This is about the Dinar part. People must eat and don’t care about Constitutions.
From the Council on Foreign Relations, April 9, 2003:
Relief Expert Says Iraq’s Food Supply Adequate, but Contaminated Water Supply Poses Large Health Risk
snippets:
– We talk about weapons of mass destruction. But there is nothing like the efficiency of a contaminated water source to wipe out a population. There is a chilling precedent from northern Iraq in 1991, when the Kurds were driven by the Iraqi military into the mountains. They died at a mortality rate that was almost the equivalent to what we had seen in Goma, Zaire [in the early 1990s].
– Unfortunately, the Oil for Food program was not allowed to buy produce or any of the food sources from Iraqis themselves….
Link
From a Research Institute, June 30, 2003:
Researchers at one of the world’s leading research centers for dry land agriculture reported today that Iraq’s ability to feed itself had been compromised by years of neglect, drought, and the aftermath of the war.
“Iraqi agriculture will have a hard time meeting the country’s food requirements well into the foreseeable future,” said Adel El-Beltagy, director general of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, ICARDA.
“Three years of drought, decades of inappropriate government policies that penalized farmers and ignored the environment, and the destruction of Iraq’s agricultural research system will take at least five years to repair, El-Beltagy said.
Until then, Iraq will be largely dependent on international food aid. The United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that it will need to import more than 2 million tons of food into the country over the next six months at a cost of US$1.7 billion, the largest such effort in the agency’s 40-year history. According to the WFP, an estimated 16 million Iraqis — more than two-thirds of the population — are thought to be entirely dependent on food aid.
Link
News (July 2005):
Iraq needs 220,000 tons of imported wheat a month
The statement said the ministry needs to import more than 2.6 million tons of wheat a year and 900,000 tons of rice every year to cover the rationing system. It said Iraq needs to import huge quantities of legumes, tea, sugar and vegetable ghee which are also handed out to Iraqi families as part of their monthly food rations.
 
The ministry said it needs to import almost all the items on the rationing card. The country’s food import bill is estimated to cost the treasury up to $4 billion a year.
Link
From Times OnLine, by Michael Meacher, 12 Aug. 2005:
– Before the US proconsul Paul Bremer left Baghdad, he enacted 100 orders as chief of the occupation authority in Iraq. Perhaps the most infamous was Order 39 which decreed that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatised, that foreign companies could have complete control of Iraqi banks, factories and mines, and that these companies could transfer all of their profits out of Iraq.
These laws will not be reversed while 140,000 US troops remain in the country, or a network of US military bases planned to be retained in Iraq for a much longer period. Aid for rebuilding the electricity and water services, the oil industry, and the legal and security systems will reside with the US Embassy for many years to come.
– If all 100 orders are taken together, they set the overall legal framework for overriding foreign exploitation of Iraq’s domestic market. They cover almost all facets of the economy, including Iraq’s trading regime, the mandate of the Central Bank, and regulations governing trade union activities.
– Order 81, for example, has the status of binding law over “patent industrial design, undisclosed information, integrated circuits and plant variety” — a degree of detailed supervision normally associated with a Soviet command-and-control economy. While historically the Iraqi Constitution prohibited private ownership of biological resources, the new US-imposed patent law introduces a system of monopoly rights over seeds. This is virtually a takeover of Iraqi agriculture.
The rights granted to US plant breeding companies under this order include the exclusive right to produce, reproduce, sell, export, import and store the plant varieties covered by intellectual property right for the next 20-25 years. During this extended period nobody can plant or otherwise use plants, trees or vines without compensating the breeder.
In the name of agricultural reconstruction this new law deprives Iraqi farmers of their inherent right, exercised for the past 10,000 years in the fertile Mesopotamian arc, to save and replant seeds. It enables the penetration of Iraqi agriculture by Monsanto, Syngenta (…) Food sovereignty for the Iraqi people has therefore already been made near-impossible by these new regulations.
Link

Posted by: Noisette | Aug 16 2005 14:50 utc | 2