📍GM, agriculture, and food security

(from the archives)

India's position is opaque, based on incomplete research, and unresponsive to public health and food security issues. Dr. Suman Sahai lists recommendations from a national symposium.

A two day national symposium on “Relevance of GM Technology to Indian Agriculture and Food Security was organised by Gene Campaign on Nov. 26 and 27, in Delhi, to celebrate its 10th Anniversary. The Multistakeholder symposium brought together speakers and participants from across the entire range of views held on the subject of GM crops. Speakers ranged from strong supporters of GM technology to those equally strongly opposed to it and those with measured views. Participants included scientists, academics, social scientists, farmers, members of parliament, lawyers and judges, representatives of government, including the regulating agencies, various policy makers, the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS), the seed industry, food processing and retailing industries, environmentalists, consumer organisations, organic farmers (IFOAM) and civil society organisations.

The two-day event witnessed a series of high quality presentations and strong, focussed discussions. One thing that all speakers pointed out was the appalling state of the Regulatory Framework in India and the urgent need to change it. Members of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), India’s apex regulatory body explained the process of regulation and in the face of vociferous demand, agreed to put more data on the GEAC website.

Members of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee explained the process of regulation, and were met with vociferous demands for better information.

A series of recommendations emerged from the two-day consultations. These are being forwarded to the Government’s Task Force on Biotechnology, the GEAC, the Department of Biotechnology, the Minister of Science and Technology, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Environment as well as the Prime Minister’s Office.

Recommendations

1. A distinct law should be enacted to oversee Genetic Modification Technology and its implementation. This law must harmonise with other laws and national and international agreements.
2. A comprehensive biotechnology policy should be developed in consultation with all stakeholders.
3. A statutory National Bioethics Commission must be set up.
4. There should be a consultative and participatory process to prioritise crops and traits for genetic improvement through biotechnology with the goal of addressing the needs of small farmers and Indian agriculture.
5. Investment in public sector research should be increased and strengthened. Novel gene discovery in crops of relevance to India should get highest priority.
6. India must develop a policy for transgenic varieties of crops for which it is a Centre of Origin and Diversity. Commercial cultivation of GM rice should not be allowed until the nature of gene flow and its impact is understood.
7. The Herbicide Tolerance trait should be subject to rigorous cost and risk benefit analysis before being considered for adoption.
8. Alternatives to the GM approach must be carefully evaluated in each case before deciding on the GM route. A cost and risk benefit analysis must be conducted before deciding on a GM product.
9. Protocol for food safety tests must be vastly improved and mechanisms for long term monitoring of human health (post GM food release) be put in place.
10. Develop a stringent protocol to assess environmental and ecological impact.
11. There should be provisions for post-market surveillance and monitoring of GM products.
12. Have a policy to deal with bio terrorism urgently.
13. India must exercise caution in the IPR regime that it adopts. The current PPV-FR should be retained since it balances Breeders and Farmers? Rights.
14. A new statutory, independent National Biotechnology Regulatory Authority must be established.
15. Make GEAC more competent, transparent and accountable. Post data on research and development of GM crops and products on websites and local newspapers.
16. An annual review of all decisions on GM products must be presented to Parliament.
17. Conduct a scientifically sound study to assess attitudes and perceptions about GM technology among stakeholders in India.
18. Undertake a program of awareness about GM technology to educate the public.
19. Organize a series of public debates across the country to elicit the views of the people, to channel it into policy making. The government should fund this exercise.
20. There should be a moratorium on commercial cultivation of GM crops until the regulatory system is demonstrably improved. Research on GM crops, however, should continue.

This article appeared in India Together on 01 Dec 2003: https://indiatogether.org/gmconf-agriculture/

 Packaged Food Needs a ‘Health Halo’ to Sell.

Our food chain is so industrialised and our food so processed, that it is hardly ‘food’ any more, it’s really a chemical construct full of additives, colours and aromas. Not only is food not food anymore, it's not being bought in the same places. Earlier we bought our rations from shops and vegetables from the sabziwala. Now we are buying our food in packages made of laminated films and tetrapacks. Glitzy ads promote these foods. Marketing processed foods, especially ultra-processed ones,  uses vivid packaging, digital media, celebrity endorsements, and prime placement in stores to drive consumption. Children specially love picking up these attractive packets and this is where the most damage is done.

Genuine wholesome food requires no promotional slogans. Packaged products , however, depend heavily on health claims - cholesterol-free, low fat, multigrain, heart-healthy - to create a perception of nutritional virtue that influences purchasing decisions. These labels succeed in diverting attention from what these processed foods actually contain, the added sugars, refined starches, high sodium levels, and synthetic additives. A biscuit marketed as low fat may contain high levels of refined flour, sugar, and trans fats from partial hydrogenation.
We know that ultra-processed foods, regardless of individual nutrient claims, are associated with increased risks of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and mortality. 

Researchers have demonstrated that people consuming ultra-processed diets ate significantly more calories and gained more weight than those eating unprocessed foods with identical macronutrient profiles - suggesting that processing itself, not just nutrient composition, affects health outcomes.

Acknowledging the critical issue of ultraprocessed food and its relation to obesity and lifestyle diseases, several international bodies, chief among them, the WHO (World Health Organisation) have come up with regulations and recommendations, specially for children, to the limit spread of these foods.

Marketing deception is particularly well illustrated by the cholesterol-free label: vegetable oils naturally contain no cholesterol (a compound found only in animal products), yet this meaningless claim suggests health benefits while obscuring high levels of inflammatory omega-6 fatty acids and industrial processing methods. This marketing strategy proves especially effective among aspiring middle-class consumers, where brand trust substitutes for ingredient literacy. This isn't coincidental - it reflects how industrial food systems manufacture consumer acceptance. Companies spend billions on health claims and packaging psychology because they work. Authentic food requires no persuasion; all it needs is transparency. The louder a product proclaims its healthfulness, the more critically its ingredient list deserves scrutiny. When dal needs no label and biscuits need several, the contrast speaks for itself.

WE NEED A BETTER FOOD SECURITY LAW

Suman Sahai

Despite the proposition that independent India has not had large scale famines, widespread hunger prevails and by all accounts, is growing. As we now know from official data, the majority of the population does not attain the minimum calorie levels for rural and urban areas. According to one estimate almost 87 per cent of the rural population gets less than the rural cut-off of 2400 calories/day, and 64.5 per cent of the urban population gets less than the urban cut-off of 2100 calories/day. India finds itself at the bottom in terms of the HDI rankings. According to the multiple poverty index the levels of poverty in the country are alarming, in the range of 645 million, or 55.4 per cent of the population.

The Indian State Hunger Index (ISHI) found that 12 of 17 states surveyed had ‘alarming’ levels of hunger, with one state having an ‘extremely alarming’ level. Not a single state had ‘low’ or ‘moderate’ hunger levels. Despite this commonality, the ISHI demonstrated high variability in hunger between states. The ISHI enabled global comparisons which showed that several of India’s worst performing states have higher levels of hunger than countries such as Zimbabwe and Haiti. Madhya Pradesh, the worst performing state, ranked just above Ethiopia.

The agrarian crisis
The output of food grains in 2003–04 was still 14 million tonnes below the high level reached in 2000–01. Admittedly the food grain production did go up in the last two years yet the shortfall is still massive. In 2011 there was the announcement of so-called record food grain production which prompted the lifting of the Supreme Court ban on wheat exports. Nevertheless, this increase in production has been limited to the surplus states such as Punjab, Haryana, and Andhra Pradesh whereas the rainfed states suffering from the highest levels of hunger, such as Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand, have not shared in these increases. On the contrary, the extent of fallow lands is increasing as farmers are unable to farm due to the paucity of productive resources. Given these growth rates and the regional disparities in hunger and agricultural production, it is not surprising that hunger and malnutrition have reached unprecedented levels.
Malnutrition

Today, nearly half of India’s children below the age of three are malnourished and stunted, and 40 per cent of rural India eats only as much food as sub-Saharan Africa. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), India is one among 17 countries where the number of the undernourished decreased in the first half of the 1990s, before increasing in the second half, thus almost completely offsetting the gains made during the earlier part of the decade. The per capita availability of food has declined for the first time since the 1960s. The official National Sample Survey (NSS) of 2000 revealed that three-fourths of India’s rural population and half the urban population did not get the minimum recommended calories. This is confirmed by nutritional and health surveys, which show: more than two-fifths of the adult population suffers from chronic energy deficiency, and a large percentage are at the border of this condition; half of India’s women are anaemic; and half of India’s children can be clinically defined as malnourished (stunted, wasting, or both). It is estimated that half of the Indian rural population, over 350 million people, are below the average food energy intake of sub-Saharan African countries.

Economic reforms in India have led to disinvestment in the agriculture sector. This has adversely affected more than 60 percent of the population which relies on agriculture for its livelihood. Many of the farmers responsible for making India self-sufficient in grain production are themselves facing hunger due to non-remunerative prices and rising input costs, among other factors. The following graphs show how the new agriculture policies have diminished the food availability gains made in the 1980s, resulting in a food availability situation not much better than the early 1950’s.

Fig 1: Food Grain Availability

Source: Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Delhi 2005.
Fig. 1 shows that the 1950s, and up to 1964, the per capita availability of food grains ranged between 140 and 170 kg per annum. The availability dropped drastically in 1967, when it touched 143 kg, and then it increased again. What is noteworthy is the trend between 1979 and 1994, when the per capita availability of food grains ranged between 155 and 180 kg per annum. After 1994, availability declined to 150 kg per annum.

This picture becomes clearer if we mark out the per day availability of food grains as shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2 : Per Day Food Availability

Source: Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Delhi, 2005.
Fig. 2 shows that the net per day availability of food grains in India has dipped alarmingly. It is now touching almost the same levels that it had reached in the early 1950s, at less than 450 grams per day per capita. There is a considerable shortfall in the actual requirement and availability of food grains. In the context of the current agrarian crisis, this trend poses a grave danger to communities already afflicted with hunger.

The Food Security Bill
In the backdrop of declining food availability, there have been diverse efforts to tackle hunger. There has been the Public Distribution System (PDS) providing subsidized grain, the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) and the mid-day meal scheme for school children.

The most recent in this line of efforts to improve the hunger situation, is the National Food Security Bill (NFSB) proposed by the powerful National Advisory Council (NAC). The NFSB is being considered seriously by the government where reception to its contents is mixed at best. Elements in government and out of it have not been unanimously supportive of the Bill. An expert committee headed by C Rangarajan, stated that the entitlements outlined under the NAC draft (90 percent coverage of the rural population and 50 percent of the urban) were not feasible due to unavailability of sufficient food grains. They recommended that the entitlements which were guaranteed for above poverty line (APL) households be discarded and that only below poverty line (BPL) households (as measured by the Tendulkar estimate plus a ten percent margin) be included in the scheme. This would mean a drastic reduction in coverage with only 46 percent of the rural population and 28 percent of the urban included under the ambit of the legislation.

The Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has expressed doubt over the large quantity of grain procurement that would be required by the NAC draft and said that the issues raised by the Rangarajan Committee remained ‘pertinent’. Adding to this, the Food Ministry submitted their revised draft legislation days later which was substantially different from NAC’s proposal and decreased both the scope and size of the entitlements. Civil society groups appear divided on the NAC Bill, with some terming it merely a revised form of the PDS.

There are grave problems with the government draft that patterns itself on the draft provided by the National Advisory Council. Primary is its extremely restricted scope. This is not a Bill that attempts to bring about food security, it is only a Bill that offers a different plan to the existing PDS system, to distribute grain. No attention is paid to the most important components of food security, the production of food, its distribution and its absorption by the poor and hungry. Of the three major pillars of food security, food production, food distribution and food absorption, the NAC draft addresses just one. It is actually more a welfare Bill, a ‘dole’ as it were than an effort to tackle the complex problem of food security per se.

Tackling food security will certainly mean treading on influential toes. The conflicts will arise over who will have preferential access to productive resources like land and water. Will Coca Cola get the water for its bottling plant or will farmers get it for their cultivation? Will small farmers in the dry lands get massive investments in creating water bodies to enable them to have a second crop in the winter? The conflicts will be over such things like fertiliser subsidies. Will Punjab, Haryana, Western UP, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu continue as the principal beneficiaries of the government’s subsidies or will nutrient based subsidy be directed at poor quality soils in rainfed areas that most need intervention, finally get their due? The smallest , most marginal farmers have the worst soils and the least access to water. A Food Security Bill will have meaning only if it tries to swing things in their favour.

The Food Security Bill must tackle the fundamental question of common property resources and the right of access to them. It must be able to speak out against Jatropha plantations on common lands which are conveniently designated as ‘wasteland’. The biofuel produced in the name of clean energy will take away the grazing lands of herders and pastoralists , the place where they can park their livestock because they have no other land. It will take away the source of leafy green vegetables and medicinal plants that the poor rely on.

Just as it will have to tackle the Coca Colas , the Food Security Bill must also take a position against the Adanis, the Reliance lot and all the other conglomerates who are grabbing agricultural lands in the name of SEZs to set up industrial estates ( or just to corner real estate ) India’s most productive lands, the two crop and three crop zones are being snapped up to build urban estates. Where will we grow our food?

The food production part of the Food Security Bill will also have to deal with putting into place our response to ensure food security when faced with climate change. According to the IPCC report, the impact of climate change will be most severe in Africa and South Asia, especially its rainfed areas. We cannot continue behaving as though this is someone else’s problem and even as we debate the finer points of universal versus targeted distribution of food grains , that someone will step in and make the problem go away.

The neglect of rural India continues . There is no technical or financial obstruction to providing sanitation and clean drinking water in mission mode but it still has not been done. Children continue to die of diarrhoea and adults continue to sicken with it , unable to retain the little nutrition they get. There is no reason why this simple intervention has still not been done….
The fact is that to draft a truly comprehensive Food Security Bill and accommodate the logical aspects that belong there, a lot of people will have to be asked to give up some of what is in their bag of goodies. The Food Security Bill clearly fights shy of that .

Questions have also been raised about the manner of drafting this Bill. What kinds of consultations were undertaken? How did the principal stakeholders engage in the process of providing inputs? In what manner were experts and other actors brought on board ? How were the public’s views sought? Has this Bill attempted to be pluralistic representative of other views?

Redrafting a Food Security Legislation
It seems clear that to draft a food security bill, more than just the distribution aspects will have to be addressed. The Bill must include all relevant aspects related to the three major pillars of food security :
• the production (availability) of food,
• the distribution of food
• the absorption of food and nutrition. For this clean drinking water and sanitation are minimum requirements to prevent diarrhoea.

Starve the people and feed the rats

Suman Sahai

The Supreme Court has had to step in once again and tell the government to do its job and feed the poor. In this case, the Court’s injunction was with respect to the food grains rotting in government godowns over which there has been a public hue and cry. The Court has directed the government to make the food that is stored and on the verge of rotting, to be made available to the poor.

The government acknowledges that food worth crores is destroyed every year due to poor and insufficient storage facilities. Yet it has done little about increasing the storage capacity for food. Mountains of grain, collected over years, are rotting in the open, in states like Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. In Punjab alone, this grain could feed three lakh people. When state governments appeal to the centre to release the food stocks so that the poor have food, the government’s economists stop them from doing so on the ground that it would be bad economics. So the central government holds the grain, allowing it to rot; the people get hungrier, the youth in villages after years of deprivation get enraged and take to the gun. The Indian heartland is exploding to the sound of grenades as the economists do their calculations and discuss inflationary pressures.

In government warehouses where construction is shoddy there is seepage from the ground below and leaks from above. The bags get wet, fungus destroys the grain , making it inedible, even as animal feed. In addition rats make holes in the bags and eat up large quantities of grain, leaving behind their excreta to further poison the food. The food lost during storage is keeping millions of Indian hungry.

Even as it watches this destruction of precious food, the government has failed to take any action to fix responsibility and punish those responsible for such criminal actions. Business as usual continues , callous neglect and corruption being par for course, food is

destroyed season after season as malnutrition ravages the countryside and India’s hunger and malnutrition figures slip below Sub Saharan Africa. When this came to light in 2009, the Agriculture Minister told Parliament that he would examine the matter. A year down not a single cubic foot of additional storage space has been built.

Warehouses and godowns are actually bad forms of storage. The bags that are stored first, lie at the bottom, rotting because they cannot be taken out first. It is the bags on top , the most recent ones, that get taken out when food has to be sent out. The cardinal principle of storage, ‘first in - first out’ is violated by the warehouse method of grain storage. The answer is grain silos. These vertical structures of steel allow grain to be poured in from the top and taken out from below. First in- first out, no damp since the structure is off the

ground, easy to keep waterproof since the metal does not allow seepage and damp, so no fungus. No rats or rodents either, nor their excreta. Just clean dry grain, ready to be taken out and trucked wherever it is needed. Is the government taking steps to introduce this straightforward solution to rotting food grains? No it is not. Plans have been made instead to send a delegation to China (one more junket with all hands on board) to study how the Chinese tackle their grain storage issues. Many helpings of chowmein later we will have an analysis of how the Chinese manage their business but we may not get even one grain silo.

The odd thing about the silo is that it is not a new concept for India. In many parts of eastern India, especially places like Jharkhand and Bihar, the traditional grain gola, a small silo like structure is used to store grain at the local level, perhaps for a cluster of villages or even at the block or taluka level. In the British period, grain golas were used to stock food grains during the famines and food shortages created by colonial policies. These structures were made of galvanized iron and had a fairly long life. They are still around. There is no reason why a network of large grain silos and smaller grain golas can not be erected across the country to store food grain cleanly and reach it efficiently and quickly when the need arises. Let this government’s ambitions of nine percent economic growth begin with feeding the hungry in this land with the food that has already been roduced.

Food corruption in India and China

Suman Sahai

The list of food scares in China just over the past one year includes drug-tainted fish, industrial dye in egg yolks to colour them red, pork tainted with a banned feed additive and melamine laced milk powder. The melamine scandal which is the most recent, involved the adulterating of infant formula with the industrial chemical melamine, which can cause kidney stones and kidney failure. Melamine, used in the manufacture of plastics, was mixed with milk powder to show higher protein levels on measurement, in order to get higher prices for the allegedly ‘rich’ milk.

The melamine milk powder was discovered just before the Beijing Olympics, but the Chinese government buried the story so as not to create a scandal ahead of the Olympics when China was showcasing its prowess to the world. But soon after, legal proceedings were instituted and just a few days ago, two people were executed for their involvement in the melamine scandal that killed six and sickened over 300,000 people, some critically. Most of those taken ill were babies and children. The two accused received the death penalty for producing and selling toxic food and for endangering public safety. Apart from them, 19 other people have been jailed in this connection.

In another instance a few months ago, China executed a former director of the food and drug agency for approving fake medicine in exchange for cash. During the tenure of the disgraced drug controller, the state food and drug administration had from 1997 to 2006, approved six untested drugs that turned out to be fake. It was also found that some drug-makers had used falsified documents to apply for approvals, with the knowledge of the drug controller, in order to by pass safety tests.

Compare this with the situation in India where it is common knowledge that milk is adulterated with urea and industrial chemicals and made into a lethal brew risking the health and safety of consumers ranging from children to convalescents and pregnant mothers. Spurious drugs are so prevalent that according to newspaper reports it is impossible to ascertain the authenticity of drugs, even life saving drugs, in smaller towns and cities.

Not just this, people die routinely after drinking adulterated alcohol, or go blind or are paralysed. Pictures of wailing women seated next to corpses, victims of ‘hooch tragedies’

are commonplace. Children are periodically taken ill with food poisoning after eating their mid day meal in school, supplied free by the government. Guests at temple feasts ,

weddings and religious ceremonies are regularly found to have been taken violently ill or poisoned because of some adulterant. The adulteration of food in India is on a scale that can only be described as epic.

This is despite the fact that we have a law on food safety which prescribes food standards and heavy penalties for violators. The Food Safety and Standards Act of 2006 spells out in great detail the standards and permissible and banned additives. But all this might as well exist in the ether for all the difference it makes to ensure the safety of food on the market. Contractors and suppliers of food are the worst culprits of breaking the law in ways which are criminal. Government agencies that place such orders are complicit but this malpractice is raging in the private sector as well. Nobody is ever punished.

When talk turns to corruption, there is a large section of the Indian middle class that switches off, saying it is tired of hearing this ‘corruption talk’. Every society is corrupt, so we need not flagellate ourselves. Wasn’t the Prime Minister of this European state charged with corruption, and did not the British MPs inflate their bills? The Chinese are as bad as us they claim, if not worse. This may all be true but the difference is that we in India do not punish our guilty, We condone corruption and let it happen repeatedly and in the case of food adulteration, we over look the fact that innocent lives are lost because of greedy people. The difference between us and them is that when the guilty in other countries pay a severe pricefor their crimes. In the case of China, corrupt people who harm others are executed. In India they wear gold rings on their fingers and go scot free.

What is Causing the Global Food Crisis?

Suman Sahai

Just because news of the food crisis has gone off the front pages and prime time television, does not mean the crisis has gone away. The crisis of food availability (not necessarily that of food production) remains and inexcusably large numbers of the poor across the world remain hungry. The Millennium Development Goals (MDG), far from showing signs of relief for the poor, are actually in a decline and a larger number of poor people are now below the poverty line than before. So, is food scarce? Not if you look at the statistics of global food production. At the height of the food crisis, farmers produced 2.3 billion tonnes of food grain worldwide. This was more than the production the year before. So shortfall in grain production was not a limiting factor. Neither was there a surge in population increase as compared to the growth in food production . Whereas cereal production has gone up three times after the Green Revolution, the population has only doubled.

Despite the ill-informed comments of George W Bush, food consumption by the Chinese, the Indians or anyone else, did not exceed food production. Rice consumption remained below the total production, as did the consumption of meat, oils and fats and dairy. Wheat consumption matched the production. At no time was there a shortage in the food production, nor did consumption exceed production. So why was there a food crisis? Here is what happened, it all began in America, that land of plenty.

When the sub-prime housing crisis opened up in the US and its full impact was felt, the US stock market collapsed. ‘Hot’ , speculative money invested in the stock market fled to seek new places to park itself. Temporarily, this parking space was the oil market which saw a surge back to back and running parallel to the food crisis. But hot money very quickly moved into food commodities and grain futures, sending the prices spinning. The price of wheat increased by 130 per cent in this period and the price of rice doubled. The price of all other food items like fruits, vegetables, meat and dairy increased tremendously. This is what happens when cartels control a commodity. They hoard it, manipulate the market and send the prices soaring, to make huge profits on their investments.

Did the big grain and food traders make profits during the food crisis? They certainly did. In April 2008, Cargill announced that its profits from commodity trading in the first quarter of 2008 were 86 per cent higher than the profits it made in the first quarter of 2007. The Syngenta Corporation saw profits increase by 28 per cent in the first quarter of 2008 and Thailand’s largest food trader, Charoen Pokphand Foods is expecting a revenue growth of 237 per cent for 2008. So, every corporation in the global food chain is making a killing as developing countries struggle to battle the food crisis. The table says what there is to say.

Globalisation and its iniquitous policies and unbridled capitalism unbridled capitalism of the kind that smashed Wall Street and led to the collapse of America’s flagship banks , is the root cause of several catastrophes, including the global food crisis. US policies of diverting corn and soybean to agro-fuel production has exacerbated the situation. It has also set off a wave of perverse “Ape the US” national policies on biofuels. India leads from the front on this. Still insecure on food security, it has framed an ambitious biofuel policy that will compete with food crops for land and water. The consequences of following such a policy are going to be grim. To guard itself against a food crisis at home, India must rededicate itself to solving age-old problems like land reform, food sovereignty, income generation and supportive policies for agriculture. It must also rise to the challenge of new problems like climate change and global warming.

INDIA'S GE FREE SOYA CAN CAPTURE WORLD MARKET

Suman Sahai

A shortage of products that are not genetically engineered (GE free), especially soybean and corn, is forcing countries that are averse to GE produce to change their stand. Countries in Asia like Japan and South Korea, that are traditional soybean users have rejected GE soybean so far but may now be forced to buy genetically engineered soybean, not just for animal feed but also for soy based food products.

Most of Europe demonstrates a near phobic rejection of foods that are genetically engineered. In Asia, affluent sections of society are averse to consuming gene-spliced foods. In the case of soybean, countries like Japan and South Korea have expressed a clear preference for soy products made from GE free soybean. This has raised the demand for non GE soya and increased its price premium. The net result is a situation where the supply of non GE soya is unable to keep pace with the demand. The shortage of GE free soya is created largely due to the fact that China, the largest producer of non GE soy is faced with growing inflation in the food sector and has decided to hold on to its produce for domestic use.

The short supply and the rising price premium on non-GE crops is now forcing food processors in South Korea to buy American GE corn for the first time for their starch and sweetener industry. This is the first ever use of a GE product in the food chain in this region. Following S Korea, Japan is likely to allow the import of GE soybean too. Both countries are reluctant buyers of GE soybean, forced to do it in order to make up the shortfall in domes-tic requirement because not enough GE free soya is available.

This is a golden opportunity for India to step up its production of non GE soybean and enter the international premium niche market. India as the only country after China to produce certified non GE soybean, can position itself as the new source of GE free soya for countries in Europe which seek bulk soya for animal feed and Asia, particularly China, Japan and South Korea which are looking for quality non GE soya for food.

Stepping up production of GE free soybean immediately should not be difficult. India has been cultivating it for some years in places like Uttaranchal, Madhya Pradesh and some parts of Maharashtra. The transition to soybean in Madhya Pradesh came from the Black Toor, a legume similar to soybean which is eaten as a daal. In the hills varieties of soybean are also eaten as daal. This is to say that the cultivation of soybean is not unknown in India so it will not be an alien crop that farmers are not knowledgeable about. The introduction of soybean will have another advantage, that of replenishing the soil. The nitrogen fixing legume will improve soil nutrition, enabling better second crops. A kind of win - win situation for the farmer.

In Vidarbha particularly, soybean could become the alternative to cotton, which has proved to be such a risky crop. A farmer rehabilitation package could be based on promoting soybean cultivation. This will be better suited to the water deficient situation in Vidarbha and will be less risky than the water guzzling cotton, particularly Bt cotton, which demands even more water than other cotton varieties. Soybean has already begun to replace cotton in Vidarbha as farmers move away from the Bt cotton that has brought disaster.

If India is to exploit the market vacancy successfully, the soya package must be carefully organized, with top class planting material and marketing channels stream-lined and tied up from the farmers' fields to the international buyer. Farm training in sanitary and phy-tosanitary measures will be necessary, so that farmers are careful about maintaining the health and purity standards of their produce. Where necessary, government should negotiate markets in other countries, much in the same way as Malaysia negotiates advantageous market condi-tions and low tariffs for its palm oil.

Policy aspects will also have to cover research programs on soybean. There will have to be a clear and explicit ban on any research on genetically engineering soya. The government must be very clear that it cannot dabble in research on GE soya, risk contamination and expect to capture growing international markets for GE free soybean.

It will need just one single instance of contamination with GE soy to bring the GE free niche market crashing down. We saw what happened to US rice exports after the detection of traces of a GE rice from Bayer, called LL 601 in rice consignments. Overnight there were no takers for American rice. Vietnam and Thailand entered with GE free rice and captured the rice market.

The directionless, largely copycat agenda for research on GE crops that is being supported by the DBT (Department of Biotechnology) and the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) must be brought under a stringent review to conform with India's food as well as trading interests.