Yahoo News, 7 March, 2014
Just before the Lok Sabha election dates were announced and the model code of conduct came into force, Minister for Environment and Forests Veerappa Moily accomplished the last of the three major tasks he was entrusted with to push his government’s growth agenda.
After stalling the notification of Ecologically Sensitive Areas in 60,000 sq km of the Western Ghats and clearing the Posco steel plant by delinking it from the proposed integrated port and mining projects in Odisha, Moily has now reversed his ministry’s position and backed the ministries of agriculture and science to allow field trials of genetically modified (GM) food crops.
All of this took Moily just nine weeks. His prime minister should be proud, and relieved. Within three years of his 2005 US visit, Manmohan Singh got the Indo-US nuclear deal ratified by Parliament. The struggle to introduce GM food crops under the Indo-US strategic partnership in agriculture conceived during the same visit has taken so much longer.
India and the US are unlikely partners in agriculture, though. In 2008, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development report by the UN said that the secret of global food security was in ‘back to basics’ agriculture and that many risks of biotechnology were as yet unknown. India ratified the report. The US did not.
But Manmohan Singh’s heart must have always been in the right place. Two years after then-Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had imposed an indefinite moratorium on commercial planting of Bt brinjal, in an interview to Science in February 2012, the prime minister rued that “NGOs, often funded from the United States and the Scandinavian countries,” did not let him “make use of genetic engineering technologies to increase the productivity of our agriculture”.
However, the Parliamentary Standing Committee (PSC) on Agriculture in its August 2012 report (Cultivation of Genetically Modified Food Crops: Prospects and Effects) noted that not only NGOs but a number of government agencies objected to transgenic food, underlining the need for setting up an overarching bio-safety – and not merely biotechnology – regulatory authority.
Amid the din, the government failed to reach any consensus on the draft Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) Bill. The debate again gathered steam in March 2013 when the reconstituted Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), a statutory body under the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), approved field trials of around 200 odd varieties of food (including cauliflower, rice, wheat, tomato, potato, okra, brinjal and mustard) and non-food crops. In July 2013, then-Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan wrote to the prime minister that her ministry wanted to keep the field trials in abeyance till the formation of the BRAI, as the Supreme Court was hearing a PIL on the issue. She also pointed out that while the ministries of agriculture and science promoted GM crops, the MoEF’s role was regulatory.
Natarajan’s opposition scuttled the government’s plan to take a unanimous stand in favour of immediate field trials before the SC. By then, the legal battle had been going on for eight years. It was in 2005 that activist Aruna Rodrigues filed a PIL against lack of transparency and conflict of interest in the government’s biotechnology regulation mechanism.
Even before Natarajan wrote to the PM, the SC had in May 2012 constituted a Technical Expert Committee (TEC) to examine the safety regulations of the proposed field trials. One of the six committee members agreed upon by the MoEF and Rodrigues did not participate in the proceedings. Instead, the SC allowed the agriculture ministry to fill in the slot with an expert of its choice – Rajendra Singh Paroda, former director general of Indian Agriculture Research Institute – after the TEC submitted its interim report in October 2012. In July 2013, this controversial new member did not sign the final TEC report, which called for an indefinite moratorium on field trials of GM food crops pending fundamental improvements in the regulatory system.
Immediately, the Association of Biotech Led Enterprises-Agriculture Group attacked the TEC’s findings as “anti-science and anti-research” that would “severely dent the future of the country's farmers besides destroying the domestic private and public sector research.” On the other hand, around 250 scientists and researchers from various institutions of India wrote to the PM, throwing their weight behind the TEC report. We will return to the TEC's findings later.
The jury is still out on the environmental and health safety of GM food. If anything, there isincreasing evidence against it. And after two decades in the US, it is becoming clearer that GM cropsdo not yield more than the conventional ones. But they do create super pests and weeds.
None of these concerns have stalled the march of the GM giants into India’s seed industry, which is billed to grow to Rs 10,700 crore by 2015. A switch to GM crops prohibits farmers from saving seeds for subsequent harvesting. They must buy whatever seed variety the company sells every season. For example, Monsanto already controls 90 percent of India’s cotton areas.
What has India’s response been? In 2006, when the government signed a deal with the US on strategic partnership in agriculture and food security, our Planning Commission included Monsanto, Walmart and Archer Daniel Midland as board members of the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture. Not surprising, because the GM industry funds and controls almost all agricultural research in America and the safety regulators themselves are former industry bigwigs.
In July 2009, then-Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office Prithviraj Chavan wrote to then-Health Minister Dr Anbumani Ramadoss, allaying his fears about the potential health impact of GM food. In that letter, Chavan quoted extensively and verbatim from promotional materials of the industry, including the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, a quasi-scientific body funded by Monsanto.
By then, the government had already initiated the process of shifting the regulatory authority from under the environment ministry (GEAC) to the science ministry (BRAI), while keeping the health ministry totally out of the loop. The BRAI Bill still awaits passage, but the attempt to undermine the health and environmental concerns by turning the GM crops into a mere biotechnological issue has been consistent since.
A Tough Trial
In such an atmosphere of expediency, what prompted Natarajan to keep the field trial on hold was a string of categorical warnings in the SC-appointed TEC’s report.
Consider these:
Contamination: The TEC cautioned against allowing field trials on land leased by the applicants to avoid the possibility that the plots might be used for a different purpose after the trials. It also pointed out that the government was leaving the onus of bio-safety on the applicants.
For instance, India is believed to be the original home of the brinjal, with some 30 species of wild and cultivated varieties. These include potential weed species that can cross to brinjal. The TEC flagged the risk of an insect-resistant gene being passed on to a weed through cultivation of GM brinjal and increasing its ‘weediness’ manifold. Forget brinjal, India also has weedy relatives of cultivated rice.
The TEC quoted the report on Bt-brinjal (EE-1 Environmental Risk Assessment) by Dr Doug Gurian-Sherman: "Given the widespread concern about gene flow, it is remarkable that there appears to be no assessment of possible harm from gene flow from Bt brinjal to wild brinjal relatives in India...”
Segregation, health and import: The Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, admitted that it would not be possible to segregate GM from non-GM material during the overall process of collection, handling, and storage in India. But the Indian laws require labeling of packaged food. The inability to segregate GM and non-GM food products, the TEC noted, would also make it impossible to carry out post-release monitoring for health effects.
This will also have serious implication on export, say, of rice now worth Rs 12,000 crore per year. Though GM rice trials were not being permitted in areas where basmati rice is grown, the TEC wondered how stringently it would be possible to enforce such control at the production level once GM rice was approved for commercial release.
Herbicide tolerance: The panel found the weed-resistance technology completely unsuitable for India. It may work for large farm sizes of hundreds of acres, whereas the average farm size in India is just 3.3 acres. Besides, it will have serious socio-economic impact on major sections of rural society where manual weeding is a source of livelihood.
Low capacity: The TEC found significant biological differences between Bt and control samples in the case of cotton. Shockingly, these problems had gone unnoticed and unaddressed in the course of the regulatory process leading to approval. The scrutiny of the bio-safety information was being done, the TEC said, by a panel that lacked full-time personnel qualified for the purpose.
Bad data: For health safety checks, the EC found that in several cases the methodology and results were not clearly reported, making the statistics unreliable. The TEC found the information provided in GM dossiers to be cursory. Examination of the molecular data by the TEC pointed to the need for the submissions to be scrutinized in detail by dedicated independent scientists.
Indian origin: Till now, no GM crop that is intended primarily for food production has been commercially released in its center of origin. The US restricts Bt-cotton (not even a food crop) in Hawaii where a weed related to cotton is found. Unlike the 1960s, the TEC observed, there was no major shortage of food in India now warranting such desperation.
Oil, not food: By far the largest deployment of transgenics worldwide is in soybean, corn, cotton, and canola, all of which are used primarily for oil or feed after processing. A case can also be made in India for oil seeds that require high import. Also, since oil is used after processing and refinement, the safety concerns are less than that of direct consumption of GM crops.
So far, 18 GM food crops – cauliflower, cabbage, corn, rice, wheat, tomato, groundnut, potato, sorghum, okra, brinjal, mustard, papaya, watermelon and sugarcane – are awaiting field trials in India. Nowhere in the world are Bt-transgenics being harvested in large amounts as major food crops directly used for human consumption. The TEC could not find any compelling reason for India to be the first to do so.
But Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar would have none of it. Bulldozing state Agriculture Minister Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil's resistance, his home state Maharashtra issued no-objection certificates to 28 applications for GM crop trials last year. The seven private applicants have been waiting for the GEAC nod since. Last December, the prime minister had had enough of Natarajan’s restraint. And now Moily has delivered well in time.
Rodrigues remains unfazed. “The next (SC) hearing is in the middle of this April. But I’ll ask for an earlier date to submit a supplementary affidavit now and seek an (interim) order against the (field) trials,” she says. “One could see it coming as they brought him (Moily) to clear the decks. I am dismayed by such brazenness. But the fight will continue.”
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