“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.

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.

In issuing Order 81, Bremer didn’t order Iraqi farmers to march over to the closest Monsanto-supplied shop and stock up. But if Monsanto’s experience in India is any guide, he didn’t need to.

… Read the letter of the law, and the impact of Order 81 seems limited to using public policy to construct an architecture that’s simply favorable to a company like Monsanto.

… it’s possible that Iraq’s farmers will indeed find themselves in the same predicament that India’s farmers have ended up in — a world where growers no longer rely upon their fields and their communities to meet their needs but in a world in which, when hard times strike, the only way out seems like the final exit. A world in which, in a twist perhaps worthy of Shakespeare, the farmer borrows one last time from whatever bank or moneylender will hand over a few last rupees, buys one last bottle of Roundup®, and — as has happened so many times in India — ends it all by drinking it down.”

Read the article in full here:
Iraqi farmers to meet vidarbha farmer’s fate.