Food Security In Troubled Times : The global food system’s stability is under threat

Suman Sahai

The world is demanding more food each day. This is principally due to the demands of a growing population but also because people by and large are getting wealthier and want more and better food.

 Coinciding with this growing demand for food is the phenomenon of climate change which has already begun to threaten food output and reduce the amount of food available. These two simultaneous developments are threatening the stability of the global food system.

On the one hand climate turbulence , chiefly floods and droughts slash away the expected harvests of major staple foods like rice, wheat and corn so that there is less available. On the other hand, a ‘getting wealthier’ class of people in both developing and developed countries is wanting and able to eat better, especially meat and other animal products like butter, ghee, cream, cheese etc.

 All this is putting a lot of pressure on the land, leading to more and more intensive farming practices, using chemicals to extract the maximum out of plants and animals. So you have an overdosing of the land with chemical fertilisers to put in chemical nutrients rather than allow natural organic nutrients to build up in the soil.

Along with this comes the excessive use of toxic chemical pesticides to kill the pests that follow intensive chemical farming because their natural predators that keep them in check are dead. 

As our own experience with the South-west Monsoon shows us, the weather is getting increasingly uncertain. There are floods and droughts in unexpected locations, at unexpected times. Climate shocks, particularly droughts which are becoming more frequent now and occurring in unlikely locations, have caused the most upheavals in global food supplies. 

 

 The American Midwest is the world’s greatest producer of maize and soybean. The drought of 1988/89 swept through the maize-soya belt of the US. This resulted in a loss of 12% of global maize supply, which meant maize eating food importing countries had lesser maize to import at higher prices. 

 

The widespread drought of 2002/03, hit wheat production in Russia, Europe, India and China, resulting in a 6% reduction in global wheat supply. At the same time, the 2002/03 drought hit rice production in India , causing a decline of 4% in rice output. When there is a shortfall in global food stocks, the biggest casualties are food importing countries that are dependent on imported food.

 

India, and other Monsoon dependent countries, are particularly vulnerable to climate turbulence because a disturbance in the rainfall timing and pattern and the total amount of water received during the Monsoon period is a significant factor in India’s food self-sufficiency. 

The health of the Monsoon essentially determines the amount of rice, India’s major staple food, that will be produced. India’s Monsoon period has been on average 100 days long. This is the period during which the country receives almost all the water it will get from rainfall. 

The Monsoon period is already reduced by about 15 days so in effect the total amount of water we are getting has also gone down by some 15 %. This is having serious implications already and the situation is likely to worsen in the coming years. 

So how do we cope with the impacts of climate change and secure our food supply ? Well first, we need to get off the uniform, monoculture, chemical treadmill because that kind of chemical based intensive food production is the most vulnerable to climate shock. It also produces unhealthy food, contributes to worsening climate change and pretty much wrecks up the environment. 

There are some important changes we need to make but let’s start with a few. We need to get out our genetic diversity of crop plants and deploy it. 

If you have many varieties of rice in the field or of wheat or potato, or maize or whatever, then you are quite safe. If some varieties get destroyed because of unseasonal weather, others will survive, so you may have less food but you will have food. If you plant only that one high yielding variety backed up by chemical fertilisers and pesticides and that one variety falls to climate turbulence, then you have no food. So diversity is smart. 

Invest in millets, instead of just rice and wheat as staple foods in your kitchen. These little grains are nutrition bombs and can take on the worst of climate change. The ‘big’ millets are Sorghum (jowar) and Pearl millet (bajra). The ‘small’ millets are: 

* Finger millet (ragi) High in calcium, and makes rotis and snacks 

* Barnyard millet. Called ‘sawa’ in Hindi. Once a staple, it’s now eaten during fasts and is rich in iron 

* Foxtail millet. Can be cooked like rice and made into upma 

Then there are the fibre and mineral rich millets: 

* Kodo millet Little millet (kutki in Hindi) 

* Proso millet (cheena in Hindi).

All of these are now quite easily available in the market and can be cooked in different ways for tasty, nutritious meals. So start making some changes in the food you bring home

Source: https://www.thecitizen.in/opinion/food-security-in-troubled-times-962233?infinitescroll=1 

Agriculture faces a threat as man, animal conflicts begin to escalate

 Suman Sahai

Apart from the vagaries of the weather which present a huge challenge to India’s agriculture and food production, animals raiding crops constitute another, not insignificant challenge. In the plains of Uttar Pradesh, large herds of the antelope called “nilgai” and abandoned cows cause massive damage to standing crops. The nilgai, because of its name that ends in “gai” (cow), is assumed by villagers to have some association with the cow. That makes it holy, and the village people will not kill it even if it rampages through their fields. Explaining that it is a kind of deer, not a cow, doesn’t seem to convince and nobody wants to take the risk of bringing upon themselves a heap of cosmic curses by taking the life of a holy animal.

Cows that have been abandoned have turned feral and also extremely aggressive. They move in large gangs and can decimate great tracts of standing crops in one visit. They charge at farmers who try to chase them away and, in several instances, have gored people seriously enough to cause death. So, farmers have started fencing their fields at great cost, a cost they can ill afford. Both the nilgai and the feral cows are not restrained by barbed wire which they break through, so in desperation, some farmers have begun to use the concertina wires used in high security areas. These wires have sharp blades along their length and when animals try to push through, they are lacerated by the blades, injuring themselves badly. This is causing a painful dilemma for farmers who do not wish to hurt animals, but have no other way of protecting their crops and livelihoods.

In mountainous regions like Uttarakhand, it is big gangs (technically called “sounders”) of wild boar (wild pigs) that do the damage. Farmers are abandoning agriculture, leaving their fields fallow because the marauding boars come at night and dig up the fields, eating whatever is planted and destroying the field bunds and boundaries. The boar are also aggressive animals and in numbers they are dangerous since they attack when confronted. The male boar, which has one or two upturned tusks, can rip open a man’s abdomen if threatened.

The other, more recent, problem in the hills are the rhesus, or the red face (and red bottom!) monkeys. These rhesus monkeys are not native to the mountain areas of Uttarakhand but have been trucked up from the plains, as one hears, where they have set up home in the shaded nooks of government buildings and where the packed lunches of employees provide rich pickings. The North and South Blocks of Raisina Hill in New Delhi, the seat of India’s government, are preferred locations.

Stories of marauding monkeys entering government offices and destroying files have appeared in the media. True or not, they have given a convenient excuse to the worthies in the government to attribute the disappearance of controversial, inconvenient files to the raiding rhesus monkeys! To rid themselves of the monkey pest, Delhi decided to collect the simians and truck them up to the hills.

These monkeys, however, are not “wild” animals. Born in cities, they are urban creatures brought up on snatched human food. No wild berries or succulent leaves for them, their food preferences tend to parathas and sandwiches when they are not being fed bananas by devout Hindus propitiating the avatar of Hanuman.

Bewildered by the unfamiliar terrain in the mountains of Uttarakhand, they do not rush to the forest, presumed by North Block babus to be their “natural” home, but gravitate to inhabited areas because that is what they are accustomed to. In the hills, they descend on orchards and agricultural fields.

When they raid orchards, they eat some fruit and destroy far more, plucking the unripe fruit and throwing it down. In fields, they will eat what they want but will have uprooted many more plants by the time they leave. They are quite destructive, our close relatives after all!

This is a partial snapshot of how the man-animal conflict plays out in rural areas, where the livelihoods of farmers comes under strain because of the damage caused by animal populations that should be better managed.

Uttarakhand did for a while declare wild boar to be “vermin” that could be killed if causing damage to crops. The ridiculous condition was that a forest official had to be informed of a wild boar attack, and then he would come to destroy the animal. This assumed that the boar would hang around till the official arrived to slaughter them. Naturally they didn’t, and the scheme did not work.

The culling of natural populations of fast-breeding animals like deer, boar, etc, is practiced in many countries, including most of Europe. This keeps the population at a manageable number such that their habitat can support. That way a man-animal conflict is avoided. This would be a solution for India if implemented sanely. Some wildlife enthusiasts would proclaim that humans have no place on this planet, whose original inhabitants were the wild animals, and the earth should revert to them.

Although I see a certain theoretical point in that argument, I am inclined towards a policy of co-existence as we are now also part of the ecosystem.

Source:- https://www.asianage.com/amp/opinion/columnists/270723/suman-sahai-agriculture-faces-a-threat-as-man-animal-conflicts-begin-to-escalate.html

In India, has the environment now been destroyed beyond recovery?

 Suman Sahai

With dramatic changes in the climate overtaking our world, the ferocious pollution in Delhi, the most polluted city in the world and across North India, the irony should not be lost on anyone that world leaders will be sitting down to yet another ineffectual talkathon on arresting climate change just over a week from now.

The 2023 UN Climate Change Conference will be held in Dubai from November 30 to December 12, 2023. The main meeting will be the COP 28 (28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties) as well as the 18th meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol. And the fifth meeting of the parties to the Paris Agreement.

The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 was an international treaty to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases causing global warming. Industrial countries with high emissions were required to cut back more than the less polluting developing countries.  

The Paris Agreement of 2015 was a pledge to keep global temperature rise well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to aim to keep the rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The hyperbolic agenda of COP 28 is: Fast-tracking energy transition and slashing emissions before 2030; Transforming climate finance, delivering on old promises and setting the framework for a new deal on finance; Putting nature, people, lives, and livelihoods at the heart of climate action; and even more immodestly -- Mobilising for the most inclusive COP ever. I wonder how many people believe any of this.

Nothing except hot air has emerged from these treaties and the global climate has only worsened, causing the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, to despair recently that humanity has “opened the gates to hell” by allowing the climate crisis to worsen.

As if to provide the scientific underpinning to Mr Guterres’ hopelessness, a new report has just come in October titled “The 2023 State of the Climate Report: Entering Unchartered Territory”. Brought out by Oxford University Press, the report is authored by a multi-disciplinary team of scientists from different countries.

The headline message of the report is that “Life on Planet Earth is under Siege and we are now in Unchartered Territory’’ This bald, terrifying statement says in so many words that it is possibly too late to reverse the damage done to the climate and that it is going to get increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to predict the timing, the nature and severity of anomalous events that will take place in the future.

2023 will probably turn out to be a benchmark year when many planetary boundaries were irretrievably breached. In July, 2023 was recorded as the hottest year on record. Scientists derive from paleo evidence that this July was probably the hottest in 100,000 years. If that doesn’t sound crazy enough, July 2023 is also when the Antarctic Sea ice reached its lowest level so far and unprecedented numbers of wildfires were seen across temperate areas, particularly in North America.

Asia is turning out to be particularly vulnerable to climate upheavals and disasters. We are seeing the increasingly vulnerable state of North India, particularly in the Indo-Gangetic plains, where high levels of pollution persist for months and uncharacteristic weather events have become more frequent. Cloud bursts and heavy monsoon rains cause flash floods and landslides in northern India. The heavy, nonstop rain for three days starting with a cloud burst wrought havoc in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand in 2021. If the devastating floods of Pakistan in 2022 and the frequent flooding in Bangladesh and China are any indication, the Asian region has already slipped into a highly atypical weather pattern.

The climate of the regions around the Hindukush and Himalayan mountains is directly influenced by the snow-capped ranges which are bearing the brunt of global warming. Glaciers here are melting at a quickened pace. It is estimated that over half of the earth’s 215,000 glaciers will melt by the end of the century, even if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Images captured by Nasa satellites reveal that the Himalayas have already lost about one third of their permanent ice (permafrost) in just the last 50 years. This has serious implications for the water availability in the major rivers of North India.

When glaciers melt and retreat, glacial lakes are formed collecting the melted water. These are fragile, highly unstable structures that can rupture their banks easily, resulting in large volumes of water flowing down in torrents, producing devastating floods. Such GLOFs (Glacial Lake Outburst Floods) are becoming more frequent. A GLOF event is what caused the 2013 Kedarnath disaster, when at least 5000 people lost their lives.

 A GLOF is also what caused the flash floods in Sikkim in 2023 where along with a significant number of lives lost, huge damage was caused to expensive infrastructure, including Chungthang dam and hydroelectric power project. In a swiftly warming world, there is a greater likelihood we will see more instances of catastrophic floods caused when the unstable glacial lakes breach their insubstantial banks. As it is, satellite data show that the last 30 years have seen a big surge in the volume of glacial lakes.

All this tells us how precarious our hold now is on the planet that has sustained human civilisations over millennia. Population growth coupled with an economic growth model that is anchored in a rapacious appetite for more and more has extracted more resources and emitted more pollutants that the environment could handle. We have destroyed the equilibrium of nature. I could end on a prescription of “What to Do” to make things good again, but the solutions have been screamed from the rooftops at every COP meeting. Only, nobody listened. I am afraid that they will not listen at COP 28 either.

Source: https://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/columnists/191123/suman-sahai-in-india-has-the-environment-now-been-destroyed-beyond.html

Re-imagining Agriculture

 Suman Sahai

Gene Campaign has been working in Uttarakhand for about 20 years on issues related to agriculture, food and nutrition. In this period I have seen significant changes among the people, especially the youth. The aspirations of the younger generation with respect to what they want from life are changing so rapidly that people of the older generation are most often not aware of what their children want. Indeed this is true across the country , especially in rural areas where agriculture remains the mainstay but where there is a growing disconnect from it. This is not new. Several studies show farmers are increasingly disenchanted with farming and would move out of it if they had a chance. One study found that 48 % that is roughly half the farming community did not want the next generation to take up farming.

The policy makers and scientists have not, however, synchronized their planning with the aspirations of either the farming community or the young people living in rural areas. Let me start with the dominant narrative in the food and agriculture sector.

We are still talking the language of ‘food security’ and nutrition security’ . Granted that the latter remains a challenge of serious dimension but in my many conversations with young farmers in Uttarakhand , Jharkhand, UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and occasionally other states reveals one common theme. 

Young people want cash incomes so change the focus and the discourse from ‘food security’ to ‘ generating cash incomes from the farm’. The younger rural youth perceives agriculture as a mug’s game. I have often heard the farmers’ sons say “ Babu you do the farming, I am off to the city where I will at least get a steady income”. In a consumerist society and with the onslaught of  mindless television programs and worse, advertisements, the young people do not want to associate with agriculture.

But this can change if agriculture starts generating cash incomes that can buy them  the kinds of things they aspire to, a powerful motorcycle, a bigger television set, fashionable clothes and shoes, visits to the city, holidays and so on.

So my suggestion is, make the focus surplus cash rather than food security alone. Change the perception about agriculture. In today’s world, perception is king !!

In the television promotions on national channels, stop showing the farmer in a dhoti with a plough upon his shoulder, crushed with misery with three lines of frowns upon his forehead. Or  looking bleakly up to the sky waiting for the rain to come as he sits on parched earth which is cracked from the drought. That is not an image the youth ( or anyone else) wants to  identify with.  Show the farmer as a smart young man or woman taking  produce to the market, processing fruit into attractive bottles of juice and jams,  operating a unit making parboiled rice and packing it into attractive packages, making chips out of potatoes, sauce out of tomatoes, biscuits out of flour. Show that agriculture makes money.

Take a cue from the advertising that the defence sector does. When they invite people to join the army, airforce or navy.  A smart young man in his blue- gray overalls, carrying his helmet is shown in the backdrop of a fighter plane. The army is represented by fit young men in spit and polish, looking ready to take on any enemy to defend the  country. A woman in uniform is marching at the Republic Day Parade leading a contingent.  These are powerful, and attractive  images. The airforce doesn’t put up  images of mangled, crashed MiGs nor does the army put up pictures of bloodied, shot up soldiers.

Then why do we persist in showing a miserable broken farmer unable to feed his family, broken by the adversities of his life. Adversity is as much part of his life as crashed planes and sunken ships belong to a career in the airforce and navy. But is that what you want to project as all that the defence sector offers? 

Agricultural fields in Himalaya Photo courtesy: Ayush Joshi

In Gene Campaign’s  work in Uttarakhand, we have begun to talk about the great possibilities that the farm, orchard and livestock offers to make money and lead good lives. We have started training programs in value addition of fruits, vegetables  and traditional grains. We have had experts come and give training and demonstrations in increasing the production and productivity of crops. We also talk to farmers about the value of healthy, clean produce if they want their products to reach the market and get a good price. We are introducing the concept of standards and the importance of meeting  those standards if they want to make their products viable and competitive in the market.

We work principally with women farmers and we have organised them into Mahila Kissan Samitis (MKS).  Here in Uttarkhand,  as in most hill states, the women do most of the agricultural work so we figured they should claim the identify too. We have provided access to government schemes and programs, specially those related to agriculture and horticulture thus enabling them to apply in time and follow up their applications.

There has been a noticeable improvement in self confidence and a sense of empowerment. At a MKS sammelan attended by government officials like block officers, agriculture development officials, bank managers , horticulture department etc, we were delighted to see the women being assertive, taking on the officials about government schemes not reaching them and being monopolised by a few.

On the other hand, to build skills and capacity for income generation,  the women have received training in value addition of fruits , millets and traditional grains. Also in hygienic processing, standardisation, packaging and marketing. On the financial side they have been trained in the pricing of products, accounts and book keeping. Many of them have started earning from the sale of rhododendron and fruit products. They have also increased the consumption of millets in different forms at home which will hopefully lead to a better nutritional status over time.

Source:https://savekumaon.com/agriculture/ 

Millets Will Solve Problems

 As a large section of India is now aware, 2023 has been declared the Year of Millets by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (UN FAO). The highlighting of millets on the global platform was mooted by MS Swaminathan some years ago, to focus attention on the importance of these highly nutritious grains which had ceded agricultural space to wheat and rice and fallen by the wayside after the Green Revolution. Ever since the UN FAO declaration, campuses across India are holding programs on millets. Every agriculture research station is conducting awareness programs, the better ones are doing exhibitions and demonstrations. How sorely such awareness programs are needed is seen in the near blank responses of the majority of visitors when asked what they knew about millets. Nothing. 

Why are millets important, one might ask. India is home to the largest number of hungry people in the world and sits near the bottom on the list of countries facing high levels of malnutrition. India also , like many countries in the tropical zone, is going to bear the worst brunt of climate change. This means a rocky agriculture scenario with unstable food production. Wheat, North India’s main Rabi (winter) crop is anticipated to suffer significant declines in production as temperatures rise with global warming. This becomes exceedingly critical since wheat along with rice, is the mainstay of India’s buffer stocks and its subsidized food programs. These are the Public Distribution System (PDS), the Mid Day Meal Scheme in schools, The ICDS ( Integrated Child Development Services Scheme) as well as the Annapurna and Antodaya food schemes. 

Millets can play a major role in addressing these challenges to India’s food and nutrition security. That’s because millets are hardy crops with a wide adaptation window which allows them to grow in diverse agro-ecological zones. They grow in high altitudes, in low altitudes like the plains of India and almost everywhere else. They need little water and have high temperature tolerance. 

On top of all this, the photosynthesis system of millets is more efficient than that of wheat and rice. In scientific jargon, millets are C4 crops whereas rice and wheat are C3 crops. C4 crops have a higher water use efficiency and are productive in climatic conditions that are hot and dry. C3 crops on the other hand, suffer under hot and dry conditions and lose productivity. That is the reason, millets will perform well under the hot and water stressed conditions brought about by climate change and will hence stabilise food production better than wheat and rice. So much for the production of food grains. 

The other stellar role that millets can play is in alleviating malnutrition. This is especially relevant for states like Uttarakhand which show appalling figures for malnutrition. Millets are nutrition bombs that are loaded with vitamins and minerals like calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese and several others. Finger millet, also called ragi and madua is loaded with calcium. Barnyard millet called sawa in UP and Bihar and madira in Uttarakhand, is a powerhouse of iron. These micronutrients are the key to good health and their deficiency is the main cause of under nutrition and malnutrition. Mainstreaming millets and incorporating them in family diets will go a long way in helping to improve the nutritional status of our poor. But to get there, a lot of work needs to be done.

Source: https://savekumaon.com/millets/

GM Crops – Relevance for Indian Agriculture

Dr Suman Sahai is a scientist trained in genetics and Founder Chairperson of the research and advocacy organization, Gene Campaign

What are GM crops and are they really what we need ? Are they safe to eat and are they also safe for the environment ? First it was Bt cotton, then there was the controversy over Bt brinjal. Most recently we have been discussing whether GM mustard has anything to offer India. All these are genetically modified crops to which there is both strong opposition as well as strong support, the latter largely from the biotech industry and a section of the scientific community.

GM crops are those crops in which a “foreign” gene has been introduced. In the case of Bt crops , it is a gene from a bacterium. In GM mustard, there are also bacterial genes but  different ones. There is substantial evidence that these crops can in some cases be unsafe for both people and the environment but this is contested by the biotech industry which puts out its own data.

So how do we go forward? I mention below some aspects that should inform any decisions taken with respect to this technology.

• New agricultural technologies in India must be introduced only if they can be successfully adopted by small farmers which constitute the bulk of the farming community in India. 

• Genetic engineering and GM crops are a privately owned technology unlike the Green Revolution which was a publicly owned technology. Agbiotech is largely owned by multinational corporations that are constantly undergoing changes and mergers but the players remain essentially the same: Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, DuPont, Bayer Life Sciences and BASF. They control all upstream and downstream products and processes related to genetic engineering through a series of patents. 

• Countries like India can engage in Agbiotechnology only by licensing genes and research processes from the corporations. This means the technology will remain alien for the foreseeable future unless we embark on a flurry of innovations, signs of which are regrettably not visible so far.

• This also means that the private sector is creating private goods for which it charges very high rates. The case in the Supreme Court against Monsanto on the overpricing of its Bt cotton is a case in point. 

• Apart from the implications of technology dependence in a critical sector like food, the research agenda gets determined by the technology available. At the moment there are only two genes on offer from the corporations, the toxin gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuriengensis (Bt) and the genes that confer herbicide tolerance. Neither is of great relevance to the problems of Indian agriculture, yet over 40 % of the agbiotech research being done in India is based on the Bt gene. 

• If India wants to use Agbiotech, it must set its own research agenda, engage in novel gene discovery and use genes discovered in its labs to solve its agricultural problems. It should encourage South- South research partnerships rather than depend on multinational technology. Countries like Cuba, S Korea and Egypt can join India to form a South Technology Core. 

• Genetic engineering which is a regulated technology the world over requires careful monitoring and oversight and a stringent regulatory system to detect harmful developments in time. Otherwise GM crops can cause serious damage to the environment and to human and animal health. 

• The genetic variability in Indian agriculture is one of the richest and most varied in the world. Because of this, it forms an important bedrock of global food security.  India must be particularly careful that foreign genes do not contaminate native biodiversity and result in adverse impacts on such a valuable global resource. 

• The international biosafety convention, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety recognizes the dangers posed by genetic engineering and lays down the Precautionary Principle as the basis of using GM crops. India does not follow the Precautionary Principle though. India is a center of origin for rice , that is , it is the birthplace of rice. Other such centers of origin, like Mexico (corn) , has banned GM corn; Peru (potato) has banned GM potato and China (soybean) has banned GM soybean but India promotes development of GM rice. 

• The Indian regulatory system is not yet stringent enough, transparent or inclusive of public views so the chances of damaging lapses occurring are high. If India wants to adopt GM crops, it should do so only after it has set up strong regulatory systems and taught its farmers the pros and cons of using Agbiotechnology. Studies have found that over 95 % percent of the farmers who cultivate Bt cotton have no idea what it is, what the stipulated procedures for cultivation are, why these are important and what will go wrong if these are not followed.

• A Citizens Commission on Agbiotechnology consisting of independent experts from various fields should be set up to advise the government on which agricultural technologies might be suitable for Indian farmers and to monitor their adoption and impact. 

Source: https://savekumaon.com/gm-crops/

India lacks GM regulation

You are one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court against GM crops. What prompted you to file the petition?

Gene Campaign (GC) organised a national conference on the Relevance of GM Technology to India Agriculture in 2003 with all possible stakeholders, including industry, civil society groups, academics, government officials, etc., broadly representing all shades of opinions. The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) rebutted every single recommendation, saying none of these were needed. We then had no choice but to approach the Supreme Court with a writ petition. 

 

The government claims it found no negative impact on animals and plant. Is this correct?

The government has not provided data on biosafety tests despite requests and questions sent under the RTI. For instance, the Gene Campaign had asked for the biosafety data on Bt brinjal when it was coming up for possible release but this was not provided. That’s just one instance. Right from the beginning, the government refused to engage in open discussions. This has not helped find a solution.

When GM technology is accepted in the US, why is there so much protest in India?

GM technology is only the beginning. We have many transformative technologies in the pipeline, all with substantial potential for good as well as harm. We must develop stringent regulatory systems to minimise risk in these cases. Shoddy regulation can cause often irreversible damage. Let me also mention here that the US, which is one of the strongest proponents of GM technology, also has strong regulations, including a liability and redress law that ensures violators have to pay for damages and clean-ups and compensate for economic loss. India does not have these.

What is the problem with manipulating the genes of food crops to get the desired results?

Interfering in the genetic material can cause unnatural substances to be produced in the cell. These may be harmless or very harmful. That is why the scientists who developed this technology, themselves asked for a regulatory system that would test for unintended effects on the environment as well as human and animal health. There are enough examples of allergy-producing substances or toxic products produced by genetic engineering. Careful monitoring is therefore a must.

Have we achieved the intended goal with Bt cotton?

No. GM crops have been bred for high yield or higher productivity. The two most prevalent GM traits are Bt for pest resistance and HT (herbicide tolerance) for weed control. The Bt technology has failed as one can see from the Bt cotton experience. The bollworm pest has become resistant and secondary pests have become aggressive and dominant. Farmers are either moving away from cotton or are spraying heavily. The HT technology is a human and animal health disaster. The two weedicides in use with HT crops are glyphosate and as in the case of GM mustard with the undeclared HT trait, glufosinate. Glyphosate is linked to cancer and mental health issues among others. The link between cancer and glufosinate is not fully established but there is a report of induced tumors. It is clearly neurotoxic, produces cognitive decline and is toxic to animals and microbes. Its use in the soil will cause severe microbiological imbalance and a deterioration of soil health. Residues of both these dangerous weedicides are reported in food. As the evidence shows, it is reckless and dangerous in the extreme to adopt HT technology.

Source: The Indian Express, 16 Sept. 2023 ; https://www.newindianexpress.com/xplore/2023/sep/16/india-lacks-gm-regulation-dr-suman-sahai-2615286.html