The Hindu Business Line : With caution to Cancun

URUGUAY 1986, Seattle 1999, Doha 2001 and now Cancun 2003. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) seems to be inching forward on a tortuous path which may end in despair for the developing world as a whole with the possible exception of China.

Cancun is only some eight weeks away. When the curtain fell on the WTO Ministerial at Doha there were mixed feelings. While there was relief that the meet ended without the kind of ugly scenes witnessed at Seattle, India's former Commerce Minister, Mr Murasoli Maran, made a colourful statement about the "constructively ambiguous" nature of the deliberations.

Doha was an attempt to mollify the developing and the least developed world by the Quad — the US, the European Union (EU), Canada and Japan.

If one has to go by what the pre-meet signals are, the US and the EU will dominate, and agriculture will be centre stage at Cancun. Interestingly, it will be agriculture that will see hard bargaining, but, more important, the question of transgenic plants will be the bone of contention on which the US and the EU are at opposite ends. And, if India is unwary it could walk into a trap from which it will be hard to extricate itself. There are a few, but important, pointers that the US will make a strong bid to open up the biotech agenda with particular emphasis on genetically-engineered crop plants and foods (GE).

This is because the US, in particular, and its comrades in arms, such as Argentina, Canada, Brazil and recent convert Egypt, in general, have much to gain from the biotech onslaught on the developing and least developed world. In the first week of June, the US Consul General in Chennai, Mr Richard D. Haynes, made a strong appeal to India which, in essence, implied that agribiotech is the only salvation for a country such as India.

He summed up by proclaiming: "Biotechnology's great potential to improve the lives of farmers throughout the world and to help preserve our global environment from increasing pressures of population growth depend largely on a science and rule-based system to approve bio-engineered products. To do otherwise would deny a better life for the millions of Indian families whose fortunes are tied to tilling the soil."

The appeal was made against the background of the persistent opposition of the EU which in the Consul General's words "has for the past five years consistently violated WTO rules that require measures regulating imports to be based on sufficient scientific evidence, and regulatory approval procedures to be operated without undue delay.

The EU member-states have blocked regulatory approval of new agricultural biotechnology products since 1998, and have done so without presenting any scientific evidence demonstrating a danger to human health, as required under WTO Sanitary and Phyto Sanitary (SPS) Agreement".

In fact, the US President, Mr George Bush, went so far as to tell the EU that its opposition to biotech products was "hurting" poor African farmers.

The US makes it appear that the only salvation for the 60 crore-plus Indian farmers lies in agribiotech, notwithstanding the disturbing findings by distinguished and independent scientists like Dr Arpad Pusztai of the Rowett Research Institute (RRI) , in Aberdeen, Scotland, who showed that rats fed on GE potato suffered damage to their vital organs and immune system.

Though Dr Pusztai's employer fired him for going public with his research findings, Dr Vyvyan Howard of Liverpool University vindicated the former's findings.

Or more pertinently, the finding that a GE cotton, such as Monsanto's Bollgard, can lead to acquisition of insect resistance or herbicide tolerance by wild plants growing in its vicinity changing their entire population dynamics, and dramatically increasing their invasive potential resulting in the spread of super weeds.

Or, perhaps, the warning by a leading US molecular biologist and lawyer, Dr Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists, that nobody knows the effect of Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis, a soil bacterium whose gene is implanted in the cotton to create the Bollgard cotton) on human diet — directly through potato, the "New Leaf Superior" Bt variety of Monsanto, or indirectly through the Bollgard cotton seed (which is pressed to make animal feed, and is, therefore, present in milk and the human gut).

If the US makes a strong bid to push the biotech agenda at Cancun, as is most likely to be the case, and the EU puts up an equally persistent resistance, the outcome will easily be a deflection of the focus to the developing world, India, in particular.

If India succumbs to the pressure, it will be making a monumental mistake, the magnitude of which will only unfold in decades to come. More or less, the ground for a soft stand by India on the GE products, be it the Bt seed or the GE potato, or Monsanto's "Round Up Ready Wheat" that is already waiting in the wings has been prepared by the recently concluded global seed meet in Bangalore in the first week of June. At the meet, held under the patronage of Mahyco, the Monsanto-Maharashtra Hybrid Company Combine, and a privately funded Chennai Foundation, the International Seed Federation Secretary General, Dr Bernard le Buanec, in no uncertain manner told that "farmers will decide the future of the GE crops".

Perhaps, it would have been more appropriate to rephrase the statement that it is the US MNCs involved in seed business that will determine what the farmers of the third world should grow.

If one considers the recent events connected with the Bt cotton in India, the question is not so much one of Bt technology per se, but, about Bt technology in the hands of a giant MNC which can dictate the Indian farmer what he should grow.

After the recent flop of Bollgard cotton in several States, Monsanto has re-positioned itself as the supplier of the Bt gene, rather than the Bt seed, per se, speaks volumes for the kind of clever commercial strategy that the giant MNC has put in place to tighten the noose around the gullible Indian farmer.

Look at the scary eco disaster that is unfolding in the cotton fields of Saurashtra and Kutch in Gujarat, where the "fly by night" seed companies have succeeded in transferring the Bollgard gene onto an established hybrid by the simple technique of back-crossing. That is, indeed, the saddest consequence of the "farmer's freedom of choice".

And all this, when the agencies, like the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) — the supreme authority in India charged with the task of safe-guarding the bio safety of GE products on Indian farmers' fields — can only throw up its hands in despair, while politicians in power will "constitute committees and commissions" to "examine the question and submit a report".

No item on the Doha agenda has seen crucial progress during the negotiations, including the three informal mini-ministerials held in Sydney, Tokyo and Sharam-al-Sheik (Egypt) during the last year-and-a-half. And there is one to follow in Montreal before the Cancun meet.

The EU has just announced a new accord that will reform the Euro 43 billion Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) project.

The current WTO Director General, Mr Supachai Panitchpakdi, termed the accord as a "substantial achievement that would be a positive effect on the global agricultural talks and beyond", while the spokesman of OXFAM (an international charity), Mr Sam Barrat, dismissed the new accord as a "repackaged one, a huge disappointment".

The US Farm Bill of Mr Bush provides a subsidy of $54.7 billion. The EU accord "streamlines" the huge subsidy to limit over production of agricultural goods.

When both the US and the EU are projecting to the world a myopic view of subsidy restructure, it is more than certain that, what is lost on one count will be attempted to be more than gained through another channel. And that is where the biotechnology bandwagon comes in handy to "remove hunger from the bellies of the poor in Asia and Africa".

The newly-appointed Agricultural Minister, Mr Rajnath Singh, during the seed meet in Bangalore, while referring to GE, said "The crucial issue is the long-term sustainability of such innovations to ultimately ensure food security using technologies rooted in the principles of ecology and equity".

Well said! But one hopes that those going to Cancun will do so with caution, lest this vast country becomes another experimental ground for a dubious technology that is operating only at the periphery of real science.

(The author is a senior fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.)

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