Designer seeds a
growing concern in India
Monday, January 25, 1999
John
Stackhouse
Badshahpur, India -- Ever since the cotton-field massacre,
security for the miracle tomato has been stepped up. As it has
for the miracle cauliflower, cabbage and soybean,
too.
On a well-guarded research farm in the northern
Indian state of Haryana, geneticists are busy trying to create
daring new seeds for all these crops, and more. They claim the
designer seeds, mixed with genes to fight off pestilence, floods
and drought, will save the world's second-most-populous country
from what could be a new century of hunger.
While the geneticists toil away in their labs
and test fields, they know their greatest obstacles lie on
India's political battlefield, where the promise of transgenic
seeds has met some of its fiercest opposition yet. If the gene
scientists believe in technological progress, their activist
opponents fear a new form of technoslavery, as the world's
biggest seed producers race to sell genetically engineered seeds
to some of the world's poorest farmers.
"These seeds will not add to the food
security of India," warned Davinder Sharma, a New Delhi
agriculture analyst. "They will add only to the profit
security of these companies."
Popular or not, India's Gene Revolution is well
under way in a small laboratory in the middle of a mustard field
in Badshahpur, 50 kilometres south of New Delhi. To get there,
one must drive down rutted back roads that carve their way
through vegetable fields struggling to be part of India's new
surplus economy.
Billions of dollars of public money has gone
into fields like these, through heavily subsidized irrigation,
fertilizer and pesticide schemes, and yet India's crops struggle
to keep pace with its population. Yields, on average, are only
half those of China. But the private sector says it has an
answer.
Inside the Badshahpur research station, behind a
tall iron gate, genetic engineers and entomologists at
Proagro-PGS India Ltd. work into the night to find new ways to
fight pests that for centuries have kept India on the edge of
hunger. Among them is Harish Kumar, a mild-mannered entomologist
who toils in a narrow basement room swarming with bugs which he
vows to kill -- and does.
In one dish, Dr. Kumar shows the leaf of a
naturally grown cauliflower that has been devoured by moths in
only 24 hours. In the next dish is his genetically altered
cauliflower leaf, surrounded by dead moths -- the result of a
killer gene. "There's absolutely no survival," Dr.
Kumar said exuberantly.
If Proagro wins approval to sell its genetically
modified seeds, it believes it will revolutionize Indian
agriculture. Its new mustard seeds show a 20-per-cent increase
in productivity over the best Indian variety, and the company
claims they would require almost no chemical
fertilizers.
In a country where 200 million people are
undernourished, such designer seeds could also change the
national diet with genetically injected vitamins and minerals
added to basic vegetables and grains. And they would spare
consumers the horrible consequences of eating chemically laced
produce, which has emerged recently as a major public-health
problem.
To do this, most genetically altered seeds are
injected with a gene from the the Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis)
bacterium that produces insect toxins especially effective
against moths, caterpillars and certain beetles.
By mixing the Bt gene with cotton genes, U.S.
seed giant Monsanto Co. says its new Bollgard seed could save
India from voracious bollworm attacks like the one in 1996 that
wiped out much of the southern cotton belt and led to at least
100 farmer suicides.
Instead of praise, Monsanto's Bt cotton seed has
met only anger and resistance from leftist farmer groups who see
it as a 21st-century DDT -- a seemingly miraculous technology
that could lead to devastating consequences. One self-styled
farmers group (the same one that ransacked India's first
Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet for being foreign-owned) torched
and uprooted four Monsanto test fields in November in the
southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
"One thing is clear in the recent debate:
there's a lack of information, and a lot of confusion,"
said M. S. Swaminathan, one of India's most respected
agronomists and co-author of a World Bank study on transgenic
crops. He believes the new seeds can help, but only if they are
used along with other pest-control measures, including selective
spraying to help the pests' predators survive.
The biotech seeds "should be part of an
overall integrated pest-management system," Dr. Swaminathan
said. "It should not be propagated only on its
own."
Genetically modified seeds for tomatoes, tobacco
and cotton have been available commercially in the United States
since 1995, and face little opposition there. About
three-quarters of the world's 30 million acres now planted with
genetically modified seeds are in the United States.
The European reaction is far different, with
active resistance from groups as disparate as Greenpeace, the
German parliament and Prince Charles, who says designer seeds
verge on the realm of the divine.
"In the West, where food security is not an
issue, these seeds are promoted for business reasons," said
Arvind Kapur, Proagro's general manager. "In India, we're
looking at this technology to solve our food problems. We need
to produce another 220 million tonnes of food in the near future
just to match our population growth."
Many food scientists believe the target can be
reached by saving crops from pests, which every year consume an
estimated $2.4-billion worth of crops in India.
But the new seeds may not be accessible to all.
Proagro figures the typical farmer can earn an extra 6,400
rupees ($229) per harvest from the transgenic mustard if he
invests 600 rupees ($21.43) in a three-kilogram sack of new
seeds. But for millions of subsistence farmers, who currently
use seeds saved from the previous harvest, 600 rupees is beyond
reach.
Moreover, once the revised seeds are available,
they will very quickly lose their advantage as pests develop new
resistances. Many scientists believe a genetically modified seed
might be useful for only seven to eight years -- perhaps less in
India's harsh climate.
And there are emerging concerns about the
possibility of a "terminator" gene, one that companies
would put in their seeds to make the seeds from the resulting
plant sterile. Thus farmers would have to buy new seeds every
season, instead of harvesting their own.
(A conceptual patent for the
"terminator" gene is owned by a U.S. cotton-seed
company, Delta and Pine Land Co., which Monsanto has offered to
buy.)
The very notion of a self-destructing seed
worries some farm groups but not many scientists. At the Proagro
lab in Badshahpur, Dr. Kapur said Indian farmers must learn to
discard their antiquated seeds for powerful new ones, just as
offices everywhere traded in typewriters for
computers.
"Once technology is available, who
benefits?" he said. "Look at Microsoft and Bill Gates.
Who is the beneficiary? We all benefit."
