Biosafety in India / Bt hype in India (26/10/2005) | |
Below's a short summary of an article on biosafety in India published recently in Economic and Political Weekly. To read the article in full: "Optimistic predictions of the GEAC, the ICAR and the department of biotechnology (DBT) quoted an additional income of Rs 10,000 per acre for the farmer. The DBT also claimed that crop yields would increase by 80 per cent. For the chair-person of GEAC, the fact that Bt cotton would drastically reduce pesticide use by 80 per cent among other benefits was reason enough to grant approval." Somehow these officials all seemd to lose sight of what was happening in the first country to approve Monsanto's Bt cotton in Asia - Indonesia - which was experiencing such bad results that the company was actually forced to abandon selling GM seeds there altogether. Bt cotton commercialisation in India was also dogged by a whole series of bad reports from farmers, NGOs, independent scientists and even State governments, culminating eventually in the banning of 3 types of Monsanto's bt cotton in Andhra Pradesh and 1 type more widely. Monsanto, of course, via its own surveys and via industry-friendly scientists did its best to make all the rosy predictions come true. One of the most notorious pieces of research in this regard was a paper by Martn Qaim (University of Bonn) and David Zilberman (University of California, Berkeley) published in SCIENCE (Science Vol 299, No. 5608, pp. 900-902). They claimed outstanding yield increases from Monsanto's GM cotton - results they projected as relevant to farmers throughout the developing world. Their yield increses were exactly in line with the department of biotechnology's predictions - 80%! Qaim and Zilberman's paper's findings were so at odds with the reports coming from Indian farmers that its publication caused a storm of protest. Devinder Sharma called the paper a "scientific fairytale" while Dr Vandana Shiva - pointing out that Qaim and Zilberman based their findings entirely on data drawn from Monsanto's trials and "not on the basis of the harvest from farmers' fields" - dismissed it as "fabricated data that presents a failure of Bt Cotton as a miracle." "If increasing demand is an indicator of a technology's effectiveness or performance, how do the authors explain the increasing demand for pesticides? Does increasing demand automatically imply higher efficacy, successful experience and so on? Or does it also have elements of hyped up propaganda?" Biosafety in India |