Dan Amstutz feathers US grain farmers nests in Iraq

29 Apr 2003 07:45:00 GMT
Oxfam official blasts appointment of Iraq agriculture head

LONDON (AlertNet) - A senior Oxfam official this week attacked the appointment of a former executive of the world's biggest grain exporting firm to take charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq.

Kevin Watkins, Oxfam's policy director, said Dan Amstutz, a former senior executive of grain exporter Cargill who served in the U.S. administration in the 1980s as a trade negotiator, was "uniquely well-placed to advance the commercial interests of American grain companies and bust open the Iraqi market ".

Watkins, quoted in the British newspaper the Guardian, went on to say that Amstutz was "singularly ill-equipped to lead a reconstruction effort in a developing country".

He said the former U.S. trade official would "arrive with a suitcase full of open-market rhetoric", and was more likely to try to dump cheap U.S. grain on Iraq than encourage it to rebuild its once-successful agriculture.

"Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission," he said.

The Guardian added that President George W. Bush was on record as saying he wanted American farmers to feed the world.

It said Oxfam, which would prefer to see Iraqi reconstruction conducted under the auspices of the United Nations, was worried that the Iraqi agricultural sector would be left unprotected from cut-price U.S. competition.

In a statement on Amstutz's appointment, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said the head of reconstruction would "help us achieve our national objective of creating a democratic and prosperous Iraq while at the same time best utilise resources of our farmers and good industry in the effort, both for the interim and the long term".

Critics have accused Washington of giving preferential treatment to U.S. firms in contracts to reconstruct Iraq.

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