Engineered cotton and manufactured consent

This year's southwest monsoons had already advanced on the western Indian peninsula and agricultural operations were well underway, when the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), constituted by the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests, began deliberating on the pros and cons of introducing a transgenic variety of cotton seed into India's complex agrarian economy. Barely three months later, in October 2001, a genetically modified variety of cotton crop was found on about 10,000 hectares of land in the western Indian state of Gujarat. While this discovery raises serious doubts about the Indian government's capacity to perform its regulatory functions, subsequent developments also point to the complex web of interest groups and lobbies that the polity has to confront in the immediate future.

The unauthorised use of genetically engineered cotton seeds has sparked off a controversy. While big farmer groups are demanding, even more vociferously, the commercial introduction of transgenic seed varieties, the administration and environmental activists insists that the unauthorised crop must be destroyed. The conflict over cotton in India is not just about the familiar clash between the commercial drive for profit and environmentalist urge to protect biodiversity, it also typifies corporate methods of manufacturing consent in liberalised times.

A cotton controversy

Interestingly, the discovery of illegal Bt cotton plantations was made by the Bombay-based Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company (Mahyco), in which US transgenic crop giant Monsanto holds a 26 per cent equity stake. Mahyco had applied to the GEAC for permission to commercially introduce Bt cotton. Bt is a transgenic variety of cotton that contains the soil bacterium Bacillus thurngiensis (Bt) which encodes an insecticidal protein through a gene called Cryl Ac . Mahyco claims that this. genetic property enables the cotton plant to resist the pest Helicoverpa armigera or bollworm. The company also claimed that it had carried out field trials of Bt cotton, whose "successful" results were apparently submitted to the GEAC. Environmentalists, on the other hand, claimed that the company's field trials would not with stand critical scrutiny and hence could not constitute the basis for official endorsement. The GEAC decided to take a balanced approach and invited the company and its critics for a hearing. Thereafter, on 20 June, GEAC announced its decision to have yet another round of field trials since the available data was grossly inadequate to make any reasonable surmise of yield projections and net agronomic advantage. The GEAC's decision provoked an uproar from the big farm lobby which has repeatedly argued that biotech is the answer to India's agrarian troubles. To compound matters, the GEAC, rather imprudently, found it unnecessary to publicise the available field trial data for independent scrutiny.

Meanwhile, an Ahmedabad based private seed company, Navbharat Seeds, had already begun marketing cottonseeds that contained CrylAc, patented globally by Monsanto, and for which the Indian license is held by Mahyco. Navbharat is believed to have developed the seed as a hybrid from transgenic seed imported from the US, where Bt cottonseeds are freely available. In India any individual or company can sell seeds without applying for permission. The only statutory obligation is to paste a label on the seed packet, a requirement with which Navbharat had complied. Subsequently, Navbharat also applied for registration of its brand, which was duly granted. The fact that the seeds were genetically modified was concealed and that is a legal violation for which the company could be prosecuted.

Estimates suggest that more than 10,000 packets, each containing 450 grams of Bt cotton seeds, were sold through retail outlets for a price of USD 11.5. Though the illegal cotton crops were discovered in October 2001, investigations revealed that Bt seeds were available and were being cultivated in Gujarat since 1999. It is impossible to accurately estimate the exact acreage under Bt cotton in Gujarat or the number of farmers growing it. Preliminary field visits by personnel of the State Agricultural Department reveal that it is widespread in districts like Bharuch, Kutch, Amreily, Gandhinagar, Surendranagar and Saberkantha. Confronted by legal violation on this scale, the GEAC was forced to take action. On 19 October it issued a directive ordering the State Biotechnology Coordination Committee to destroy the standing Bt crop. GEAC stated that the crop was ready for harvest and hence immediate intervention was needed. GEAC also directed the administration that the affected farmers should be compensated. However, the directive appears to have come too late, as farmers had already carried out one or two rounds of pickings. The order to destroy the crop set in motion a chain of reactions. The government of Gujarat and the central government in New Delhi seemed to be more interested in evading the issue of compensation, as each tried to pass the financial burden onto the other. The farmer lobby, meanwhile, was quick to try and seize the initiative. The firebrand leader of rich peasants, Sharad Joshi, was immediately out on the streets denouncing the move to destroy the illegal genetically modified (GM) crop.

Growing a profit

Given the turn of events, and evaluating the situation from a net-gain perspective, it would appear that the final beneficiary of this episode is the seed giant Monsanto. In the last several years Monsanto and other biotech multinationals such as Syngenta and Novartis have been making concerted attempts to capture the global seed market. In Europe their efforts seem to be yielding few returns. Therefore, the fragmented and unorganised farm sector in Latin America and Asia has now become the focus of their activities. In this drive to penetrate underdeveloped economies, the biotech industry has found a new and, on the face of it, unlikely cheerleader— the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The Human Development Report 2001, released by the UNDP a few months ago, is in large measure a fairly explicit sales pitch for the industry. The report asserts, quite presumptuously, that "biotechnology offers the only or the best 'tool of choice' for marginal ecological zones—left behind by the green revolution but home to more than half of the worlds poorest people, dependent on agriculture and livestock".

With such respectable institutional backing it is not surprising that transnational corporations have felt free to act unilaterally and in violation of sovereign laws to gain envy into third world markets. There is no dearth of propaganda on the benefits that this technology offers to farmers, so much so that the reputed power of GM seeds to miraculously transform agriculture has acquired the status of a religious revelation among some of the more influential circles in many poor countries. Witness the insistent demand of rich farmer lobbies to legalise the introduction of modified seeds. Presumably the corporations are within their rights to operate through lobbies of this kind. But this is often accompanied by more dubious activities that amount to malpractice. Among others, biotech companies are known to make misleading claims, suppress information about possible negative consequences, doctor field trials, and, most notoriously, introduce seeds by stealth in clear breach of the law. It is this last tactic that has prompted industry insiders to speculate on a possible connection between Mahyco and the furtive activities of Navbharat Seeds.

Mahyco is reported to have spent USD 8 million on commercialising Bt cotton in India and it has reason to try and hasten a favourable government decision. For the record, Mahyco's managing director has lashed out at Navbharat Seeds demanding "strong and immediate action" against it for "blatant contravention of the legal and regulatory processes".

Sceptics, however, are not convinced by such public statements, primarily because the Monsanto- Mahyco combine has been extremely reluctant to take legal action against Navbharat for the infringement of its patent. As a rule, biotech multinationals are very aggressive in their use of the legal system to extract the maximum advantage for themselves. Only recently Monsanto dragged a Canadian farmer, Percy Schmeiser, to court for allegedly infringing its patent on GM canola. Schmeiser claimed his organic canola field was invaded by Monsanto's genetically engineered variety of canola from a neighbouring field because of high pollen flow. The court eventually ordered the farmer to pay damages to Monsanto. In marked contrast, in the Navbharat case Monsanto- Mahyco have cited the ambiguity of existing Indian patent laws as the reason for not legally pursuing the matter. There are many who feel that a company that has created legal history by securing a new precedent in Canadian case-law could not have forfeited its possible claims to redressal under the Indian legal system without some compelling motive of profit. Whatever be the truth of it, overnight a lobby of farmers in favour of Bt cotton has been created in Gujarat through illegal means, at no cost to Mahyco and to the considerable profit of Navbharat. If anybody loses financially it will be either the farmers who planted the seed or the government that destroys the crop.

Friends of the farm

Meanwhile, in what must be the strongest argument for legalising the biotech seed, the affected farmers in Gujarat today say they had larger yields due to Bt cotton. In effect, spurred by short-term gains, they speak Monsanto's language. And of course the farmers cannot be mindful of any of the possible negative consequences that environmentalists have warned of, since they have yet to be made aware of them. In many ways this calls to mind the green revolution farmer's excessive enthusiasm for chemical fertilisers and ground water, in a bid to maintain productivity in the face of a continuing spiral of depletion. As has happened the past in India, the cash starved farmer's immediate financial relief may well become the benchmark for granting legitimacy to yet another technology whose agro-economic suitability, relevance and sustainability have not been established rigorously.

Ironically enough, the introduction of these technologies is always legitimised by pointing to the plight of the Indian farmer, which is governed by too complex a set of factors for it to be ameliorated by the purely technocratic solution proffered by the biotech industry and supposedly neutral organisations like UNDP. These factors include the absence of a micro credit system, poor utilisation of land and water resources and the price fluctuations of the international market. Cotton is indeed one of the most volatile crops in India. The country has the world's largest tract of land under cotton cultivation: about 8.9 million hectares. The Indian cotton economy employs 7 million people. Yet, the country's cotton fields rank among the lowest in the world in terms of productivity. Two-thirds of the cotton crop in India is cultivated under rain fed conditions, exposing farmers to the vagaries of weather. In addition poor soil health, constraints in the adoption of sound agronomic practices, the small size of land holdings on which the crop is cultivated, and the poor spread of integrated pest management methods have all combined to push productivity down. The last factor is particularly crucial. Compared to other crops, cotton faces the most serious pest problem and the magnitude of damage caused on this count through the entire duration from the sowing to the picking has been the single most important factor in depressing productivity. In the past several years cotton has driven hundreds of farmers and their families to suicide because either the bollworm or the weather has affected the harvest and pushed them into a cyclical debt trap.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that cotton accounts for more than half the total money spent in India on pesticides. Given the scale of revenue involved, the competing drive for market dominance between two alternative technologies of pest control threatens to derail a dispassionate evaluation of genetically engineered seed. The powerful pesticide lobby in India sees the introduction of Bt cotton as a threat to its existence. The industry has been lobbying hard, sometimes on the side of environmentalists, to thwart the commercialisation of Bt cotton, so that the seed debate in India seems today to be reduced to a choice between chemical pollution and genetic pollution. In reality, the debate encompasses a far greater range of issues involving ecologically- sustainable methods to deal with the pest problem. In this context, it is worth noting that there are pockets in India where organic cotton production has shown encouraging results and this points to a potentially optimal 'solution. However, proponents of the transgenic variety have not been deterred by such alternatives, preferring instead to churn out statistics about arable under proprietary seed. They claim that half the acreage under cotton plantation in the US has switched over to Bt cotton. Reportedly, China in 2000 had increased the area under GM cotton to 28 per cent of its total cotton acreage, a tenfold increase in two years. Countries like Argentina, South Africa and Mexico are also said to be following suit.

Environmentalists, on the other hand, argue that transgenic cotton makes neither environmental nor agronomic sense. They point out that there is overwhelming scientific evidence to suggest that with sustained cultivation of the Bt crop, resistance to the Bt toxin will develop. Over a period of time this could lead to the proliferation of resistant pests to the extent that Bt will no longer be effective against a majority of the targeted pest population. Though Bt cotton is derived from a naturally occurring soil bacterium, it is crystallised to enable its insertion into the plant. Thus Bt cotton is an insecticidal genetically engineered plant containing an insecticide produced in all parts of the plant during the entire life span of the crop. Pests and non-target insects will therefore be exposed to this pre-activated toxin for a long time, thereby increasing the risks of resistance development and harmful effects to non-target species. Environmental activists cite the case of the Chrysoperla cornea, or the green lacewing, which is a predatory species used in India under the Integrated Pest Management Programme to control bollworm. Bt

maize led to increased mortality among the green lacewing. This risk to predatory species threatens to undermine modern pest management systems. In some regions in the US, it was found that between 1996 and 1998, the cotton bollworm acquired a tenfold increase in tolerance to the toxin found in Bt cotton. In China too the bollworm is reported to have developed early resistance to Bt.

The Biotech bureaucracy

While a final verdict on the merits of the various approaches cannot be arrived at without systematically compiling and evaluating the entire corpus of evidence, there are enough credible instances to suggest that engineered seeds may have adverse consequences sufficient to merit concern and scientific examination. It is understandable, though not acceptable, that the biotech industry should brush aside these concerns to hawk their wares. What is rather more dubious is that institutions like the UNDP, masquerading behind supposedly neutral developmental agendas, have chosen, in the name of food security, to conduct themselves like the commission agents of private firms. When confronted with crusading 'biotech revolutionaries' who resort to every possible method, including getting mileage out of rural poverty and food insecurity, it does appear that third world governments have neither the will nor the mechanisms to rectify matters. Eight years ago India had introduced regulatory mechanisms pertaining to genetically modified organisms in the Environment Protection Act. As a result, the country now boasts a three tier mechanism made up of a web of committees whose roles and functions are overlapping at best and confusing at worst. This elaborate regulatory mechanism and its rules had no occasion to be tested in the past. Now, when the occasion has arisen very few in the bureaucracy have been able to handle it effectively. Let alone address the question of the efficacy of GM seeds, this So-called regulatory mechanism has been unable even to deal with the illegalities of the Bt cotton episode. With such mechanisms in place, the "world's largest democracy" is unlikely to be able to resist a corporate stranglehold on its agrarian economy.

Why environmentalists oppose GM seeds

GM crops could cause genetic pollution by transferring their foreign genes to related plants. Pesticide resistant genes could turn weeds into 'superweeds; and insect resistant genes could turn insects into super bugs both impossible to control without massive applications of chemicals.

• Given the fact that developing countries are hotspots of genetic diversity, transgenic crops pose a potential risk to the traditional wild varieties. For example Mexico, the centre of diversity for corn is threatened by GM variety being imported from the US.
• GM crops could have a devastating effect on native flora and fauna. Because such crops may have competitive advantage over natural wild plants the latter may be unable to survive.
• Food produced from some GM crops could severely undermine the treatment of human and animal disease. This is because many GM crops contain antibiotic resistant genes.
• GM food could increase the risk of allergies.