The PM
wants enlightened debate to decide on the complex issue of GM crop to boost
agricultural yield. But neither independent science nor simple economics
supports his faith in a transgenic miracle.
Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh is a man of silence and science. So the only time he
granted an interview (read broke his silence) to a publication, he chose Science. Last February, he told the
magazine that “NGOs, often funded from the United States and the Scandinavian
countries, which are not fully appreciative of the development challenges that
our country faces” were responsible for controversies that did not let him “makeuse of genetic engineering technologies to increase the productivity of ouragriculture”.
The
PM was referring to the indefinite moratorium imposed on commercial planting of
Bt brinjal in 2009 by then Environment minister Jairam Ramesh who found no over-riding
urgency or adequate scientific consensus for the experiment. After that interview,
Ramesh did not react if his boss was accusing him of sabotaging science or India’s
food security but went on record saying that his “decision was not influenced
by the campaign of any NGO, either from India or abroad”.
Six
months on, in August 2012, the parliamentary standing committee on agriculture placed
its report -- Cultivation of GeneticallyModified Food Crops: Prospects and Effects -- in the House. It
revealed that a number of government agencies such as Department of Scientific
and Industrial Research, Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research, National
Biodiversity Authority, Department of Consumer Affairs, Department of Commerce
and the Food Safety Standards Authority of India objected to transgenic food.
Yet,
speaking at the 100th Indian Science Congress in Kolkata last week,
the PM was back at his scientific best. “Complex issues, be they genetically
modified food or nuclear energy or exploration of outer space, cannot be
settled by faith, emotion and fear but by structured debate, analysis and
enlightenment,” he said in his address.
Strangely,
he resented it last time when there were public hearings on Bt brinjal. For
years, his government has been dodging pleas for open discussion on nuclear
power by several organisations, some of which he dismissed as foreign-fundedlast year. Now,
in one bold stroke, he dubbed all opposition to GMO (genetically modified
organism), including those from various departments and technocrats of the government,
as unscientific.
The
science of GM food may be complex but the issue of its acceptance is not.
Generating transgenic food is not grafting the stems of two plants to get a
darker shade of red. It is about firing a plasmid or small DNA with a particle
gun into cells and an inserted DNA integrating into a chromosome. It involves a
million mutations which are totally unpredictable. The result is alien gene
structures that never existed in nature. The default response of human or
animal immune system is to attack the unknown. The GM food triggers the same
reaction inside us.
The
result is inflammation of the bowel which causes a range of disorders, from
allergy and autism to cancer. Worse, transgenic food such as Bt corn or brinjal
is modified with a soil bacteria -- Bacillus
thuringiensis -- so that it produces toxins to kill insects. We are assured
that the inbuilt pesticide harms only insects and not us. Irrespective of the
veracity of the assurance -- it was debunked last February around the same time
the PM was talking to Science -- would
anyone want to swallow that as food? One would, the argument goes, if famished.
The
advocates of GM food claim that the technology increases yield and will help feed
a billion mouths. There is no conclusive data yet that transgenic food
increases yield or deters weed. More importantly, the World Food Programme says
that “there is enough food in the world today for everyone”. Yet, there is and
will be hunger as long as millions cannot afford their share of food due to
artificial market conditions.
It
perhaps makes sense that the same market wants to profit more by peddling
unnatural food in the name of addressing the artificial hunger it has created.
If only the term unnatural was enough to describe the madness and potential
threat of transgenic food and non-food organism or those who are promoting it.
In
1992, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided without any safety studies
that GM food would be treated like any other food. Six years on, it took a
lawsuit to reveal thousands of internal communications among FDA scientists who
demanded long-term trials but were muffled under the watch of Michael R Taylor,
administrator of the Food Safety & Inspection Service and an old Monsanto
hand who later returned to the company as vice-president (public policy).
Today, Taylor serves as the FDA’s deputy commissioner.
Taylor
is not alone. US secretaries for Agriculture Ann Veneman (2001) served on
Monsanto’s board of directors. The present secretary, Thomas Vilsack, was
felicitated as Governor of the Year 2001 by the Biotechnology Industry Organisation.
Former deputy administrator of US Environmental Protection Agency Linda Fisher
was a Monsanto vice-president and now serves DuPont, another chemical giant. That
is how thin the thin line between the industry and the state has become.
While
company-funded (or state-sponsored) scientific trials hastily clear GM
products, every independent study faces roadblocks. “We don't have the complete
picture. That's no accident,” explained Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of
Concerned Scientists in Washington, “Multibillion-dollar agricultural
corporations, including Monsanto and Syngenta, have restricted independent
research on their genetically engineered crops. They have often refused to
provide independent scientists with seeds, or they've set restrictive
conditions that severely limit research options.”
Nevertheless,
researchers established last February that the Bt toxin kills kidney cells, leading
to what is informally called leaky guts, now an alarmingly common condition in
children in the USA and Canada. The result is premature release of food in the
bloodstream which immediately activates antibodies and triggers food
intolerance and severe allergy. Over time, this can lead to a range of diseases
from Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s.
Other
studies linked transgenic food to infertility, defective childbirth, abnormal
DNA function and even a pathogen new to science. These are not matters of
faith, emotion or fear. But no authority – MNCs, USFDA or scientific agencies
of the Indian government – has settled any of these issues in public or allowed
independent science to take a call.
Corporate-cum-state
funding is an article of faith for agricultural research the world over. The
industry donated millions to top universities and researchers have paid dearly for
criticising GMO. Renowned Hungarian-born biochemist Arpad Pusztai was sacked by
Scotland’s Rowett Institute when his 1998 study found that GM potato had
negative effects on the stomach lining and immunity system of rat labs. Last
year, Monsanto even bullied Vermont’s legislature to drop a bill that had the backing
of over 90% of Connecticut residents and sought to make labelling of all GMO
mandatory.
Yet,
our PM wants to keep fear out of the transgenic discourse. He wants no emotion
to be stirred even after thousands of suicides, loss of cotton crop (and livestock
foraging on those Bt fields), skin infection of farmhands, a ban enforced by
Maharashtra, and his agriculture minister Sharad Pawar telling Parliament last
month that the objection to Bt cotton was “speculative, confusing and
unscientific”.
But
can we really debate the aspiration of biotech giants who want to eventually replace
all natural farming with their GM seeds? Does the implication of two or three
MNCs controlling the entire world’s food resources require analyses? Is there any
enlightenment in risking a million unpredictable and uncontrollable mutations triggered
by an infant technology just because we cannot stop profiteering in and wasting
the food produced nature’s way?
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