I'm not sure if anyone is still interested in this discussion, but I wanted to make some comments anyway. While there has been a lot of alarmist claims about CPA order 81 which appear to be technically inaccurate, the fact of the matter is that the seed saving legacy of the Iraq farmer IS threatened.
I tried not to be alarmist. I wanted to get it right.
Read order 81 carefully, but esecially Articles 14.C.1 and 14.C.2 and 15.
One of you mentioned it being WTO-styled.
In fact, the plant variety protection racket goes back to the end of the 19th century when hybridization was becoming a more modern science in the post-Mendel world of genetics.
The U.S. patent office consistently refused to patent life. The emerging USDA and some well placed bureaucrats began building a bypass around the U.S. patent office via legislation that developed throughout the 20th century:
1930 Plant Patent Act
1970 Plant Variety Protection Act
Anyone who is interested in learning more about the precedent being set by the courts and the legal frameworks that are developing should check out
www.seedsofdeception.com and also read "Altered Harvest" by Jack Doyle, 1985. I believe Doyle's book is out of print. It appears to be 20 years ahead of its time, and the historical record is quite good.
Europe started the "International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants" (UPOV) -
http://www.upov.int.
Canada has Plant Breeder's Rights Act -
http://laws.justice.gc.ca./en/P-14.6/fulltoc.html and the associated Plant Breeders' Rights Office -
http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/.../pbrpove.shtml.
And now Iraq has order 81. Former CPA chief Paul Bremer also appointed some national security wanks with 5 year terms well before the recent election, in order to secure U.S. foreign policy power inside the new order.
All of these "patent" laws are simply frameworks for the biotech cartels.
Traditional seeds can be patented. All you have to do is map the genetic code and isolate the traits and file the paperwork. This is ALREADY happening in other countries. It WILL happen in Iraq unless the new government scraps order 81, which is unlikely due to the national security puppets who will scream to high hell about open markets being in the national interest and whatever other neoliberal BS they can come up with.
Farmers have been developing seed for centuries. ICARDA has 1000 specimens from Iraq stored in Syria. The Abu Ghraib genebank was looted/destroyed in the war. The same thing happened in Afghanistan - and they HID their germplasm resources.
Another issue is cross-pollination. GM traits can be passed through cross pollination. This is ALREADY happening. And if GM seed traits are passed to a traditional variety, guess who owns the seed that follows from the cross? You guessed it, the patent holder.
As for Monsanto spokestwit Chris Horner stating "for the record, Monsanto has no plans to introduce biotechnology in Iraq..." - it's BULLSHIT. Monsanto now controls 90% of the world's GM seed supply and 80% of the world's soybeans. Do you think they are going to let an opening market in Iraq sit dormant? The key words are "no plans". Plans change. They are buying up seed companies at an alarming rate. They are moving into water. Their chemicals have already invaded the soil. What else is left for agricultural hegemony except to control the weather.
All this talk about food security is a lot of prop-spin. Cozy language is being used for the idealogues to lap up. The facts are that GMO tech is threatening food security and biodiversity in the name of profits and foreign policy chess maneuvers. More importantly, GMO is not necessary. Like other militaristic technologies, it is about concentration of power. Traditional farming methods are much less threatening to biodiversity and provide REAL options for food security, but they are inheritantly more democratic - they prevent monopolies like Monsanto from operating that they do. Traditional farming is about building community and the open sharing of knowledge and a diverse seed base.
Do you all know about the corn blight of 1970? Read the intro to Altered Harvest at
http://www.unsafescience.com/cms-sclb.html.
In any case, if terminator seeds (via GURTs) become a reality, this will all be a moot point, as the ability for farmer's to save seed will be severely marginalized, because the resulting seed from the GM varieties will be sterile. Should those varieties cross-pollinate and pass the terminator trait to other non-GM varieties in the same family - biodiversity meltdown.