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July
3, 2003
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July
4, 2003
The Rat in the Grain
Dan
Amstutz and the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
The war on Iraq couldn't have come at a more dire
time for Iraq's beleaguered farmers. Spring is harvest time in
the barley and wheat fields of the Tigris River valley and planting
time in the vast vegetable plantations of southern Iraq.
The war is over, but the situation in
the fields of Iraq continues to rapidly deteriorate. The banks,
which provide credit and cash, have been looted, irrigation systems
destroyed, road travel restricted, markets closed, warehouses
and grain silos pillaged.
To harvest the grain before it rots in
the fields Iraqi farmers need more than eight million gallons
of diesel fuel to power Iraq's corroding armada of combines and
harvesters. But most of the fuel depots were incinerated by US
bombing strikes. There's no easy way to get the fuel that remains
to the farmers who need it most and no desire to do so by the
US forces of occupations.
Even if the crops can be harvested, there's
no clear way for the grain to get stored, marketed, sold and
distributed to hungry Iraqi families. Under the Hussein regime,
the crops were bought by the Baghdad government at a fixed priced
and then distributed through a rationing system. This system,
inefficient as it was, is gone. But nothing has taken its place.
Iraqi farmers are still owed $75 million
for this year's crop, with little sign that the money will ever
arrive. There's speculation throughout the country that one intent
of the current policy is to force many farmers off their farms
and into the cities so that their lands can be taken over by
favorites of Ahmed Chalabi and his US protectors. The post-Saddam
Iraq will almost certainly witness a land redistribution program:
more farmland going into fewer and fewer hands.
Grain farmers aren't alone. As in the
first Gulf War, US bombing raids targeted cattle feed lots, poultry
farms, fertilizer warehouses, pumping stations, irrigation systems
and pesticide factories (the closest thing the US has come to
finding Weapons of Mass Destruction in the country)-the very
infrastructure of Iraqi agriculture. It will take years to restore
these operations.
Many fields in southern Iraq lie fallow,
as vegetable farmers have been unable to secure seeds for this
summer's crops of melons, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers and beans-all
mainstays of the Iraqi diet.
"We expect failures," said
Abdul Aziz Nejefi, a barley farmer from Mosul, in a dispatch
from the Guardian. "We never had this situation before.
There is no government."
Meanwhile, millions of Iraqis face starvation
this summer. A UN staff report from late May paints a bleak
portrait. It notes that Iraq's poultry industry has effectively
been decimated. Millions of chickens perished during the war.
Millions of others face starvation, since nearly of the chicken
feed stored in government warehouses has been looted. Chicken
and eggs are staples of the Iraqi, amounting for more than half
of the animal protein consumed by the population.
Many other farm animals, including sheep
and goats, could be ravaged by disease, since the nation's stockpiles
of veterinary medicines and vaccines have been almost totally
destroyed or looted.
Some 60% of Iraq's 24 million people
depend totally for their food on the food ration system that
was established after the Gulf War. Each week, these Iraqis
could count on a "food basket" consisting of wheat
flour, rice, vegetable oil, lentils beans, milk, sugar and salt.
That system is now in shambles and is scorned at by US policymakers.
And promised grain imports have yet to materialize.
"Before there is unwarranted military
technological triumphalism, let those setting out to manage the
peace think mouths," says Tim Land, professor food policy
at City University in London. "Grumbling stomachs are bad
politics as well as disastrous for the public health. There has
to be a food democracy after decades of food totalitarianism."
Into this dire circumstance strides Daniel
Amstutz, the Bush administration's choice to oversee the reconstruction
of Iraq's agricultural system. Now an international trade lobbyist
in DC with a fat roster of big ag clients, Amstutz once served
as a top executive at Cargill, the food giant which controls
much of the world trade in grain. During Amstutz's tenure at
Cargill, the grain company went on a torrid expansion campaign.
It is now the largest privately held corporation in the US and
controls about 94 percent of the soybean market and more than
50 percent of the corn market in the Upper Midwest. It also has
it's hands on the export market controlling 40 percent of all
US corn exports, a third of all soybean exports and at least
20 percent of wheat exports.
Al Krebs, who edits the Agribusiness
Examiner, a vital publication on US farm policy, unearthed a
1982 questionnaire on food, politics and morality that vividly
illustrates the Cargill philosophy. The Joseph Project a public
policy research group sponsored by the Senate of Catholic Priests
of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis-St.Paul, asked Cargill executives
to explain the company's attitude toward hunger and famine issues.
The executives responded as follows:
"The assumption that there are moral
priorities that are offended in serving world or domestic markets
as economically and efficiently as possible rests on a confusion
about economic facts. It is also a highly objectionable characterization
of business's role. Before one makes moral judgments and advocates
economic actions, one should understand the economic issues that
are involved.
"The business of making moral judgments
is both hazardous and potentially irresponsible unless one is
fully satisfied that all the facts and causal relationships have
been explored . . . We are not in a position --- given time and
other constraints --- to provide all the relevant background.
Nor are we anxious to make moral judgments --- or moral defenses
--- of our own."
In 2000, the biggest food companies in
the world, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Cenex Harvest States
Co-op, DuPont and Louis Dreyfus, got together to form Pradium
Inc., a kind of secret, internal grain market that offered real-time,
cash commodity exchanges for grains, oilseeds and agricultural
by-products as well as global information services. It also offered
ways to fix price grain prices on a global scale. Amstutz served
as Pradium's chairman.
Amstutz is no stranger to government,
either. During the first Bush administration he served as Undersecretary
of Agriculture for International Affairs and Commodity programs.
He was also the chief US negotiator on agricultural issues for
the Uruguay Round of GATT talks, which led to the WTO.
"Daniel Amstutz, an ex-Cargill executive,
is there to push the agribusiness agenda, not a democratic agenda,"
says George Naylor, president of the National Family Farm Coalition.
"He will excel in telling the world that his policy is good
for farmers, consumers and the environment when just the opposite
is true."
The small farmers of the grain belt of
the Midwest have a particular loathing for Amstutz. During his
stint in the first Bush administration, Amstutz devised the notorious
Freedom to Farm Bill, which eliminated tariffs and slashed federal
farm price supports-all in an effort to lower grain prices for
the benefit of Amstutz's cronies in the big agricultural conglomerates.
As a result, thousands of American farmers lost their farms and
monopolists like Cargill reaped the benefits.
The contours of Amstutz's plan for Iraq
are familiar: a combination of free-market shock therapy and
predation by multinational corporations. Gliding over a decade
of UN sanctions that have starved the nation and a war that ravaged
the nation's infrastructure, Amstutz announced that the real
problem facing Iraqi agriculture is, naturally, government subsidies.
"Iraqi farmers have had little incentive to increase production
because of price controls that have kept food very inexpensive,"
Amstutz announced. "With a transition to a market economy,
we can see health returning to agriculture and incentives to
employ good farming practices and modern techniques."
The more likely scenario is that Amstutz
will use destitute condition of Iraq's farmlands as a lucrative
opportunity to dump cheap grain from American companies like
Cargill, all of it paid for by Iraqi oil. If this scenario plays
out, it will spell disaster for Iraq's struggling farmers.
Prior to the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq imported
more than one million metric ton per year of American wheat.
Since then, however, no direct sales of American agricultural
products have occurred. Amstutz is anxious to begin flooding
Iraq with Cargill grain.
Moreover, Iraq owes the US Department
of Agriculture's Commodity Credit Corp. $2 billion on loans that
facilitated pre-1991 ag sales and nearly $2 billion in interest
on the loans. Amstutz will certainly demand that those loans
be recouped through oil sales.
"Someone needs to warn the Iraqi
people that other third world countries can already attest that
the dependence Amstutz will create surely means that Iraq's sovereignty
will be greatly compromised," says Naylor.
And Naylor argues that cash-strapped
American farmers won't see any benefits, either. "Even if
there will be more exports to Iraq, this little drop in the "Amstutz
perpetuates the more exports lie because his agribusiness cronies
are encouraging overproduction all over the world, thus being
able to sell more genetically-modified seeds and chemicals and
buying ever cheaper farm commodities."
Even as millions of Iraqi's face starvation
under the stern hand of their food pro consul, Amstutz's appointment
has excited little commentary in the US. His most virulent critic
has been Kevin Wilkins, Oxfam's policy director in London. Watkins
warns that Amstutz is little more than a carpetbagger seeking
to advance the interests of the same food titans that his lobbying
outfit in DC represents, Cargill, DuPont, Cenex and Archer Daniels
Midland.
"This guy is uniquely well-placed
to advance the commercial interests of American grain companies
and bust open the Iraqi market, but singularly ill-equipped to
lead a reconstruction effort in a war torn country," Watkins
warns. "Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction
in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human
rights commission."
Amstutz was recently spotted in Iowa,
pitching his agricultural reconstruction plan to Iowa feedlot
owners. He told the farmers that they stood to profit handsomely
from his plan to bring modern feedlots to Iraq, those foul-smelling
operations that pack thousands of cattle and hogs into tightly
confined pens. "They are meat eaters," he brayed. "Iraq
is not a vegetarian society."
Iowa doesn't have many cattle or sheep
operation. Most of the people in his audience raised hogs. And
unless Amstutz has joined in a partnership with Franklin Graham
to Christianize Iraq, there won't be a big market for pork products
in Baghdad.
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