The Looting of Iraq's Fields

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 deteriorate rapidly. 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 there's no desire to do so by the US forces of occupation.

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 price 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). It will take years to restore those 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.

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 all of the chicken feed stored in government warehouses has been looted. Chicken and eggs are staples of the Iraqi diet, accounting 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 entirely on the food rationing 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 by US policymakers. And promised grain imports have yet to materialize.

Into this awful mess strides Daniel Amstutz, the Bush administration's choice to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq's agricultural system. 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 its 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.

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 grain prices on a global scale. Amstutz serves 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.

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 conglomerates. As a result, thousands of American farmers lost their farms, while 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.

The more likely scenario is that Amstutz will use the 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 tons 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.

Even as millions of Iraqis face starvation under the boot of the food pro consul, Amstutz's appointment has excited little commentary in the US. His most violent 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," warns Kevin Watkins, Oxfam's policy director in London. "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 operations. 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 the cradle of civilization.