Basmati fiasco in retrospect

TWO EVENTS which caught the media attention very recently deserve public scrutiny. First, it was the uproar in Parliament over the "Basmati fiasco". The second is a motion to censure the Finance Minister over the "UTI scam." On the surface, both appear poles apart, but, if one critically examines them against a historical past (though of different time scales), there is a common thread that runs through -- flexible ethical standards. I shall deal with the first, as agriculture is our lifeline. The Basmati fiasco in itself is not devoid of contradictions -- the vociferous opposition insisting that a patent on the seed has been granted by the United States Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO) to a Texas-based agribusiness company and the Minister-in-charge stumbling for an answer when he said that the government was awaiting "confirmatory report" on the granting of the patent -- the usual official foot dragging approach to thorny issues.

The question now is not so much as a contest to prove or disprove the superiority of Basmati over "Texmati" -- the trade name given by the company to their rival to Basmati. That is purely academic. Scientists here might argue that the technical claims of Texmati over Basmati are contestable, this way or that, as for instance, the "starch index" -- which is paramount to cooking quality -- of one might or might not be better than the other. What is a lot more crucial is that India's traditional genetic heritage has been successfully challenged by a privately funded agribusiness company in the U.S. and markets will not shut out at least in the U.S., where the native Texmati will be competitively sold in preference to the imported Basmati. And, a non-discerning consumer will not see the difference anyway. So the next time an American, European, Asian or African customer scouts for rice overseas in a departmental store and sees both Basmati and Texmati displayed side by side, he or she will unhesitatingly go for the one which has a price advantage and not bother whether the cooked grain is a few millimetres more or less, and the starch index a few percentage points more or less. It is as if, while on a shopping arcade in Manhattan, you pick up an exquisite Kancheepuram silk sari and notice, bewilderedly, the label as "Pierre Cardin -- original silk -- Made in France!"

A specific pattern

I am afraid we are shouting hoarse on the Basmati fiasco of the Twentyfirst century, while the story goes back a few decades into the Twentieth.

The attempt to patent Basmati or neem or turmeric (the principal pharmacological ingredients in the latter two) all fall into a specific pattern when one goes back to nearly four decades into our agricultural past. Human amnesia is unique, but the Indian variety is far worse. It conforms to the illuminating philosophical thought of Santayana who very brilliantly said "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it".

The early Sixties saw massive quantities of inferior grade wheat shipped to India under the "Public Loan 480" (PL 480) plan of the U.S. Seeds of the noxious weed, Parthenium, which subsequently became a menace in the wheat fields of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, also got shipped along. That was also the time when scores of American and American-trained Plant Breeders descended on India and were put in key positions with the active support of the high and mighty agricultural bureaucracy in New Delhi, supposedly to usher in a "green revolution", the hall mark of which was a "very high input" driven technology, characterised by massive dumping of chemical fertilizers, insecticides and pesticides into the Indian soils to prop up the "miracle" high yielding crop varieties (HYV) of wheat and rice.

It is very pertinent to remind ourselves that the chemicals that were dumped in Indian soils massively came, almost all of them, from the U.S. at a very great cost to the national exchequer, since at the time of the launching of the green revolution India hardly had an infrastructure for mass manufacture of fertilizers or insecticides/pesticides. More than 30 years later our "environmental conscious" scientists are crying hoarse on the tremendous adverse fallout of the so-called green revolution, in terms of drying aquifers, degraded soils, lost biodiversity and are now, with the characteristic Indian amnesia, pleading for a "gene revolution" to sow the Indian soils with genetically modified crops (GM crops). It speaks volumes for the kind of brazen opportunism that is so very characteristic of this breed of "scientists".

The American or American-trained Plant Breeders who descended on Indian soil, under the patronage of the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) and some agriculture universities were treated as "VIPs", who could traverse the length and breadth of this vast land unfettered and freely scouted our rich gene bank and readied end-products, which became money spinners for some of the MNCs involved in agribusiness, primarily seed business. If the native collaborators and the high and mighty in ICAR were as vigilant, or perhaps as patriotic if one might add, the present day Basmati fiasco would not have erupted.

Personal profit at public cost

By the extension of the same logic, it is worth noting that the very same native collaborators came under limelight and overseas patronage to reap personal profit at public cost. One has only to scan through the top slot jobs, both past and present, of such "international" institutes as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), International Maize and Wheat Research Centre (CIMMYT), International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) -- all babies of the ubiquitous Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), essentially a Washington lobby -- to see how many "patriotic" Indians are on Washington's payroll. It is a virtual "who is who" of the nation's "contribution" to Washington's agribusiness! Tragically, we also have had heroes -- real ones -- who went down fighting the American hegemony at the behest of native opportunists. One such is late Dr. R. H. Richharia, a former Director of the Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI) in Cuttack, who refused to part with his unique native collections of rice accessions numbering 22,500 -- known as the "Raipur collections", some of which are aromatic, a few therapeutic, but most of them very high yielding -- even when the World Bank lured him with a substantial payment to close down his Madhya Pradesh Rice Research Institute (MPRRI) and hand over the entire collections to IRRI.

Dr. Richharia was practically hounded out by the high and mighty in New Delhi and if only he had lived some more years the story of rice in much of Asia would have been far different from what one now sees. In an international conference in Malaysia in 1986, Dr. Richharia in a research paper said "Pressure was brought about by the World Bank to close the activities of this institute (MPRRI) in lieu of offering a substantial financial assistance as I had refused to pass on the entire rice germplasm to IRRI without studying it".

Come to think of it, the American economy has enriched itself in excess of US $70 billions, according to Dr. Suman Sahai of the Gene Campaign (The Hindu, August 3, 1996) from this "gene import" -- in fact a hand-in-glove gene piracy.

Even if we take the story of the green revolution in its proper perspective, none in the agricultural scientific community in this country can possibly dismiss the arduous work of our peasant community, which toiled for centuries selecting, preserving, nurturing and passing on from one generation to another our rich gene bank, from which these "imported" Plant Breeders and their conniving native collaborators richly drew. There is now a clamour by the latter day patriots for a retrospective pecuniary compensation for this arduous toil of the Indian peasant community. So far nothing has happened at the national level and much less at the international level.

Heaps of "good" intentions invoking Mahatma Gandhi are good for the press and public image and the hungry farmer has no choice except to tighten his belt on an already very thin waistline! The most recent debate on farmers' rights to sell seeds and retain control over seed production in the newly formulated Plant Variety Protection and Farmers' Rights Bill in the Lok Sabha is illustrative of our flexible ethical standards. The same bureaucracy, which makes unnecessary noises from the comforts of air-conditioned offices for the plight of the poor impoverished farmer, stalls anything beneficial for the farmer. Note this candid comment of Dr. Sahai after passing of the bill in the Lok Sabha "Curiously, the most determined opposition to farmers' rights came from the scientists of the Indian Council of Agriculture Research and the babus of the Agriculture Ministry" (The Hindu, August 18, 2001). The persistent opposition by a number of NGOs, at the forefront of which was the Gene Campaign, along with the farmers of Punjab, Haryana and Karnataka under the leadership of Mr. Mahendra Singh Tikait saved the day, or else, there would have been many more Basmati fiascos in the making.

K.P. PRABHAKARAN NAIR

Formerly Professor, National Science Foundation,

Royal Society, Belgium

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