India
Puts GM Food Crops Under Microscope
by Ranjit Devraj
Published: Saturday 27 October 2012
“The court-appointed committee has called for specifically
designated and certified field trial sites, adequate preliminary testing and
the creation of an independent panel of scientists to evaluate biosafety data
on each GM crop in the pipeline.”
Environmental activists are
cautiously optimistic that a call by a court-appointed technical committee for
a ten-year moratorium on open field trials of genetically modified (GM) crops
will shelve plans to introduce bio-engineered foods in this largely
agricultural country.
“We are now waiting to see whether
the Supreme Court will accept the recommendations of its own committee at the
next hearing on Oct. 29,” said Devinder Sharma, chairman of the Forum for
Biotechnology and Food Security, a collective of agriculture scientists,
economists, biotechnologists, farmers and environmentalists.
The committee – appointed in May to
examine questions of safety raised in a petition filed by environmental
activist Aruna Rodrigues – pointed to serious gaps in India’s present
regulatory framework for GM crops in an interim report released on Oct. 18.
In particular, the committee was
asked to look at open field trials of food crops spliced with genes taken from
the soil bacterium Bacillus thurigiensis (Bt), an insecticide whose impact on
human health is unknown.
Noting that there “have been several
cases of ignoring problematic aspects of the data in the safety dossiers”, the
committee suggested reexamination “by international experts who have the
necessary experience”.
In
February 2010, the then Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had ordered a
moratorium on Bt brinjal (also called aubergine or eggplant), based on a series of public
hearings on the issue – though this was not extended to field
trials of other Bt food crops.
A parliamentary standing committee
on GM crops appeared to reflect the public mood when it recommended in August
that GM crop trials be banned and future research conducted only under tight
regulation.
“The
government should see the writing on the wall. It is now amply clear that this
country of 1.2 billion people, 70 percent of whom are dependent on agriculture,
is strongly against the introduction of GM crops,” said Sharma.
According
to Sharma wide publicity given to a recent study by
French scientists led by Gilles-Eric Seralini at the University of Caen, which
showed rats fed with GM corn developing tumors, has had an impact on the Indian
public as well as scientists and experts.
In fact, the court’s committee has
recommended that long-term and inter-generational studies on rodents be added
to tests to be performed on all GM crops in India, whether approved or pending
approval.
Sharma said the Supreme Court’s
decision is bound to have a bearing on resistance in Europe to GM food crops,
because of safety concerns. Spain is currently the only country in the European
Union that grows a GM food crop and this is limited to GM corn to be used as
animal feed.
Kavita Kuruganti, a consultant with
the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, a Hyderabad-based organization working
on sustainable agriculture in partnership with non-government organizations,
said it is significant that the court’s committee had called for reexamination
of all biosafety data for approved and pipeline GM products.
The committee’s report contradicts
advice from the prime minister’s scientific advisory council (SAC) on
biotechnology and agriculture, which complained in an Oct. 9 release, “A
science-informed, evidence-based approach is lacking in the current debate on
biotechnologies for agriculture.”
But Kuruganti told IPS that the
Supreme Court’s committee consisted entirely of distinguished scientists and
that their opinions “cannot be dismissed as unscientific as they (have)
rationalized each of their recommendations.”
Arguing in favor of introducing GM
food crops in India, the SAC statement claimed: “Land availability and
quality, water, low productivity, drought and salinity, biotic stresses,
post-harvest losses are all serious concerns that will endanger our food and
nutrition security with potentially serious additional affects as a result of
climate change.”
However, the SAC acknowledged,
“There is concern about the costs at which seeds (from multinational companies
that have patents on GM) are available to our farmers, particularly poor
farmers.”
”The experience with non-food GM
crops, particularly Bt cotton, has been that ordinary farmers do not benefit
because of the high costs of seeds and inputs,” said Ramachandra Pillai,
president of the Akhil Bharatiya Kisan Sabha (All India Farmers Forum) that has
14 million members and is affiliated with the Marxist Communist Party of India.
Pillai told IPS that his party was
not opposed to modern agricultural biotechnology, but wanted public-sector
involvement because “right now the main driving force behind GM crops seems to
be the profit motive, which may bypass such burning issues as food security,
malnutrition, poverty alleviation and unemployment.”
Pillai said it was especially
important to have government oversight in the case of GM food crops to dispel
fears that the private sector was ignoring concerns around public safety.
The court-appointed committee has
called for specifically designated and certified field trial sites, adequate
preliminary testing and the creation of an independent panel of scientists to
evaluate biosafety data on each GM crop in the pipeline.
Suman Sahai who leads Gene Campaign,
a Delhi-based NGO, said the report has brought home the fact that the “existing
regulatory system for introducing GM crops into the country was hugely
compromised.”
Sahai told IPS that the regulatory
authorities had, for example, ignored the interests of organic farmers who
stand to be ruined if their crops are contaminated by GM crops, several of
which are currently under development in India.
Based on India being a signatory to
the Cartagena Protocol that recognizes biodiversity as a long-term resource,
the committee recommended a complete ban on field trials of crops for which
India is a center of origin or diversity, “as transgenics can contaminate and
adversely affect biodiversity.”
“For the first time, there is
potential legal backing to recommendations that other inquiries have thrown up,
including those made by the parliamentary standing committee,” Kuruganti said.
“There is now a chance for
monitoring to become a reality rather than just an existence on paper,” she
said. “This will also make the deployment of technology into a credible,
confidence-inspiring process – that is, once the Supreme Court accepts the
recommendations of its committee and passes suitable orders.”
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