Bremer's Order 81

Bremer's Order 81 The CPA explicitly defined the legal magnitude of the 100 Orders. An Order was defined as "binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people that create penal consequences or have a direct bearing on the way Iraqis are regulated, including changes to Iraqi law." In other words, Iraqis were told "do it or die:' Whenever prior Iraqi law might interfere with Bremer's new 100 Orders, Iraqi law was made null and void. The law of occupation was supreme.3

Buried deep among the new Bremer decrees, which dealt with everything from media to privatization of state industries, was Order 81 on "Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law." Order 81 stated:

11. Article 12 is amended to read as follows: "A patent shall grant its owner the following rights: 1. Where the subject of the patent is a product, the right to prevent any person who has not obtained the owner's authorization from making, exploiting, using, offering for sale, selling or importing that product." 12. Article 13.1 is amended to read as follows: "The term of duration of the patent shall not end before the expiration of a period of twenty years for registration under the provisions of this Law as from the date of the filing of the application for registration under the provisions of this Law:'

A further provision of Order 81 stated, "Farmers shall be prohibited from re-using seeds of protected varieties or any variety mentioned in items 1 and 2 of paragraph (C) of Article 14 of this Chapter." Furthermore,

CPA Order No. 81 amends Iraq's patent and industrial design law to protect new ideas in any field of technology that relates to a product or manufacturing processes. The amendments permit companies in Iraq, or in countries that are members of a relevant treaty to which Iraq is a party, to register patents in Iraq. The amendments grant the patent owner the right to prevent any person who has not obtained the owner's authorization from exploiting the patented product or process for twenty years from the date of the patent's

registration in Iraq. The amendments also allow individuals and companies to register industrial designs.4

In plain English, Order 81 gave holders of patents on plant varieties (which all happened to be large foreign multinationals) absolute rights over use of their seeds in Iraqi agriculture for 20 years. While that might appear to be a fair and sensible business provision to compensate a foreign company for its intellectual property, in reality it was an incursion on the sovereignty of Iraq. Like many countries, Iraq never recognized the principle of commercial patents on life forms such as plants. The patents had been granted to companies like Monsanto or DuPont by US or other foreign patent authorities.

What Order 81 did, in fact, was amend Iraq's patent law to recognize foreign patents, regardless of the legality of such patents under Iraq law. On the surface, it appeared to leave Iraqi farmers the option to refuse to buy Monsanto or other patented seeds, and to plant their traditional native seeds. In reality, as the drafters of Order 81 were also well aware, it had a quite opposite effect.

The protected plant varieties were Genetically Modified or Gene Manipulated plants, and Iraqi farmers who chose to plant such seeds were required to sign an agreement with the seed company holding the patent, stipulating that they would pay a "technology fee" and an annual license fee for planting the patented seeds.

Any Iraqi farmer seeking to take a portion of those patented seeds to replant in following harvest years would be subject to heavy fines from the seed supplier. In the United States, until a Court ruling struck it down, Monsanto demanded a punitive damage equal to 120 times the cost of a bag of its GMO seeds. This was the occasion for Iraqi farmers to become vassals not of Saddam Hussein, but of the multinational GM seed giants.

At the heart of Order 81 was the Plant Variety Protection (PVP) provision. Under the PVP, seed saving and reuse would become illegal. Farmers using patented seeds or even "similar" seeds, would be subject to severe fines or even prison. However, the plant varieties being protected were not those which resulted from 10,000 years of