Whither transgenic agriculture?

By Carine Pionetti & Ramanjaneyulu G. V.

THE CASE of Bt cotton has led to several surprises and rebounds lately: first, in June, when Mahyco was denied the authorisation to commercialise its transgenic cotton hybrid in India, at least until further trials were conducted, and now with the illegal cultivation of transgenic cotton in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. This unforeseen turn of events has pushed the Department of Biotechnology to order the destruction of the transgenic crop on the 10,000 acres on which it was grown.

There is little sense in questioning the legitimacy of the Government in taking this decision, as Gail Omvedt endeavoured to do in an article entitled ``Burning farmers' fields?'' (November 9-10, 2001) without examining what is actually at stake: the prospect of transgenic crops entering Indian agriculture. Viewing genetically-modified seeds as just another benign technology handed over to farmers to meet new production challenges is of no use at this junction. What is required is a critical assessment of transgenic agriculture as a system, with its own history, values, and prospects. The fundamental question - to be answered before all else - becomes: is transgenic agriculture likely, in the long run, to benefit Indian farmers?

Genetically-modified organisms are an economic and political construct, fitted with a Pandora's Box of environmental hazards, socio-political and economic ramifications the majority of which are either yet to be understood or remain unresolved. So much so that the majority of European farmers and consumers still fail to see the real benefits of transgenic crops to their agriculture.

The rationale for the emergence of transgenic crops lies, by and large, in the limits - not to say the failures - of another system: chemical agriculture. Where the package of hybrid seeds and chemical inputs is reaching a deadlock, genetic engineering comes to the rescue through the insertion of genes of related or unrelated species into crop varieties.

Transgenic Bt cotton is heralded as the miracle solution for cotton growers across the globe, with little critical analysis of the reasons why cotton farmers in India are constantly banking on the next technological fix, leading in many cases to an utter loss of control over their means of livelihood. It is illusory to make any claim regarding the potential benefits of transgenic cotton to farmers - and particularly to the majority of small and marginal farmers - without taking this reality into account. The crisis faced this year again by farmers in Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh, where cotton covers an alarming 40 per cent of the cropped area (compared to less than one per cent 20 years ago) provides useful insights.

A severe pest infestation (similar to that of 1997-98) is presently driving farmers to spray huge doses of pesticides in an attempt to save their crop. Yet, virtually all farmers report that the pest simply cannot be controlled this year. This is hardly surprising considering the 600-fold resistance developed by bollworm to pesticides over the last ten years, according to cotton scientists.

The costs of cultivation of cotton have increased so dramatically that in some villages the debt accumulated over the last two to three years has risen to Rs. 50,000 per household. It is no longer rare, in these parts, for women to mortgage their mangalsutra, or for land-owning farmers to sell an acre or two to start repaying their debt. The entire ``support system'' of this increasingly commercial agriculture - made up of input dealers, money-lenders, and commission agents - is male-dominated, pushing women out of the decision-making processes. This is not to say that subsistence farming is necessarily more gender equitable. But the measure of control women have over daily operations, choice in crops and production strategies invariably decreases when the locus of decision shifts away from the household to markets and towns. More readily than men, women farmers express distress at watching the very land that used to produce a variety of dryland crops (a mix of food and cash crops such as jowar, redgram, greengram, wheat, chickpea, ajwin, coriander, turmeric) become useless in providing direct food for the family.

Is Bt cotton to be seen merely as a ``relief'' technology to overcome the pest problem faced by farmers? Four compelling factors help in setting the record straight. One, in the same way as pests develop resistance to pesticides; pests will also become resistant to insecticidal plants engineered with Bt genes. There are already reports available to this extent from elsewhere. No one has ever contested this fact: the relief offered by Bt cotton can only be temporary.

Two, the strategy devised to delay the appearance of Bt resistance in the bollworm population consists in sowing non-Bt cotton next to the Bt cotton plots in a 60:40 ratio. These so- called ``refuge'' zones are already proving grossly inadequate in controlling pest resistance in regions where Bt crops are grown on a large scale. Let us note that according to Mahyco-Monsanto (the company releasing the first Bt cotton in India), specific refuge fields are not seen as a necessity since neighbouring cotton fields are expected to serve the purpose. In other words, it is accepted that non-Bt cotton growers would pay the external cost of Bt cotton.

Three, today the sale of all genetically-modified seeds is under the control of three agro-chemical companies. Given this level of concentration, and given the economics of seed patenting, one can only expect the prices of genetically-modified seeds to rise in the future, further reducing farmers' margins. Four, the focus on Bt cotton obstructs effective means of controlling the pest Helicoverpa (pheromone traps, Tricho cards, neem extracts, soil fertility improvement etc). These methods are demonstrated to farmers by NGOs and agricultural extension, which do not have the same `striking capacity' as pesticide companies.

The dominant view - that the adoption of new technology necessarily benefits the farming communities - needs to be reviewed in the light of U.S. or European agriculture. Many farmers are finding themselves trapped in a spiral where input costs (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides) keep on increasing while farmgate prices decline. The economics of industrialised agriculture and globalised food trade is such that 500,000 farm jobs are lost in the European Union every year. The decrease of farmgate prices is driving hundreds of farmers bankrupt every year in the U.K. alone. As people are forced to move out of agriculture, the entire social matrix of the countryside dislocates further.

Interestingly, after having literally engineered the demise of farming in the European Community over the last three decades, the technocrats behind the Common Agricultural Policy are now trying to stress the `multifunctionality of agriculture'. Underlying this concept is a recognition that farmers ought to be more than mere tokens in the industrialised food production chain. Their role in the making of landscape, renewal of rural culture and production of quality foods is being suddenly acknowledged in an attempt to save what is left of rural economies and cultures in Europe.

In many parts of India, agriculture remains by and large a livelihood, intertwining ecological, social, cultural and economic dimensions. With the industrialisation of inputs and integration of farmers into world markets, farmers get directly exposed to the vagaries of fluctuations in market price and rising costs of production. Transgenic crops compound the unsustainability of the entire system by introducing new risks such as the pollution of their traditional crops, a major threat on biodiversity, and the build-up of resistance in insects and plants.

Do we need to make the cynical bet that if India opts for a largely commercial transgenic agriculture, it will, 20 years from now, be striving to reintroduce into its agriculture all the dimensions that will have been discarded along the way in the name of efficiency and growth?

(The writers are, respectively, a Franco-Canadian anthropologist who has worked on the socio-political dimensions of crop diversity in India for several years, and a scientist at the Directorate of Oilseeds Research, Hyderabad.)

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