MFC - Control of food, life an ominous proposition

The following My Free Country column appeared in the Wallowa County Chieftain on Feb. 7, 2008 and Capital Press ran an edited version (minus most of the last four paragraphs) on Feb. 22, 2008.

"Control oil and you control nations, control food and you control the people," Henry Kissinger famously said in 1970. It may be hard to fathom such such evil intentions lurking in the wealthy and political classes, but modern laws tell the story.

Let's look at the new seed laws imposed on Iraq to see what the future may hold for us all. The former Coalition Provisional Authority's American administrator L. Paul Bremer III enacted 100 laws to restructure Iraq's economy in accordance with new global standards. Order 81 of Bremer's Laws describes the new paradigm for seeds.

To put it in layman's terms, in order to sell seeds in Iraq, the seeds must be registered. In order to get registered, the seeds must be "new, distinct, uniform and stable." Traditional varieties can't meet this standard, so even if they aren't lost from years of war and upheaval, the traditional varieties are excluded from the market and unable to freely circulate.

Seed sales have thus become the exclusive domain of foreign agribusiness corporations. It is illegal for Iraqi farmers to save the seeds harvested from the "new" registered varieties, so each year, Iraqi farmers will have to buy new seeds, typically genetically modified varieties because that's what the corporations are offering.

Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization determined that the vast majority (97 percent) of Iraqi farmers used seeds harvested from previous years' crops.

Let's look even farther back. Way, way back. Does anyone recall learning in school about the "cradle of civilization" between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers? Who developed the seed stock that modern corporations modify and call their own? Shouldn't the new seed giants pay royalties to the legions of farmers who came before them?

Well, perhaps God -- or Mother Nature -- will demand their due.

As corporations develop so-called "terminator" technology (seeds that are genetically designed to be sterile) mankind is hurtling toward uncharted territory. Will the new self-styled gods have compassion when the poor people of the world can't pay for new seed stock? Or will we see the kind of control Kissinger had in mind?

Control of the world's food supplies doesn't end with plants, either. Corporations are working to genetically map and engineer animal life in order to claim ownership on that front as well. Imagine a world where plants and animals can no longer reproduce naturally and new stock must be purchased year after year. This is truely dangerous territory. After all, humans are animals, too.

The corporations in question will swear on their very "lives" that genetic engineering is safe, I have no doubt. You may read their promises in these pages after I've said my piece. But until corporations are subject to the same liability that individual people face for their actions, those promises can be taken with a grain of salt as far as I'm concerned.

The doctrine of corporate personhood -- the legal fiction that corporations are people and subject to the same protections of life and liberty that human persons enjoy under the law -- is a uniquely American contribution to humanity. When a group of people form a corporation they are no longer individually responsible for their actions. But as the saying goes, a corporation has no soul to save and no body to incarcerate.

In our lifetimes we have seen corporations perpetrate abuses that would have you or I hung for crimes against humanity. The fines that are levied as punishments hold no sway over multi-billion dollar behemoths. If it's cheaper to risk the fine, then the quest for profits continues. Not all corporations are guilty of this, to be sure. But it only takes a few "bad apples" -- with massive budgets, near-monopoly priveleges and extraordinary liability protections -- to bring us all to our knees.

Air and water pollution are no longer the limits of our concerns. How can we bill a corporation for irrevokable genetic pollution? Answer me that.

Angela Black writes on freedom and farming issues from her home in Lostine, Ore.