INDIA has become the latest developing country to embrace genetically modified crops. But while several farmers’ groups are greeting the government’s approval of Bt cotton with jubilation, environmentalists have condemned it.
“This is like the fall of the Berlin Wall for Indian agriculture,” Sharad Joshi, founder of the Maharashtra-based farmers’ organisation Shetkari Sanghatana, told 91av. “Farmers have been deprived of new technology for a long time but now they will have access to it.”
“It’s a recipe for environmental and social disaster,” says Devinder Sharma of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security. “This will open the floodgates to genetically modified organisms.”
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Bt cotton contains a gene from the common soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. It codes for a protein that kills pests such as the bollworm. The bollworm has devastated cotton crops in states such as the Punjab for the past four years. Proponents of the technology say Bt cotton will help farmers cut down on pesticides, which are expensive, often damage famers’ health and are also contaminating groundwater.
Official trials of Bt cotton have been going on in India for four years. “The field trials clearly established that Bt cotton grows in a healthy way in our conditions, and insects are killed by the toxin. There were no adverse effects on soil flora,” says Achyut Madhav Gokhale, chair of the environment ministry’s Genetic Engineering Approval Committee.
Trials of transgenic mustard have already started. “We expect soya, corn and others to follow later,” Gokhale says. “It’s a technology we cannot stop.”
He adds that only conditional clearance has been given to the Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company (Mahyco), which is part-owned by Monsanto, holder of the patent on Bt cotton. Farmers will have to fulfil terms such as planting 80 per cent Bt cotton and 20 per traditional cotton to provide “refuges” to stop pests developing resistance to the Bt toxin. For the moment, however, Mahyco itself will monitor the transgenic crops.
“How is this going to work in a landholding of less than half an acre where a small farmer is supposed to waste 20 per cent of the crop?” asks Suman Sahai, president of Gene Campaign in Delhi. She says the conditions are ludicrous for Indian farms, and the trials scientifically flawed and not transparent.
