Let’s Be Honest About Genetically Modified Crops

More than twenty years after they were first introduced, genetically modified (GM) crops are reported to be grown on approximately 3.7% of the world's total agricultural land, by less than 1% of the world's farmers[i]. In India, only GM cotton (commonly known as Bt cotton) is allowed to be grown for commercial cultivation, whereas several GM food crop trials have been under way for a few years. That these genetically modified food crops are being trialled at all is opposed on agricultural, environmental and economic grounds, and that they should move beyond trials and into widespread cultivation is being proposed, often by citing food security and climate change reasons.

Photo Credit Rahul Goswami

To understand whether GM seed and food should be permitted in India, it is important to understand what GM technology is. Simply put, a GM seed is the result of a laboratory process where genes from the DNA of one species are extracted and artificially forced into the genes of an unrelated plant or animal. The foreign genes may come from bacteria, viruses, insects, animals or even humans. In other words, genetic modification brings about alterations in genetic makeup and in the properties of the organism developed. The World Health Organization defines a GM organism (GMO) as one "in which the genetic material (DNA) has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally". In simple language, genetic engineers tinker with and recombine genes of completely unrelated species in the laboratory, creating new DNA not found in nature, and therefore new organisms that would not be found in nature.

This is one aspect of the idea of an unnatural organism that leads to a most fundamental question. Are food crops derived from such a method safe for human (or animal) consumption?

There are two ways to seek answers. One is to consider the more deleterious effects of any sort of progress against a time-line of that progress - while individual mobility (the automobile) may be considered a boon the effects of many people practicing such mobility is not (urban traffic, the rise of suburbia, pollution, increased and unsustainable use of raw material, wastefulness, etc.), while some modern drugs may help us deal with certain diseases (tuberculosis, malaria, dysentery, etc.) the unregulated and profit-maximising tendencies of the pharmaceutical industry has pushed many families into debt and has contributed to weakening human immune responses.

Thus there is for every kind of progress a blowback, which may be technical, economic, environmental or combination of these. With some kinds of progress, we now have time-lines several generations long to examine, such as with automobiles and medicinal drugs. With others, we have a very much shorter time-line to examine. GM is one such, and it’s already short time-line is full of high promise but questionable practice.

Because of its short existence as an idea and as a still very limited practice (GM seed and food are outlawed in 15 countries of the European Union)[ii] it is always only ever experimental. And for that reason the strenuous attempts of the bio-technology, industrial agriculture and commercial seed industries worldwide to have it called 'safe' have failed scientific scrutiny and have also failed public trust. For example, more than 15 years ago in 2001 a report from an expert panel of the Royal Society of Canada said it was "scientifically unjustifiable" to presume that GM foods are safe.[iii] What irked the examiners was the outright assertion that GM is safe - little has changed since. A year later in 2002 a report by the UK's Royal Society said that genetic modification "could lead to unpredicted harmful changes in the nutritional state of foods," and recommended that potential health effects of GM foods be rigorously researched before being fed to pregnant or breast-feeding women, elderly people, those suffering from chronic disease, and babies.

At the time, such cautions were both necessary and widely considered necessary. When conscientious scientists like geneticist David Suzuki, said, "Any politician or scientist who tells you these products are safe is either very stupid or lying", it was considered vindication of the need for caution. Contrast that view, no more than 15 years ago, with the opposition to any caution today when those who advocate it are called anti-science and Luddites.

Notwithstanding the efforts of the biotech industry, the commercial seed industry and the retail food industry to paint GM seed and crop as the answer to all problems existing and to come, opposition to GM and GE (genetically engineered seed and crop) continued to grow, with farmers' groups, leading scientists and civil society all calling for at least abundant caution if not a moratorium or ban. In view of the diversity of opinion on GM and GE seed and crop, the Government of India constituted a Parliamentary Standing Committee on GM crops in 2011-12[iv]. After a lengthy and exhaustive process that gathered evidence of practice from cultivators, from experts, from the public and from stakeholder groups, the Committee issued its report, which was hard-hitting and damning in a way few Parliamentary reports are.

That the present government was a part of this report - a landmark in the use of checks and balances by our democratic system of governance - is now overlooked and ignored. The report noted abuses in conducting adequate safety trials, the grossly inadequate and antiquated regulatory mechanism for assessment and approval of transgenics in food crops, the serious conflict of interest of various stakeholders involved in the regulatory mechanism, the total lack of post-commercialization monitoring of GM crops. It also cautioned the Union Government on the effects of GM crops on agricultural exports when considering whether to approve them. The report observed that cultivating GM crops leads to contamination and presents an inherent risk for farmers and Indian agriculture, and that contamination by GM crops can lead to countries banning imports of Indian agricultural produce. Given the growing demand for chemical-free, pesticide-free food worldwide, the risk of contamination by GM seed and crop of traditional and hybrid crop staples is one of the several risks that this technology carries and which our country cannot afford.

Considering the flaws and shortcomings noted by the Committee and the still unclear ramifications of transgenic crops on bio-diversity, environment, human and livestock health and sustainability, the Committee demanded that the ongoing field trials in all states be discontinued. The members of the Standing Committee on Agriculture, across political parties, were unanimous in their report. The report stands as a comprehensive indictment - and indeed a signal authoritative rebuttal to the claims of the GM/GE/biotech industry and its attempts to wrest control of India's food grain and commercial crops production. That such a comprehensive report is, a scant few years after its release, not even referred to by either Union government, state governments or the food and commercial crops industry speaks volumes about transparency and information, both prerequisites in a democratic system.

Besides, three more high-level reports advising against the adoption of these crops in India have likewise been ignored. These are the 'Jairam Ramesh Report' of February 2010 - which set a new standard for public consultation on an ecological and ethical issue - that imposed an indefinite moratorium on Bt Brinjal; the 'Sopory Committee Report' set up by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, of August 2012, on the attempt to develop through GM means a variety of desi cotton and which exposed both scientific deception and regulatory oversight; the Supreme Court of India's Technical Expert Committee which was formed for the Aruna Rodrigues petition concerning GM field trials, whose final report released in July 2013 has recommendations that are yet to be acted on by our regulatory agencies.

The Technical Expert Committee, in its interim report (of October 2012) had favoured abundant caution on the matter of biological safety and genetically engineered seeds and crops. It had recommended a ten-year moratorium on field trials of GM food crops. There was then and remains a very good reason for making such a recommendation: contamination of relative strains that are native to the crop growing region, by GM crops under trial, may be detected only after years, and such contamination is irreversible. For a country like India, which is a centre of origin for several food crops and oilseeds and a centre of biological diversity, the first responsibility is to protect this biological diversity from contamination.

The path of extreme caution has also been recommended to avoid the likelihood of serious ecological and health (human and animal) problems caused by the use of unnatural GM and GE seed and crop, as also to avoid economic stress to growers and the loss of seed sovereignty. As explained by Colin Todhunter[v], a push for genetically modified seeds is to sanction the exploiting of the farmer, in favour of profits for the commercial seed industry, and the ruin of traditional agriculture.

Among the benefits claimed by the adoption of GM technology in seed and crop is that of greater yield. This is an attractive inducement for farmers who would certainly like their half acre or acre of land to produce more weight in crop per square unit of land. Just as attractive is the claim that GM seeds require smaller applications of chemical fertiliser and pesticides, both of which are expensive. These assumptions however have crumbled under examination.

Data from the USA - a country that has grown GM crops for well over two decades - gives us a picture very different from the claims loudly made. In the most extensive and rigorous study, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) analysed 20 years' returns and costs of GM crops, to conclude that contrary to myths about the superiority of GE crop yields, most yield gains in recent years are due to traditional breeding or improvements in other agricultural practices. UCS expert scientist Doug Gurian-Sherman unequivocally stated, "Traditional breeding outperforms genetic engineering hands down."[vi]

India's experience with Bt cotton has been tragic. A new study published by California-based agricultural scientists in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe directly links the suicides among Indian farmers (more than two lakh cumulatively, from the National Crime Records Bureau) to Bt cotton adoption in rain-fed farming areas, where most of India's cotton is grown. This appalling record has shown to the world how GM methods ruthlessly exercise patents to force farmers to buy costly seeds every year, sending their families into debt, how such crops have left behind degraded soil and polluted water bodies, and how desi cotton has all but disappeared from India, which is a starting setback to the revival of the khadi-based village and rural hubs intended.

The environmental soundness and health benefits of our traditional agricultural methods, free of chemicals and pesticides and based on our seed diversity, can enable India to choose diversified agro-ecological farming instead of the industrial, energy-intensive and monoculture-based mode that GM fully represents.

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[i] Source : Source: FAO Stat and ISAAA

[ii] http://sustainablepulse.com/2015/10/22/gm-crops-now-banned-in-36-countries-worldwide-sustainable-pulse-research/

[iii] https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-014-0034-1

[iv] http://wwfenvis.nic.in/files/Agriculture/Action%20Taken%20by%20the%20Government%20on%20the%20Observations%20Recommendations%20contained%20in%20the%20Thirty-seventh%20Report%20of%20the%20Committee%20on%20Agriculture%20(2011-2012).pdf

[v] http://www.globalresearch.ca/pro-gmo-scientists-blinded-by-technology-and-wedded-to-ideology/5574988

[vi] http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/genetic-engineering/failure-to-yield.html#.WKvFhvKJcfI

This article first appeared in Swarajya

GM crops debate needs Swadeshi voice

By the end of the active stage of the ‘Green Revolution’, the result of the long campaign had been to take away from Bharat’s farmers their legitimate claims to being scientists, innovators, natural resource stewards, seed savers and hybridisation experts.

The agro-ecological farming systems of Bharat have been placed under modern threat from the time that the ‘Green Revolution’ was planned. This planning became manifest through the direct policy support given to the public finance and sanction given to the creation of ‘command areas’ which were fed by the water collected behind new large dams. But it also became manifest through the connections that were being created between our national agricultural research system and the West, in particular the agricultural universities of the USA.
That threat took form from the early 1960s, and one of its results was to lead a generation of crop scientists, agricultural administrators and State and Central Governments to accept ‘high yielding’ and ‘productivity’ and ‘hybrids’ as the only dimensions of the relationship between staple crops and the provision of food to Bharat’s people. These views were successfully marketed, thanks to sustained and continuous support by the Government machinery, to the consuming public, and even found place in school textbooks in all major languages. In this way, the idea that a ‘scientific’ approach to new ways of growing our staple crops was projected to our society as being the only modern way.
When this happened, for over a generation of younger citizens who became adults in the early 2000s, the idea that agriculture is equal to well-applied doses of science was one that went largely unquestioned. Meanwhile, the role of the kisan was deliberately diminished. By the end of the active stage of the ‘Green Revolution’, the result of the long campaign had been to take away from Bharat’s farmers their legitimate claims to being scientists, innovators, natural resource stewards, seed savers and hybridisation experts. Instead, they were reduced to becoming recipients of technical fixes and consumers of the poisonous products of a growing agricultural inputs industry.
It is against such a background – which is a chapter of the overall transformation of the cultivation of food in Bharat – that the opposition to genetically-modified crops and food is to be viewed. The steadfast opposition to this technology is grounded in the recognition that our country’s immense biodiversity of seeds, plants and life forms is our collective heritage, which has evolved through the cumulative innovations, adaptations and selections of many generations of indigenous farming communities, for whom these seeds and life forms are sacred.
When this position is understood, then the reason why genetically modified organisms – uncontrollable and irreversible when let into the agro-ecological environment – and their produce is so despised, becomes plain. It is not a matter of science alone, as the geneticists and their financiers claim, but has as much, if not more, to do with culture, independence and self-reliance. These are essential aspects of the GM discussion which the proponents and advocates cannot employ, because none of these aspects favours their position.
Articles such as ‘GM crops debate can do without Swadeshi paranoia’ (by Surajit Dasgupta in Niticentral, 30 July 2014) follow a pattern of advocacy. They treat technology of GM as being by itself the silver bullet that can solve all crop problems, they elevate GM scientists over all other science related to the practice of agriculture, they denigrate shamefully and belittle the farmer and her knowledge, they cast slurs on all those who are critical of GM and seek to discredit them by citing academic papers and other material that advocates GM. This is the pattern that we are seeing not only in Bharat, but wherever there is opposition to GM and to the policies that the technology depends on to enter a country.
The growing of our crop staples, of vegetables and fruit has to do with a great deal more than the adoption of a particular technology. On everything other than the need (always framed as urgent) to accept GM, the proponents and advocates of this technology can join no discussion, for that is the limit of their argument. For a generation, farmers’ groups and unions have been protesting the neglect that farm livelihoods have been subjected to. They have protested (and continue to) policy impacts that have caused the displacement of farmers in huge numbers because smallholder farming earns them nothing, or because their farms are swallowed up by racing urbanisation; they have been demanding a minimum living income as a guarantee to all farm households, which must be their due as food growers.
Who are they and what do they have? They have 85 per cent of the total holdings in Bharat (117.60 million marginal and small holdings of the total of 138.34 million) which account for 44.5 per cent of the land area under agriculture (71.15 million hectares of the total of 159.59 million hectares). It is this large section of our people, the providers of Bharat’s food on that 85 per cent of all farm holdings, whom we are accustomed to call ‘annadaata‘, that is represented by organisations like the Bhartiya Kisan Union, the largest farmers’ union in the country, which has opposed GM crops (and field trials) from the outset. “We are concerned about farm community’s and nation’s seed and food sovereignty which will certainly be eroded when GMOs are pursued as a technology,” was the BKU statement, which powerfully shows us why GM is a socio-economic, ecological and cultural question, none of which are subordinated to science.
This is what worries the growers of Bharat’s food. Technological and market fixes have not shortened this list of worries but have done the opposite. The subject for us is the growing of crop staples, or crop choice, the methods used to cultivate, the support that the ‘kisan’ finds, and the environmental and cultural links between crop grower and food consumer. When considering this multi-dimensional nature of food and farming, it is important to note (which the GM advocates and proponents omit) that conventional crop breeding continues to meet important challenges like improving drought tolerance, improving nitrogen fertiliser efficiency, and increasing yields according to the contexts of the different agro-ecological regions in our country. When we reached self-sufficiency in food staples, we did so by relying on crop breeding together with providing support (erratic as it was, prone to politically manipulation) to our ‘kisans’. Where then is the place for GM?
There is none. That is why proponents have resorted to quoting papers that are designed by institutions outside Bharat which have a great interest in facilitating the grabbing of Bharat’s genetic commons and bio-cultural heritage to be privatised and monopolised. The Bharat Beej Swaraj Manch had stated their opposition to GM most forcefully in a statement (released in New Delhi earlier this year): “We assert our sovereign rights to freely plant, use, reproduce, select, improve, adapt, save, share, exchange or sell our seeds – without restriction or hindrance – as we have done for past millennia.” GM has no place in this assertion, by a countrywide seed savers’ network, of the rights of kisans.
There is no place for GM under any of the scenarios presented by the proponents (climate change in particular). As an indication of our enormous agro-diversity, the National Gene Bank of the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources has said that its base collections total 402,894 accessions of 1,586 crop species. These include 159,569 cereals, 57,523 millets, 58,756 pulses or grain legumes, 58,477 oilseeds, 25,330 vegetables, 6,872 medicinal and aromatic plants, and 3,847 spices and condiments. There is in this astonishing collection (and the kisans’ own collections) all that our country needs to find staples that will deal, as Surajit Dasgupta has mentioned, with “increasing temperatures, decreased water availability in some places and flooding in others, rising salinity, and changing pathogen and insect threats”.
The methods to deal with these have been practiced by the cultivating households (of which there are many within our 167 million rural households) in the 20 agro-ecological regions of Bharat and their 60 sub-regions over which are roughly apportioned the diversities of soil, climate, physiography, the availability periods of conducive moisture (which determines the length of growing seasons). They had perfected crop rotations (largely abandoned by industrial agriculture) and which can increase yields by even 20 per cent, the water holding capacity of soils (woefully under-studied) had been improved, they lowered susceptibility to drought by planting cover crops that increase soil organic matter, they had saved themselves from water pollution by nitrogen and the need for pesticides.
This is a small glimpse of the wider context in which the GM advocates and proponents work, but they do so outside the dimension of cognitive justice that ties us together – acknowledging the right for different knowledge systems to exist with their associated practices, livelihoods, ways of being, and ecologies to coexist. It is organisations like Anchalika Krushak Sanghatan of Odisha, Bhu Adhikar Abhiyan of Madhya Pradesh, Ekta Parishad, Gujarat Khedut Samaj, Bharat Swabhimaan Andolan Lucknow, Shetkari Sanghatan of Maharastra that are rearticulating this wider context in which GM and the techno-capital domination is represents. These are a few amongst the many organisations that have created diverse spaces which democratise food, its research and its provision, and whose hundreds of thousands of members practice bio-diverse ecological agriculture free from the narrow issues of technology and its overlords.

Authored jointly by Rahul Goswami and Viva Kermani
First appeared in Niti Central
http://www.niticentral.com/2014/08/01/gm-crops-debate-needs-swadeshi-voice-235071.html

GM food crops – Why India must say no

When the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) on July 18 decided that open field trials of 21 new varieties of genetically modified (GM) crops should be permitted, the arguments contra and pro became considerably more intense. That a single committee is seen to have the experience and foresight to judge the consequences of allowing open field trials of genetically modified rice, wheat, maize and other food crops can hardly be believed, but that is the state of what passes for ‘regulation’ these days.

Desperate to corner the Indian market, which is seen in international agri-business as vital for the long-term profitability of the food bio-tech companies, the GM seed companies have pulled out many tricks in order to try and make their arguments convincing. The latest attempt is to claim that India needs GM food crops to feed its growing population and that without GM crops we will never be able to feed ourselves. This claim is worse than specious and is amongst those that provoked outrage enough to lead the Minister into distancing his Government from the decision of the committee.

What GM technology proponents fail to tell you is that India has been self-sufficient in food staples for over a decade, and more than that for cereals. Today the country grows about 100 million tons (mt) of rice, 95 mt of wheat, 170 mt of vegetables, 85 mt of fruit, 40 mt of coarse cereals and 18 mt of pulses (refer to the Economic Survey for the data). These totals ensure that our farmers grow enough to feed all Indians well with food staples. We have 66 mt of grain, two-and-a-half times the required buffer stock (on January 1, 2013). The country has reached this stage through, first and foremost, the knowledge and skill of our farmers who have bred and saved seed themselves and exchanged their seed in ways that made our fields so bio-diverse.

This is the aspect that the GM proponents, such as Amol Parth (‘GM Field Trials-Government must be guided by Consumer and Farmer Choice‘) miss or omit by design. Instead, the statements that they use such as “thousands die of hunger daily in India” are irresponsible and baseless scare-mongering with a view to projecting GM as the only answer. When our people go hungry, or suffer from malnutrition, it is not for lack of food, it is because their right to safe and nutritious food that is culturally connected has been blocked. That is why it is not a technological fix problem and GM has no place in it.
Recognising the wider context, the Technical Expert Committee appointed by the Supreme Court, in its interim report of October 17, 2012, had also recommended a ten-year moratorium on field trials of Bt food crops. Why did they do this? No field trials of Bt transgenic crops until gaps in the regulatory system are addressed, the committee had said. Field trials are conducted before establishing biosafety as GM contamination from field trials may be detected after years, and such contamination is irreversible. Yet the GEAC has chosen to ignore the Supreme Court recommendations – this must be questioned.
Moreover, the TEC could not find any justification for India becoming the first country where major food crop that is directly used for human consumption is genetically modified. The health risks are too great. Routinely, the GM industry influences scientific journals to publish reviews purportedly showing that GM foods are safe on the basis of long-term animal studies, whereas they show considerable evidence of risk and use unscientific double standards to reach conclusions not justified by the data. This is part of the GM lobby’s bag of dirty tricks, a bag now opened in our country.
A common argument made in favour of GM crops is that the farmer benefits as yield increase. This is a totally spurious claim designed to hoodwink our farmers, who are already struggling with high input costs. European countries are often criticised for their opposition to GM whereas impartial research has shown that Europe’s mostly non-GM agriculture delivers higher yields than the USA’s mostly GM agriculture with less pesticide use. On the contrary, it is the GM-adopting USA that is falling behind Europe in terms of productivity and sustainability.
Seventeen years after its introduction, only 3.4 per cent of the world’s agricultural land is sown with GM seed. If this technology is as wondrous as its mischievous supporters claim, and is the answer for improved yield and lower costs, why has it not been embraced more widely? Quite simply because the good sense of farmers has halted its spread. Food growing countries, states, districts and farmers understand fully well that GM technology is about patents and control. Letting GM in will mean exposing the farmer, the consumer and the nation to unacceptable risk. Our seed sovereignty is dear to us. That is why the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU), India’s largest farmer union, on July 21, stated that GMOs are unsafe and are not needed in India.
For a country that has great diversity and a vast repository of seeds and knowledge that come to us from agricultural systems many generations old, it is in our national interest to protect our seeds and traditional knowledge and bar multi-national seed companies that want to control our food system. This is what swadeshi economics means.

This article first appeared in NITI Central http://www.niticentral.com/2014/07/23/gm-food-crops-why-india-must-say-no-234572.html