GM fly in the organic soup

Right when the country is debating the entry of Bt-Brinjal, India’s organic cotton is at the centre of a global trade storm that threatens its international market domination.

A report by the German edition of Financial Times on January 22, 2010, in the midst of the German fashion week, triggered what has snowballed into a major controversy.

In its report, ‘Label Scandal’, the FT Deutschland (FTD) named some of the major global clothing brands, including H&M, C&A and Tchibo, alleging that they were selling GMO-contaminated organic cotton, sourced from India, inferring that it was a fraud by design. GMOs (or Genetically Modified Organisms) are prohibited in organic standards.

While the report has been refuted as “unfounded” by all the stakeholders, industry experts say India’s rise as the number one producer-exporter of organic cotton is annoying the West, especially the European countries. India today produces and exports more than 60 percent of the world’s organic cotton, which, in a few years, has rapidly grown in to a $3.2 billion industry.

The FTD report, quickly picked up by other European media outlets, based its inference on the findings of what they claim is an independent lab, Impetus. The report quoted Lothar Kruse, Impetus director in Bremerhaven, as saying that roughly 30 percent of the tested samples contained GMO traces.

The report also quoted Sanjay Dave, director of the Agriculture Processing and Exports Development Agency (APEDA), as saying that the alleged fraud was occurring on a “gigantic scale.” The newspaper mentioned in its report two instances in which Apeda had acted against two agencies issuing certification, Ecocert and Control Union Certifications (CU).

DNA’s repeated attempts to contact Dave did not yield any result. So far, neither Apeda, which is the organic cotton regulatory authority, nor the commerce ministry, has issued any statement on the government response to this issue, which has a serious bearing on the country’s more than two lakh organic cotton growers, who are either already certified or in the process of getting certification.  

Currently, there are 18 certification organisations active in India. In 2009, the authority sanctioned Ecocert and Control Union for administrative lapses. But the sanctions were lifted after the two agencies rectified the problems.

CU says it enhanced its regulations, which led to higher certification costs for farmers at the cost of its business. The number of farming projects certified by CU declined, even as total projects in India grew rapidly. It takes anywhere between two years and seven years for a farm to convert to certified organic, experts say.

Tests questionable
However, after the controversy had done enormous damage, Kruse clarified his position early this week, saying he was misquoted and misrepresented. He told a European fashion magazine, Ecotextile News, that the FTD had not commissioned his lab to analyse cotton products from India; that most of its samples came from the textile industry and other labs that are not able to perform the analysis. “We do not know the origin or background of the samples,’ he was quoted by Ecotextile News as saying.

Kruse did claim that approximately 30 per cent of all samples labeled as ‘organic’, ‘green’ or ‘bio’ that Impetus had analysed within the last five years contained traces of genetic modifications. “But, and this is very important,” he was quoted as saying, “I also made clear that probably most of these positive samples were suspected cases and that this high rate does not reflect the reality.”

In around 500 samples in five years, Impetus found that the “GMO level of approximately 80 per cent of the positive samples was below 2 per cent.” A deliberate fraud would yield much higher content levels of GMO material.

Clothing retailers across Europe moved quickly to reassure consumers that their garments sold under organic cotton labels were environmentally sound. However, some brands like C&A have silently launched internal inquiries, fact-checking with their supply chains, given the high stakes.

The global retail sales of organic cotton apparel, according to 2008 Organic Exchange Farm and Fiber report, stood at $3.2 billion — a 63 percent growth over the previous year. The 2009 report is due, but the Exchange, a global intermediary body, expects the market to grow in 2010 to $5.3 billion, or around Rs26,500 crore.

Two of C&A executives visited India last week and met its spinning partners in one central location, said Thorsten Rolfes, a company representative. “They were prepared with a detailed list of questions for these spinners to answer.”
India’s meteoric growth

The controversy has prompted some of the certifiers to look at firming up their certification processes and brought to the fore two key issues. One: India’s growing domination in organic cotton production and exports. And two: the risk of contamination of organic cotton, given the near total acreage under GM-cotton.

In a span of three years, India overtook 22 countries in production and export of organic cotton. What was merely 10-15 percent of global production in 2002 shot up to a whopping 69 percent (11 lakh bales of the total 15.84 lakh bales) in 2008-09.

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.