Blog of Mass Distraction

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

The privatization of Iraq

Just a couple of news items about Iraq that I wanted to mention. The first is about new IP patent protection laws that have been introduced to bring GM foods to the Iraqi people. This is part of an aggressive drive to turn the Iraqi people into a captive market for the genetically modified and patented crops produced by big American bio-tech companies like Monsanto; crops that cannot be planted, harvested and resown as any normal farmer would do. Keeping seeds from harvest to be resown the coming year while utterly sensible, is illegal (based on US patent laws) for patented genetically modified crops. The seeds must be bought every year from the owner of the patent. While this is bad news enough, the other news portends a far worse situation.

A collection of Western nations have agreed to cancel a large portion of the Iraqi national debt based on a few conditions. There is still a significant portion of the debt owed to certain countries, particularly Russia. The canceling of the debt, however, has one dire condition: that Iraq must accept and implement IMF reforms. IMF reforms have a consistent history of further indebting the countries that implement them. The economic restructuring done by the IMF is done purely for the benefit of external parties that can come to the country and drain its resources and wealth. This becomes possible with the drive for "foreign investment" that is promoted by the restructuring plans at the expense the general populace. Perhaps Iraq is headed to economic self destruction; that would go along well with the political self destruction it's suffered from all these nigh-long years (and the physical destruction imposed on them from external sources).

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