Transgenic crops, rural strife

A campaign led by residual followers of Sharad Joshi-led Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra is demanding that genetically modified (GM) crops like Herbicide Tolerant Bt (HT Bt) cotton be approved. In Haryana too, a fringe group calling themselves the Bhartiya Kisan Union, are doing the same. 

The irony is that HT Bt cotton is already grown on millions of hectares of land, under the very nose of central and state regulators. It has been aided by the illegal use of a deadly chemical called Glyphosate, used to kill weeds. There is no application for HT Bt cotton approval in India and the seed supplies are patently illegal. 

Farmers’ desperation is understandable, given the prevailing crisis. However, that does not make these technologies desirable or safe for either farmers, consumers or the environment. Haven’t farmers seen deaths and hospitalisation after acute pesticide poisoning? Public policy-making cannot be driven by such demands created by campaigns. 

A majority of countries around the world don’t grow GM crops. They may be consuming some GM foods through the indirect channel of GM livestock feed from USA and Brazil making its way into the human food chain system, but most nations have taken a conscious decision about disallowing GM crop cultivation. 

There are scientific reasons for this. GM crop cultivation is a direct hazard to the environment and food chain. The countries importing livestock feed are doing it because of lack of options, and often under arm-twisting from the USA, which had rushed into transgenic cultivation way back in 1996. 

To this day, only five countries in the world have more than 90% of GM crop cultivation area, with USA continuing to have more than 50% of the world’s transgenic area. 

In the past decade, 33 countries tried transgenic crop cultivation, but only 24 continued with the practice. 

In reality, there has hardly been an agricultural technology in our midst, which has created so much rural strife. While Shetkari Sanghatana farmers are campaigning for GM crops, most farmer unions in the country have been against the approval of transgenics.

Protests and even direct action of uprooting GM crop trials have taken place from the 1990s onwards, led by large farmer unions. It is a strange situation with farmers fighting against each other. 

It is reported that the herbicide drift, which destroys fields of neighbouring farmers, has been a leading cause for litigation between farmers in the USA. 

In the past 20 years in India, we have also seen strife between local seed companies and MNCs erupt from time to time, in courts and outside. 

There is, of course, strife when farmers resort to agitations after Bt cotton crop losses, an additional tension between state governments and farmer unions. Needless to say, what farmers are opting for, and what consumers want, are also different, causing new points of tensions. In the USA for instance, consumers’ demand for organic foods is the highest in the world, while the producers there are cultivating transgenics due to various compulsions.  

The greatest body of evidence on the adverse impact of GM crops is actually from herbicide tolerant transgenic. More than 85% of GM crop cultivation in the world is of this kind. Here, a crop is genetically engineered to withstand (and even absorb) the use of deadly herbicides like Glyphosate, so that farmers use the chemical liberally on the crop to kill weeds, rather than employ wage workers to manually de-weed the farm. When the weeds get resistant and become super-weeds, deadlier chemicals are recommended and sold. The company gets to profiteer by selling the seed as well as the associated herbicide. 

Other than the impact of the herbicide and the GM crop on soil, on non-target organisms and human health, is the issue of poor rural women losing the little employment potential that exists for them in agriculture. 

In Maharashtra, we recently heard about the horrific phenomenon of young farming women undergoing hysterectomies in desperate search for employment as sugarcane cutters. The crisis of employment and the declining workforce participation of women in India, driven mainly by rural decline, are well-known. 

It is a policy choice to be made by governments about disallowing technologies like herbicide-tolerant crops, especially when the government has no alternative employment to offer. Several committees, including the Supreme Court Technical Expert Committee, have already said that HT crops should not be allowed in India.

Governments need not sit wringing their hands helplessly. It is easy to crack down on seed production and supply systems of illegal GM. In India, only 7-8 districts in 4-5 states are the main hubs of cotton seed production. Cracking down on the fields, by the use of lateral flow strip tests for HT hybrid cotton seed production fields is easy enough, apart from inspections in ginning factories and seed treatment plants. 

More importantly, the way to deal with the problem is to ban Glyphosate in India. The central government has to take a decision. The Maharashtra government, should meanwhile, enforce an order it has passed to stop licensing of sales. Glyphosate sales are taking place all over and the agriculture department is not doing anything concrete to enforce its own order. 

It is also important to notify a rule under the Environment Protection Act to fix liability on the event developer in case illegal GM crop cultivation is discovered. After all, how did the seeds come out from R&D pipeline when bio-safety norms don’t allow anything to be released without legal authorisation?

Finally, we need labour costs in agriculture to be subsidised. Not by deploying MGNREGS for agricultural operations, but by starting an additional scheme for diverting subsidies from unsustainable chemical fertilisers to subsidising manual de-weeding and using the MGNREGS apparatus for actual oversight and payment to workers. 

Author is with the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture