For millennia, Fertile Crescent farmers informally shared and traded seeds at harvest and planting time. In the twentieth century, they shifted to storing and retrieving seed from a national seed bank, located, alas, in Abu Ghraib, where the entire bank vanished after the bombings and occupation. This calamity, following war and episodes of draught since 1991 and combined with the embargo by the United States and United Kingdom that limited access to agricultural equipment, caused Iraqi wheat production to drop dramatically and become unable to sustain the population for the first time in centuries. 65 The production crisis opened the door for the agribusiness giants to move in: the seed bank destroyed, the harvest yield dramatically down due to natural disaster and years of war, Iraqi farmers were vulnerable, desperate, exploitable. They needed seed, and agribusiness-backed relief efforts were there to provide it. Bremer Order 81 sealed the farmer’s permanent dependence on the agribusiness giants.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 280