Yet within the country, the organic cotton sector is in an infant stage, occupying barely two per cent of the total cotton acreage that in 2009-10 season crossed ten million hectares.
“India’s strong market position is an eye sore for most European companies who run their projects in countries like Turkey and Syria,” says Dr Selvam Daniel, the India representative of Ecocert, a certification agency. “Now they want to tarnish our image by saying it is GMO-contaminated,’ he says. “It’s just global business politics.”
India produced 73,702 MT of organic cotton in 2007-08, a 292 per cent increase over the previous year and half the world’s output.
Apeda estimates the area under organic cotton to grow to 500,000 hectares in India over the next few years. Only 0.55 per cent of the world cotton production is organic. In 2010, the global market for organics is expected to be 147,000 MT of lint, and projections are that in coming years the demand would overtake supply.
Risk of GMO contamination
Notwithstanding the controversy, the threat of GMO contamination of organic cotton in the country, say industry experts and scientists, is real. “The truth is that organic agriculture exists in a world where certain crops, like cotton, are becoming dominated by GE production,” said a statement issued after the recent controversy by the Organic Trade Association, an international industry consortium. Agriculture policy analyst Devinder Sharma said, “The issue of contamination is serious and we have to stop it even if the levels are small.”
The Organic Exchange says the risk of GMO contamination in organic cotton is growing in India where about 90 percent of conventional cotton is now produced using GMO seed.
“Contamination,” it says, “can occur at the farm where GMO and organic crops are grown too close together and cross pollination takes place.” The resulting seed on the fringes of the organic cotton crop may then contain the BT gene, which is the most common GMO variety.
Current organic farming standards deal with this by setting ‘buffer zones’ which specify the distance required between organic and conventional fields. There is no doubt that in India the widespread use of GMO poses a threat to the integrity of the organic cotton industry, but it is an issue that is increasingly being taken seriously by all stakeholders.
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