India Sues Monsanto Over Genetically-Modified Eggplant
William Pentland, Contributor
Forbes Magazine August 12, 2011
The already-explosive politics surrounding genetically-modified (GM) eggplant (brinjal) in India is getting still more explosive with a government agency’s decision to prosecute the developers of the insect resistant-eggplant eggplant.
In 2009, Indian regulators gave the insect resistant eggplant carrying the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) gene the green light, but India’s former minister of the environment, Jairam Ramesh, imposed an indefinite moratorium on its cultivation only a few months later. The National Biodiversity Authority of India (NBA) has decided to sue Monsanto, the St. Louis, MO-based biotechnology power-house, and the company’s Indian partners who developed the Bt eggplant.
The controversial move by NBA is based on a complaint filed in 2010 by the Bangalore-based Environment Support Group (ESG), which alleges that the developers violated India’s Biological Diversity Act of 2002 by using local eggplant varieties in developing Bt eggplant without prior approval from NBA.
While Monsanto has not responded to the charge, the Maharashtra Hybrid Companyin Mumbai, in which Monsanto has a 26% stake, has denied the charge saying it merely incorporated the Bt gene in the varieties provided by the University of Agricultural Sciences at Dharwad in Karnataka state and provided the technology ‘royalty free’. The university told the Nature blog that the question of violating the law had never arisen because it is a public institution and has no commercial mandate.
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