ministers and presidents to tell them to step on their ministers and get them into line."
The conclusions of the meetings on public opposition are even more incendiary. The documents ponder "how best to deal with public opinion" and call for "an emotion-free, fact-based dialogue on the high standards of the EU GM policy". And they record the chairman emphasising "the role of industry, economic partners and science to actively contribute to such a dialogue". He adds that "the public feels ill-informed" and says "agricultural representatives should be more vocal". And in a veiled swipe at environmental groups he says that the debate "should not be left to certain stakeholders who have a legitimate but vested interest in it".
What they say
'We have to feed an extra 2.5 billion people. It would be extraordinary if we chose not to exploit the most important breakthrough in biological science'
Professor Allan Buckwell
'New developments will benefit the world's poorest farmers: GM rice that is drought-resistant; transgenic crops with genes to protect against disease'
Lord Dick Taverne, Sense About Science
'GM crops pose unacceptable risks to farmers and the environment and have failed to increase yields despite funding at a cost of millions to UK taxpayers'
Kirtana Chandrasekaran, FoE
'GM crops do not increase yields. Scientists have found genetically engineered insecticide in crops can leak and kill beneficial soil fungi'
Peter Melchett, Soil Association
Q & A: The trouble with modified crops
How much GM is grown in Europe?
Very little. The documents boast the area increased by 21 per cent last year, proving "growing interest". But it still only covered 0.119 per cent of Europe's agricultural land.
What are the problems?
Mainly environmental. Official trials in Britain showed that growing GM crops was worse for wildlife than cultivating conventional ones. Worse, genes escape from the modified plants to create superweeds and to contaminate normal and organic crops, denying consumers a choice to be GM-free.
Do they endanger health?
Hard to tell. Some studies show that they may do, others (including almost all those by industry) are reassuring. The trouble is that very few truly independent, peer-reviewed research has been done. Most consumers have sensibly concluded that they would sooner be safe than sorry, particularly as they get no benefit from buying GM.
Can they feed the world?
Almost certainly not. Despite all the hype, present GM varieties actually have lower yields than their conventional counterparts. The seeds are expensive to buy and grow, so wealthy developing-world farmers would tend to use them and drive poor ones out of business, increasing destitution. The biggest agricultural assessment ever conducted – chaired by Professor Robert Watson, now Defra's chief scientist – recently concluded that they would not do the job.
Before buying anything you should sit down at the kitchen table with paper and pencil because you have some decision making to do. Ideally, everyone who’ll be depending on the food storage should be at the table as well, but the person who will be responsible for the program can do it alone, if necessary.
Your first decision to make is “what are you storing food for?” What situations and circumstances do you think might occur which would cause you to need your food stores and prevent you from easily being able to get more? Make a list of everything that occurs to you which you think has some significant probability of happening. Just jot them all down as they come to you and then on another sheet reorder them according to how likely you think they are to occur. While you are doing this, make a note beside each one of whether or not you will have some means of cooking or preparing food should it come about. You’d really hate to have stored away hundreds of pounds of food only to find yourself with no way to make it into a meal. This process is called “scenario planning.”
Once you have your list, write next to each scenario the length of time you feel it might last. Chances are, the situations that will concern you most are weather related and some of the more common man-made disasters, but may also cover long term unemployment, Y2K (the millennium computer bug), severe economic depression, war or civil insurrection, or threats even more exotic (cometary impacts, anyone?).
Now that you have a list of probable scenarios and the length of time you think each may last, you are ready to plot the course of your program. Plan your food purchases to meet the needs of the shortest duration scenarios on your list first. As you accomplish each goal set your sights on the next longest and work towards covering that one. In this way you are steadily preparing for one scenario after another while making progress towards your ultimate goal of meeting the needs of your longest lasting concerns.
Right off the bat, I want to say where you should not get the money to pay for your food storage and that is by running up debt. This means that you should not put your food purchases on credit cards. The money lost to credit card interest rates is self-defeating in the long run and will just get you further into a problem rather than getting you out of it. If you are the type who can and does pay off their credit card purchases every month when the bill comes due, then using one might be a real convenience; otherwise it’s a temptation to be avoided.
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Fortunately, the financial outlay need not be so great that you must spend your children’s college fund or sacrifice your retirement account. With a little forethought and research it might be so little as to represent the family foregoing one restaurant meal a month or renting a video to watch at home rather than paying full admission to see a first run film at the theater.
As a matter of fact, unless you are compelled by special circumstances to do otherwise, you are better off to not spend a lot of money at first. Like many other long term projects, there is a learning curve involved with building a good food storage program. Your initial purchases will most likely be small while you’re learning more about what you need to do. In this way you are less likely to make expensive mistakes that will have to be corrected later.
If you can afford to spare as little as ten dollars a week then you can make a solid beginning in putting food by against time of need. Just today I made a trip to one of my larger local supermarkets, Albertson’s, and wrote down a few prices. (See table.)
Rice, flour, beans, milk, sugar, shortening, Tang, canned greens, carrots, pumpkin, and tuna will make for a pretty bland diet, but for only $40 and a month’s time it will give you a solid start on a good program. In the second month you can begin to expand the variety of foods in your program.
The specific types and amounts of food I’ve listed are not meant as rigid rules, but as illustrations of what can be done. Your personal tastes and the circumstances of the scenarios you’ll be planning for are what should determine your specific purchases. It is important to only purchase those foods you are presently already eating or are willing to learn to eat starting as soon as you purchase it. Otherwise, there will be the temptation to leave it in its container and not use it. This is bad planning because it leads to failure to rotate the foods out in a timely fashion as they age or lose nutritional content and palatability. By not using the foods in your storage program you also do not get the experience of how to make them into tasty, attractive meals your family will want to eat. This will leave you at a severe disadvantage when the crunch comes and what’s in your larder is all you’re going to get.
As I cover each purchase I’ll give some considerations you should think about such as: If you don’t foresee having a way to bake bread, then buying a lot of flour might not make much sense, but you might make flat breads instead or learn to do your baking in a Dutch oven. If some of your short term plans call for removing to another location on short notice, then the food for that part of your planning needs to be of a type that can be eaten with little preparation or cooking being required. If safe water will be in short supply, then foods that require a lot of it to prepare them might not be a good idea.
The foods that I have chosen all have excellent storage characteristics for the short to medium term, up to about two years. Detailed information and instructions on storing foods may be found in my Prudent Food Storage FAQ. If you have Internet access you may download a copy free from the Providence Cooperative web site at http://www.providenceco-op.com or from one of the host sites that also carry it. Many of them may be found by searching on the term “prudent food storage” using most any search engine.
Your first $10 storage food purchase buys 10 pounds of rice, 2 pounds of beans, a jar of Tang, and 5 pounds of vegetable shortening. The 17 cents change is carried over into the next week.
This amount of rice and beans gives a ratio of 5:1, a perfectly acceptable essential amino acid balance (commonly called “making a complete protein”) for most healthy adults. An extra $3.45 expenditure will double the amount of rice and another $3.49 will buy five times the amount of beans. Purchasing the rice and beans first means you have food that can be made edible with no other foods having to be added to them and needing no preparation other than boiling. If cooking fuel is short, split peas, lentils, and black eyed peas cook quickly. Pre-soaking and/or pressure cooking is even more economical.
The Tang orange drink provides 100% of the US RDA vitamin C requirement in every 8 oz. glass (6 qts. = 24 8-ounce glasses), lesser amounts of other important nutrients such as vitamin A as well as some sweet taste since we have not yet bought anything else with sugar in it. Vitamins A, C, and D are the major nutrients typically lacking in most storage foods. Don’t assume that any drink mix or canned juice has vitamin C in it. Read the nutritional facts label on the side closely to see what the manufacturer claims it contains. An appalling number of juice products, even some canned citrus juices, claim no vitamin C content at all.
The last purchase is the can of vegetable shortening. Fat is actually a necessary nutritional component even if we do tend to eat too much of it in the present day U.S. The shortening allows you to make foods such as biscuits, fry breads, refried beans, pancakes, fried rice and pan breads, and contributes flavor. In a survival diet, fat is an important source of vital calories. This is an important consideration for small children, pregnant women, the elderly, and the ill who might otherwise have trouble eating enough bulky beans, rice, etc., to gain sufficient calories to stave off weight loss and possible malnutrition.
Your second $10 nets you 20 pounds of all purpose white flour, 5 pounds of granulated white sugar, 3 cans of carrots, and 3 cans of spinach. The 24 cents left over is carried over into the next week.
You now can make bread to give some variety to your rice and bean diet. If you don’t have any store-bought yeast to raise your bread, you can do what your pioneer forebearers did and learn to make “sourdoughs” to leaven it. If you have a grain mill or can acquire one then you may be able to find a local source of whole grains at a reasonable price to supplement or replace the white flour. The sugar allows you to make sweet breads, puddings from the flour or rice, adds calories, and greatly contributes to taste.
Of all the canned vegetables to be had from the grocer the dark green and the orange vegetables give the most nutritional value for the money. Canned greens such as turnip, mustard, collards, spinach, and kale range in value from 50-110% of the RDA of the important nutrient vitamin A (in the form of carotene) per half-cup serving. Many of them also include a fair amount of calcium and vitamin C as well. The carrots have 100% RDA of Vitamin A per half-cup.
The third ten spot buys you the 64 oz. box of dry milk. The slim remaining penny is carried over into the next week.
Sixty-four ounces of non-fat dry milk will make 20 quarts of skim milk to provide essential amino acids, necessary calcium, along with vitamin D (30% of the RDA of calcium and 25% of vitamin D per 8 oz. glass of reconstituted milk). Unlike fresh liquid milk, the dry powder is shelf stable and can be stored for long periods of time. It may be drunk as straight milk or used to enhance dishes made from the ingredients purchased in the other weeks. Dry milk can also be used to make excellent yogurt and even non-fat cheese.
Your last purchase of the first month’s cycle brings in 10 cans of tuna, 2 cans of pumpkin, and 5 cans of turnip, mustard, kale or collard greens. The remaining 32 cents is added to the surplus from the prior weeks, now totaling 74 cents.
Although the grain, beans, and milk provide all necessary amino acids, most of us will rebel at a purely vegetarian diet, so at least a little meat three or four days out of a week can go a long way towards making matters tolerable. Other canned meats can be substituted, but as a general rule tuna is leanest and cheapest per ounce. Beware of paying canned meat prices for fillers like pasta, rice, or potatoes. They can be added much more cheaply after the fact rather than buying them already in the can with the meat.
The pumpkin (plain solid pack, not pie filling) can be used like any winter squash, carrots, or sweet potatoes and carries a tremendous amount of vitamin A in the form of carotene (300% of the RDA per half-cup). A friend of mine has developed a pumpkin biscuit that I’ve grown quite fond of. It makes a good baked dish and is very versatile in casseroles, soufflés, puddings, and as either a sweet or savory vegetable. There’s more to pumpkin than pies.
The 74 cents left over seems trivial but it will buy 2 1-pound cartons of iodized table salt, or yeast to make bread with, or baking soda for leavening and other uses, or a small can of pepper to season food. You can also hold it over to combine into the next month’s surplus.
The purchasing cycle could be repeated month to month until you reach the amounts you desire, or varied to broaden the selection in your cupboard.
If you can afford to use the economies of scale that making larger bulk purchases gives you, then the price per pound of the foods you buy will drop considerably. By taking advantage of sales, bulk food outlets, warehouse groceries such as Sam’s Club and Costco, local restaurant and institutional food suppliers, or ethnic grocers (Asian, Hispanic, etc.) you will do considerably better than what I’ve outlined above.
If you have the time and resources available to you, much of the fruit and vegetable portion of your storage program can be economically acquired by growing it yourself. Not only do you get wholesome food, but by putting it up yourself you get exactly what you want in the way that you want it. If being frugal is of paramount importance though, growing your own will need some careful analysis to be certain you’re not spending more in time, labor, and equipment than the value of the food will make up for. This is especially true when it comes to food preservation, but you can at least partially offset this by choosing appropriate preservation methods. Pressure canning requires quite a bit of expensive startup equipment (canner, jars, lids, rings, etc.) which may make the operation uneconomical. However, if you dry the food instead you can often do this at a much lower cost.
One area of home preservation that generally will be worthwhile to do yourself is canned meats. Beef, pork, and chicken often go on sale and can be had for quite reasonable prices, so even with the price of the jars and equipment necessary to process it, home canned meat will usually be cheaper per pound than any commercially canned meat of equivalent quality.
There are two cardinal rules of successful food storage: The first is store what you eat and eat what you store. The second is to rotate, Rotate, ROTATE! Follow them always, keep a watchful eye on your local grocer’s offerings, and be willing to make a moderate investment of time and effort. Do this and you’ll have a successful food storage program that your family will look forward to eating in good times or bad without sacrificing your financial well being to get it.
It's fascinating to read the commentators in mainstream journals like The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal all strenuously pretending that "the worst is over" (maybe... we hope... fingers crossed... hail Mary full of grace... et cetera). The cluelessness would be funny if it didn't involve a world-changing catastrophe. All nations that have reached the fork-and-spoon level of civilization are now engineering a vast network of cyber-cables that lead directly from their central bank computers to the Death Star that is hovering above world financial affairs like a giant cosmic vacuum cleaner, sucking up dollars, euros, zlotys, forints, krona, what-have-you. As fast as the keystrokes create currency-pixels, the little electron-denominated units of exchange are sucked out of the terrestrial economies into the black hole of money death. That's what the $700-billion bail-out (excuse me, "rescue plan") and all its associated ventures are about.
To switch metaphors, let's say that we are witnessing the two stages of a tsunami. The current disappearance of wealth in the form of debts repudiated, bets welshed on, contracts cancelled, and Lehman Brothers-style sob stories played out is like the withdrawal of the sea. The poor curious little monkey-humans stand on the beach transfixed by the strangeness of the event as the water recedes and the sea floor is exposed and all kinds of exotic creatures are seen thrashing in the mud, while the skeletons of historic wrecks are exposed to view, and a great stench of organic decay wafts toward the strand. Then comes the second stage, the tidal wave itself -- which in this case will be horrific monetary inflation -- roaring back over the mud flats toward the land mass, crashing over the beach, and ripping apart all the hotels and houses and infrastructure there while it drowns the poor curious monkey-humans who were too enthralled by the weird spectacle to make for higher ground. The killer tidal wave washes away all the things they have labored to build for decades, all their poignant little effects and chattels, and the survivors are left keening amidst the wreckage as the sea once again returns to normal in its eternal cradle.
So, that's what I think we will get: an interval of deflationary depression followed by a destructive wave of inflation that will wipe out both constructed debt and constructed savings, scraping the financial landscape clean. There's no question that stage one is underway. But we can be sure the giant wave of money recklessly loaned into existence in just a few weeks time will wash back through the global economy leaving a swath of destruction.
And then what? The societies of the world will be faced with the task of rebuilding systems of fruitful activity, i.e., real economies based on productive behavior rather than the smoke-and-mirrors of Frankenstein-finance con games. In fact, excuse me while I switch metaphors again, because the Frankenstein story -- the New Prometheus -- is yet another apt narrative to inform us what we have done. We have "played" with financial fire and brought to life a monster now bent on killing us. One question that this metaphor-narrative raises is: when will the angry peasant mob storm the castle with their flaming brands and cries for blood from the makers of this monster? Rather soon, I think. Perhaps, in some countries (maybe the USA, if we're lucky), this will take the more orderly form of systematic prosecutions, bringing to justice persons who perpetrated swindles involving the alphabet soup of investment "products" that have gone bad in so many accounts (and ruined so many individuals, institutions, and governments). I think it has already begun with the inquisitors summoning the shifty Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers -- but there are hundreds of other characters like him out there, who scored untold millions of dollars in activities that were simply grand swindles. I wouldn't be surprised if, eventually, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson found himself in the dock to answer how come, when he ran Goldman Sachs, there was a special unit in the company dedicated to short-selling the very mortgage-backed securities that another unit in the company was so busy pawning off to every pension fund on God's green earth.
Apart from orderly prosecutions (which can certainly turn harsh and cruel), there is the possibility of sociopolitical upheaval -- revolution, violence, civil war, war between nations, the whole menu of monkey-human mischief that afflicts mankind. We are not necessarily immune to it here in the USA, despite our cherished notion of exceptionalism, which would have us inoculated against all the common vicissitudes of history.
Anyway, prosecution through the courts, while perhaps satisfying the hunger for justice (or, more particularly, revenge), is not a productive economic activity. So, the question begs itself again: what will we do? Under the best circumstances we will reorganize our society and economy at a lower level of energy use (and probably a lower scale of governance, too). The catch is, it will have to be a whole lot lower. I think we'll be very lucky fifty years from now to have a few hours a day of electricity to do things with.
The energy story and its hand-maiden, the climate change situation, are both lurking out there beyond the immediate spectacle of the financial fiasco. Both these things imply pretty strongly that the economic relations currently unraveling will not be rebuilt -- not the way they were before, or even close to it. The best outcome will be societies that can practice small-scale "process-intensive" organic agriculture and equally small-scale process-intensive modes of manufacture in the context of very local sociopolitical networks. An accompanying hope is that we can remain civilized in the process. Personally, while I recognize the appeal (to others, not me) of the "singularity" narrative, which has the human race making a sudden evolutionary leap into some kind of cyborg-nirvana, I regard it as an utter bullshit fantasy that has zero chance of occurring, given our stark predicament.
But returning to the short term, or "the present," shall we say, there is the matter of how the US gets through the election and then the first months of a new government, even while the larger fiasco continues. I'm voting for Mr. Obama. While I believe he will make a much better president than the addled old mad dog Mr. McCain has become, I feel sorry for anyone who is placed nominally "in charge" of things this coming year. The best a President Obama can do is offer some reassurance to a public that is totally unprepared for the convulsion now upon us. Mr. Obama will certainly not have "money" to "spend" on any of the promised social support programs that have been endlessly debated. But he could clearly articulate the reality we're facing, and ask not necessarily for "sacrifice," as the common plea goes, but for something more and better: for bravery and resolute spirit, for intelligence and resilience, for kindness and generosity -- among a people long unused to consorting with the better angels of their nature. He's already begun to set the example by appearing in public with his sleeves rolled up. The change that has been in the air all year -- that Mr. Obama has talked so much about -- is coming in a bigger dose than anyone expected. I hope we're ready to get with the program.
October 15, 2008
One would think that Iraqi farmers, now prospering under "freedom" and "democracy," would be able to plant the seeds of their choosing, but that choice, under little-known Order 81, would be illegal.
But first, it is important to set the context. Most people have never heard of the infamous "100 Orders," but they help explain why the majority of Iraqis remain opposed to foreign occupation. The 100 Orders allow multinational corporations to basically privatize an entire nation, and this degree of foreign and private control has not been witnessed since the days of the British East India Company and its extraterritoriality treaties.
A few examples of the 100 Orders are illuminating:
Back to one of the most blatant orders of all: Order 81. Under this mandate, Iraq's commercial farmers must now buy "registered seeds." These are normally imported by Monsanto, Cargill and the World Wide Wheat Company. Unfortunately, these registered seeds are "terminator" seeds, meaning "sterile." Imagine if all human men were infertile, and in order to reproduce women needed to buy sperm cells at a sperm bank. In agricultural terms, terminator seeds represent the same kind of sterility.
Terminator seeds have no agricultural value other than creating corporate monopolies. The Sierra Club, more of a mainstream "conservation" organization than a radical "environmentalist" one, makes the exact same case:
"This technology would protect the intellectual property interests of the seed company by making the seeds from a genetically engineered crop plant sterile, unable to germinate. Terminator would make it impossible for farmers to save seed from a crop for planting the next year, and would force them to buy seed from the supplier. In the third world, this inability to save seed could be a major, perhaps fatal, burden on poor farmers." (2)
What makes this Order 81 even more outrageous is that Iraqi farmers have been saving wheat and barley seeds since at least 4000 BC, when irrigated agriculture first emerged, and probably even to about 8000 BC, when wheat was first domesticated. Mesopotamia's farmers have now been trumped by white-smocked, corporate bio-engineers from Florida who strive to replace hundreds of natural varieties with a handful of genetically scrambled hybrids.
Where does such hubris come from? It comes from the entire mission surrounding the invasion of Iraq, which, upon closer inspection, had been planned years in advance by a faction of "neo-cons" who adopted Leon Trotsky's glorification of the state, his theory "permanent revolution," and his goal of exporting revolution worldwide. The neo-con revolution aims to alter the economic, political and cultural foundations of nations on the other side of the planet (rejecting old-fashioned notions of self-determination, popular sovereignty and even the nation-state system). This mission includes the transformation of agriculture and the establishment of "food control" over local populations.
Order 81 fits into this revolutionary program, and it is quite diabolical upon closer inspection. First, it forces Iraq's commercial farmers to use registered terminator seeds (the "protected variety"). Then it defines natural seeds as illegal (the "infringing variety"), in a classic Orwellian turn of language.
This is so incredible that it must be re-stated: the exotic genetically scrambled seeds are the "protected variety" and the indigenous seeds are the "infringing variety."
As Jeffrey Smith explains, author of Order 81: Re-Engineering Iraqi Agriculture:
"To qualify for PVP [Plant Variety Protection], seeds have to meet the following criteria: they must be 'new, distinct, uniform and stable'... it is impossible for the seeds developed by the people of Iraq to meet these criteria. Their seeds are not 'new' as they are the product of millennia of development. Nor are they 'distinct'. The free exchange of seeds practiced for centuries ensures that characteristics are spread and shared across local varieties. And they are the opposite of 'uniform' and 'stable' by the very nature of their biodiversity." (3)
Order 81 comes with the Orwellian title of "Plant Variety Protection." Any self-respecting scientist knows, however, that imposing biological standardization accomplishes the exact opposite: It reduces biodiversity and threatens species. So Order 81 comes with an Orwellian title and consists of Orwellian provisions.
Jeffrey Smith peels away the layers of mischief behind Order 81, finding it nonsensical that six varieties of wheat have been developed for Iraq:
"Three will be used for farmers to grow wheat that is made into pasta; three seed strains will be for 'breadmaking.'
Pasta? According to the 2001 World Food Programme report on Iraq, 'Dietary habits and preferences included consumption of large quantities and varieties of meat, as well as chicken, pulses, grains, vegetables, fruits and dairy products.' No mention of lasagna. Likewise, a quick check of the Middle Eastern cookbook on my kitchen shelves, while not exclusively Iraqi, reveals a grand total of no pasta dishes listed within it.
There can be only two reasons why 50 per cent of the grains being developed are for pasta. One, the US intends to have so many American soldiers and businessmen in Iraq that it is orienting the country's agriculture around feeding not 'Starving Iraqis' but 'Overfed Americans'. Or, and more likely, because the food was never meant to be eaten inside Iraq at all…" (4)
Just in case Iraqi farmer can't read, Order 81 enforces the new monopoly on seeds with the jackboot. Order 81 makes this clear in its own text, buried at the bottom of the document, as is most screw-you fine print:
"The court may order the confiscation of the infringing variety as well as the materials and tools substantially used in the infringement of the protected variety. The court may also decide to destroy the infringing variety as well as the materials and tools or to dispose of them in any noncommercial purpose." (5)
Order 81 is about power and profit, but it disguises itself as humanitarian legislation.
Topping it all off, the entire document puts on rather magisterial airs. It was signed by L. Paul Bremer himself, with his own hand, and presumably with his own pen:
"Pursuant to my authority as Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority…"
Like the Roman Proconsuls, Paul Bremer also spent a year in the provinces, governing the so-called barbarians…
Sometimes a photograph just begs us to know the story behind it. The first photo is a photo taken by Diane Arbus.
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