BT BRINJAL AND THE SCIENCE ACADEMIES

Suman Sahai
Six academies of science in India ,The Indian Academy of Sciences, The Indian National Academy of Engineering , The Indian National Science Academy, The National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, The National Academy of Medical Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences India, have just finished covering themselves in glory. This distinction came after their September 2010 report released to promote Bt brinjal and ask for its immediate release , was exposed to be a cut and paste job, shamelessly plagiarizing material from diverse sources, including some GM promotional material. The Inter Academy report shocked one of its authors ( Prof Vijayan of the Indian National Science Academy) sufficiently for him to declare “This is unfortunate — we are devastated. This should not have happened”.

Considering that this report was prepared in response to a request made by Dr Kasturirangan, Member Planning Commission and Sri Jairam Ramesh, Minister , Environment and Forests, it does little to address the points that the Minister raised in his detailed decision on why he held back commercialization of Bt brinjal. For instance the Minister had this to say on toxins in the brinjal family: “The plant family Solanaceae to which brinjal belongs appears to be more problematic than others because it contains several natural toxins that can resurface when metabolism is disturbed. The kind of testing done, it is being said, is not specific or stringent enough to detect toxins. This is an important issue since brinjal is an item of almost daily consumption for most of us.” But this concern, like many others, is not addressed in the report.

It was surprising indeed that the National Academy of Medical Sciences is a signatory to this report since both, the Director-General of the Indian Council of Medical Research as well as the Drug Controller to the Government of India had expressed misgivings about the release of Bt brinjal to Jairam Ramesh, recommending that chronic toxicity and other related tests should be carried out independently before taking a decision. As this goes to press, the National Academy of Medical Sciences has distanced itself from the Inter Academy report and has pushed for a fresh report with scientific rigor.

A scientific critique of the Bt brinjal testing has been done by David Andow, professor of insect ecology at the University of Minnesota and an authority on environmental risk assessment (ERA). His report says that the ERA of Bt brinjal conducted by GEAC and Mahyco was misdirected and failed to assess the actual adverse environmental consequences that Bt brinjal could have. In the August 2010 report, Andow has outlined the manner in which an ERA should be, but was not done, to address the specific biosafety questions relevant to Bt brinjal in India.


The main thesis of David Andow’s report is that the GEAC set too narrow a scope for the environmental risk assessment of Bt brinjal. Because of this, the testing was limited and many of the right questions were not asked; therefore most of the possible environmental risks of Bt brinjal were not adequately evaluated. For this reason, Andow concludes that the report of the Expert committee II ( EC-II) does not constitute an adequate ERA. Andow’s report has been endorsed by two highly respected scientists in this field, Professor Norman Ellstrand, University of California and Professor Allison Snow of the Ohio State University.

The report submitted by the science academies is embarrassing and worrisome on at least two counts. First, it reveals how the scientists have abdicated the responsibility of maintaining decent standards in science and second, that they have become lobbyists instead of remaining independent pursuers of the truth. A proper enquiry of this sorry episode must be conducted and strictures passed against the offenders. We must send the message that such shoddy work and ethical compromises are not acceptable.

The new colonizers

Suman Sahai
A new colonialism is underway. Rich, food-importing countries are grabbing the world’s farmland for captive food production for their people. China, South Korea, Japan, as well as Saudi Arabia and the Arab states are the new colonisers. Africa, with its large land mass, fertile land in most places and abundant water, is a target, like India, with its fabled wealth that once was. Only this time, India is joining the ranks of the land grabbers, not on the same scale as the biggies but India, too, is acquiring land in Africa.

The tragedy of Africa is that it remains food insecure despite its fertile farmlands, receiving food-aid from UN agencies like the World Food Programme. Ethiopia, which is aggressively promoting the lease out of its land to foreign investors, receives food aid worth $115 million but its lands generate cereals worth $100 million for Saudi Arabia. Ethiopian land produces food for foreigners but cannot do the same for itself! Similarly, Sudan which receives as much as $1.6 billion worth of free food from international agencies, grows wheat for Saudi Arabia, vegetables for Jordan and its own staple food, sorghum, for animal feed in the United Arab Emirates.

The food crisis of 2008 and high food inflation brought home to many how fragile the global food situation can be, not just for the poor but also for the rich who do not have sufficient land to grow the food they require. When global food commodities disappeared from the international market as a result of factors like speculation leading to hoarding, diversion of foodgrains like corn and soybean to biofuels and increased demand for animal feed, the rich food-importing nations realised that it was not sufficient to have money. To be food secure, they decided, they could not depend on international food stocks but must have control over food production directly. If they did not have enough land in their sovereign territories, they would simply acquire this land elsewhere, produce the food there and ship it home. This would allow them to bypass global food markets and the volatility associated with them in the recent past. It is estimated that in the last few years, up to 20 million hectares of land are either already leased or are being negotiated for lease.

This new colonialism takes forward the trend of the last centuries. The 19th century Europe took over large tracts of farmland in Africa for coffee and cocoa plantations. US-based fruit growing conglomerates appropriated farmland in South and Central America and in Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines to produce bananas, pineapples and other tropical fruits for the world market. The farmland grab of today is fundamentally different though. Earlier it was cash crops and a means to wealth generation, today it is based on straightforward food security instead of revenue generation. Food-importing countries are seeking the first instance to secure food supplies for themselves.

Not just the wealthy countries, others have also joined this exploitation of global farmland.

In neighbouring Pakistan, the government is offering farmland to (largely) Arab investors. Government-backed roadshows are being held in the Gulf state, offering extremely generous tax incentives to attract investment. Given the state of the country’s domestic security situation, an additional bonus that Pakistan offers is a one lakh strong security force to protect the foreign investments.

India too is in the thick of the land grab. Indian companies have found a way out of the land ceiling laws in India to build vast agriculture operations in Africa where there is no ceiling on land ownership. Building huge agriculture empires is not possible in India, but it is in Africa. The Indian government supports this move and provides soft loans and reduced import duties to enable the shipment of agriculture produce to India. Indian farming companies have bought thousands of hectares of land in Africa and are growing rice, maize and pulses which they sell to India. These companies have invested upwards of $2.4 billion to buy up farmland in Ethiopia alone. Karuturi Global, a Karnataka-based company is one of the biggest land owners in Africa, where it grows cash crops like sugarcane and palm oil, as well as rice and vegetables. Not surprisingly, the backlash from people in Africa against foreign investments has begun. Karuturi is one of the prime targets. Activist groups are calling the investments a “land grab” taking away the entitlements of the African people. They say such alienation of land will deprive locals of their livelihoods. They have a point.

If this form of land leasing is to be made fair and sustainable, a code of conduct must be formulated. This could be done by bodies like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

There is a fear that the foreign investments in food production will end up hurting farmers as corrupt local governments allow the land to be leased out without building in any securities for the land owners. These could often be small farmers with little idea of what has been negotiated or what would be the terms of getting their land back. Would the land owner have some right to the food that is produced on his land? Would the local community have preferential rights to access the food or could it be all exported without leaving anything for the local people? Who would ensure that the land is not degraded during the lease period and that it is returned to the owners in a healthy state? Such investment deals have been notoriously non-transparent in most cases so far.

If this form of land leasing is to be made fair and sustainable, and if the small landholders are also to benefit from it, a code of conduct must be formulated. This could be done by bodies like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. They should define the terms and conditions under which land is made available for contracted food production. There must be a consultative process with not just the governments but with the land owners directly and the terms and conditions must be made clear to them. Prior Informed Consent, a feature of recent negotiations determining access to resources, as for instance in the Convention on Biological Diversity, must be made standard features in all such arrangements, before a deal can be finalised. The international community must put its weight behind compliance of the code of conduct in both the host and investor country so that such deals do not become tools of exploitation, depriving the poor and hungry and robbing them of the chance to ever become food secure.

Dr Suman Sahai, a genetic scientist who has served on the faculty of the Universities of Chicago and Heidelberg, is convenor of the Gene Campaign

Hot, dry, hungry

Suman Sahai

Despite the India Meteorological Department’s brave pronouncements, the monsoon this year is looking to be as disturbed as it was last year. A disturbed monsoon has a direct correlation with a deficit in food production. This happened last year and in all likelihood will happen again this year unless the monsoon in north India picks up immediately. These weather uncertainties are being attributed to climate change, a result of anthropogenic or manmade factors. The anticipated changes in climate and its impact on agriculture and food production are of great concern to tropical countries like India. The developing countries in the tropics are less able to adapt and are more susceptible to climate change damage than the temperate countries, many of which will be beneficiaries.

There is a broad consensus that tropical areas are slated to see an expansion of arid zones. This will be accompanied by a contraction of 31-51 million ha of favourable cultivation areas and a significant reduction in food production in the most vulnerable areas where population density is high and food already scarce. Nearly one billion affected people live in these vulnerable environments, dependent on agriculture. These vulnerable populations have limited capacity to protect themselves from the environmental hazards that will accompany climate change, like drought and floods, and will suffer most from land degradation and biodiversity loss.

The Polluter gets Paid
Climate related impacts on food production will be geographically unevenly distributed. In a perverse irony, the developed (industrialised) countries will experience an increase in agriculture productivity potential as temperate regions get warmer. The regions which because of their industrialisation and huge emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are responsible for the climate change phenomenon will actually end up being its beneficiaries with respect to food production. On the other hand, today’s developing world in the tropics, which has not contributed to creating this climate hazard, will be its worst victim, and will suffer a loss in agriculture productivity, with serious consequences for food availability and hunger.About 40 poor and food-insecure countries, with a projected total population (in 2080) of one to three billion, will lose 10-20 per cent of their cereal-production potential. Of these, Africa will be the worst affected followed by South Asia. Crop production losses as a result of climate change could further worsen the prevalence and depth of hunger. This burden will fall disproportionately on the poorest. To compound the damage, the overall trend of reduced food production will create market imbalances, which will push up international prices, making it even more difficult for governments of food scarce countries to access food for their poor.

According to estimates, a little less than half the production potential in certain developing countries could be lost. In South Asia, the biggest blow to food production is expected to come from the loss of multiple cropping zones. The worst affected areas are predicted to be the double and triple cropping areas like Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh from where the surplus grain for our buffer stock comes. This means areas where two to three crops are produced in a year and which are predicted to turn into single crop zones, where only one crop can be taken in a year because the rest of the season will be too hot and dry for cultivation.

Coping with wheat loss
For South Asia, particularly India, one of the most serious impacts is anticipated in wheat production. Wheat is the single largest winter crop of north India and states like Punjab, Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh produce the surplus wheat that goes into the PDS. Wheat is a particularly temperature sensitive crop and it has been estimated that for every one degree rise in temperature, wheat producing areas in India and South Asia will lose about four to five million tonnes of production. This will have a cascading effect on food for the poor.

The immediate challenge is to find a substitute for wheat as the dominant winter crop for north India and other parts where wheat is cultivated. Tubers like potato, can be part of the solution. These could fill the shortfall to some extent but the cereal deficit will have to be made up by some other cereal. Corn could be suitable as a supplementary crop and a partial wheat replacement. Millets are as yet an unexplored option and have not been assessed for potential. Although millets typically grow during the summer in Asia, there are also several millet types which are cultivated at high altitude. Such millet germplasm could form the basis of developing new varieties suited for cultivation during the winter season of a changed, warmer climate regime.

The ability of a country to cope with the impact of climate change on agriculture will depend on a number of factors. The total amount of arable land and available water resources will be critical determinants of the ability of regions to adapt to the changes brought by a warming world. Apart from land, the availability of water could become a critical limiting factor. For instance, the impact of global warming on the Tibetan plateau and Himalayan glaciers will affect the 10 or so main rivers like the Indus, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the Brahmaputra that come out of there and flow into China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma. Harnessing these river waters as the ice caps and Himalayan glaciers recede and the water flow in rivers diminishes, will need skilful diplomatic negotiations so that river waters can be shared in such a manner as to ensure that requirements of agriculture are met in all affected countries.

India has technical skills in agriculture and a sophisticated farming community capable of combining indigenous knowledge with recent scientific advances. The country is rich in biodiversity and community experiences from diverse agro ecological zones offer a number of options to find solutions. All this would enable the agriculture of the region to cope with climate change impacts provided a comprehensive and effective policy response is put into action right away.

- Dr Suman Sahai, a genetic scientist who has served on thefaculty of the Universities of Chicago and Heidelberg, isconvenor of the Gene Campaign

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.

Rotting Food, Hungry People

Suman Sahai

EVERY OTHER day there is either a newspaper report or an editorial comment lamenting the loss of food grain stored in buffer stocks. Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, while prophesying a bumper kharif crop, admits he is worried about not having adequate storage for the produce. At a national conference in 2003, the Central Warehousing Corporation said it had covered storage capacity for 48 million tonnes of food grain. In 2002, the country had 63 million tonnes of food grain in buffer stocks, 15 million tonnes more than it could store. This grain was sold in the international market at prices below the cost at which it was procured by the government, because there was no storage space. That it was not distributed to the poor is another story.

Pawar, who also looks after food and public distribution and consumer affairs, needs to explain why even seven years after holding all three important portfolios, he has failed to increase the country’s capacity for stocking grain. Known for his administrative skills, why has Pawar restricted himself to moaning about poor and inadequate storage facilities, instead of getting up and doing something about it.

The government acknowledges that food worth nearly Rs 60,000 crore is destroyed every year due to poor and insufficient storage facilities. This lost food is keeping millions of Indians hungry. To add insult to injury, the government spends about Rs 2.6 crore of the tax payers’ money to get rid of food grain that has rotted during storage.

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. It is business as usual: callous neglect and corruption being par for the 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 the shocking figures of grain loss came to light last year, Pawar told the Parliament that he would set up a committee to examine the matter. A year later, he has been crowned the Prince of the ICC, but not a single cubic foot of additional storage space has been built. Nor have those who routinely oversee the destruction of the country’s food harvests, been questioned, let alone punished.

Mountains of grain, collected over years, are stored in the open in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, covered by plastic sheets. They get wet in the rain and rot. In Punjab, the rotting grain is enough to feed three lakh people. When states appeal to the Centre to release the food stocks so that the poor have food, the government’s economists stop this, saying it would be bad economics. So the grain is allowed to rot, the people get hungrier, the youth in the hungry heartland get enraged and their anger gets seduced by the gun. India’s innards are exploding to the sound of grenades as the economists discuss inflationary pressures and the agriculture minister complains about poor storage facilities, as though it was someone else’s problem to fix.

Even in warehouses where grain is stored indoors in gunny bags, the damp gets to them because the construction is below par. When the moisture creeps in during the rainy season and the bags get wet, fungus destroys the grain, making it inedible. In addition, there are rodents that not only eat up large quantities of stored grain, but also leave behind their excreta to further poison the food. Together, fungus and rodents account for nearly 20 million tonnes of food grain lost every year, which is about a tenth of the country’s annual production.

STORING GRAINS in warehouses is a bad idea. The bags stored in the first phase lie at the bottom, rotting because they cannot be taken out first. So the bags on top, the most recent ones, get taken out when food has to be sent out. The cardinal principle of storage, ‘firstin- first-out’, is violated by the warehouse method.

There is a blindingly simple answer to this problem — grain silos. These vertical structures of steel allow grain to be poured in from the top and taken out from below. It is waterproof because the structure is lifted off the ground and the metal does not allow seepage and damp. There’s no room for rodents either, nor their excreta. Just clean dry grain, ready to be taken out and transported wherever it is needed.


Is the government taking steps to introduce this solution? No it isn’t. When MS Swaminathan and the National Commission on Farmers made this recommendation, the government response was to set up a committee, after a long delay, to examine its cost and effectiveness. Nothing has come of that so far, but plans are afoot to send a delegation to China to study how they tackle their storage problems. Many plates of Peking duck and lots of plum wine later we will have a report on how the Chinese manage their business, but we may not have a grain silo.

The grain silo isn’t a new concept for India. In Jharkhand and Bihar, the traditional grain gola, a silolike structure is used to store food produce in villages. In the Raj era, such silos were used to stock food grain during famine. These structures were made of galvanised iron and had a fairly long life. They are still around. There is no reason why a network of large silos and smaller grain golas cannot be built across the country. Let this government’s ambitions of nine percent economic growth begin with feeding the hungry in this land with the food that is already produced.

Suman Sahai, convener of Gene Campaign

The Kernel of Bad Ethics

The controversial Seeds Bill is lying in Parliament. It is anti-farmer, pro-industry and needs a drastic rewrite

SUMAN SAHAI

IF DISRUPTIONS over phone tapping and the India Premier League controversy had not taken Parliament sessions hostage, the Rajya Sabha may have passed the controversial Seeds Bill in the week of April 26, when it was slated to come up for discussion.

The government was keen to give this Bill the force of law as soon as possible because the seed industry wants it. The Seeds Bill originally proposed in 2004 was met by resistance almost immediately. Just months after it was proposed, Gene Campaign organised a stakeholder consultation to critically analyse the Bill and suggest amendments. The pressure was kept up to have the Bill re-examined and it was referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture in 2005. The Committee called for evidence and submissions from a number of agencies, including government departments, civil society groups and seed industries.

The Standing Committee accepted many of the amendments proposed by civil society groups and the amended draft Seeds Bill that was proposed to Parliament was vastly improved over the original. It made the playing field more level and while giving the seed industry a fair chance to profit from the seed trade, it incorporated safeguards for farmers. The Bill in that shape was however not accepted. Since then several other amendments have been proposed, some of which have been accepted in principle, others not.

So what is the Seeds Bill and is it needed? Many NGOs have been asking for the Bill to be scrapped. This is a dangerous proposition stemming from ignorance about what such a law is supposed to accomplish. The new Seeds Bill will replace the old Seed Act of 1966, which was meant to govern trading in seed. A law regulating the seed trade is necessary to ensure that farmers are protected against spurious seeds and that seed producers are obliged to put into the market only seeds of good and reliable quality. Such a seed law must encourage competitiveness to ensure good quality and low prices and not encourage monopolies.

Our seed law must ensure that the seeds produced by farming communities (Farmer Varieties) are treated at par with seeds produced by companies. The law must provide for a transparent system of seed testing and evaluation of performance so that the farmers get good quality seed and the nation’s goals of agricultural and food production are met in the most effective manner. So we do need a Seeds Act but we do not need this one.

The genesis of the current shape of the Seeds Bill is to be seen in the ire of the seed industry over the pro-farmer provisions of the Protection of Plant Variety and Farmers Rights Act (PPVFR), 2001. This IPR law that India enacted instead of accepting a patent law for seeds, gives intellectual property protection to the plant varieties of farmers as well as those of breeders. India is the only country in the world that has given legal rights to its farmers over seed, and the industry has been furious since. The seed industry wants monopolies over seed production and giving rights to farmers over their seeds spoils their plans. They retaliated by influencing the proposed Seeds Bill in a way that overrules the provisions of the PPVFR and Farmers Rights and had provisions written in that would allow seed sector monopolies with as little accountability as possible.

In the PPVFR, the breeder applies for registration for a Plant Breeders Right. This right is valid for a period of 15 years for crop varieties and 18 years for trees. The Seed Bill allows the period of protection to be doubled so that the seed varieties can be protected by the seed producer for 30 years and 36 years respectively. This extension of the seed owner’s right will allow monopolies to be established.

A KEY OBJECTION to the Seeds Bill is that despite several submissions for amendment, it still does not require the seed industry (plant breeders) to declare the parentage of the new seed that they have developed. This is bad science and bad ethics. Scientists always keep a record of the maternal and paternal parents of the new seed that they are developing. Resistance to submitting these records and keeping this provision out of the Bill means only one thing. The seed industry breeders will use the seed varieties developed by farmers and public sector scientists and pass this off as their own. This amounts to theft. The penalties for violation have been kept ridiculously low — Rs 5,000 — so that even if someone is caught stealing public sector material or that belonging to farmers, the punishment is a laughably small sum of money.

Of a piece with this is the refusal to accommodate a provision for pre-grant opposition. Law making in many parts of the world, including our own, particularly when rights are granted, as in IPR, allows an opportunity to the public to record its objections to the grant of such a right.

Many activists had wanted such a provision in the Seeds Bill as well so that if a seed company wanted to register a seed, which had used material from other, unauthorised sources, objections could be raised. But the government, anxious to please the seed industry refuses to include a provision for pre-grant opposition.

This Seeds Bill is distinctly anti-farmer and so against the interests of food security. It must be radically overhauled.



Dr Suman Sahai is a scientist trained in genetics. She heads Gene Campaign, a leading research and advocacy organisation

Are genetically modified foods safe?

Suman Sahai

GM crops are promoted as the answer to global hunger, to combat climate change, to produce renewable energy; it appears that if there is a problem anywhere, GM crops have the answer. Apart from this hyperbole, a fundamental question remains: does GM technology produce safe foods or should we be apprehensive about negative health impacts?

There is a substantial body of scientific data that demonstrates that the process of genetic engineering itself can cause changes in the cell that can lead to new and unpredictable changes in it.
Adverse health effects from GM food can result from the over-expression of an existing protein or activation of a dormant toxic substance, resulting in cell products that could be dangerous to human and animal health.
In addition to this, the genetic engineering of plants may result in the expression of totally new substances, which are not found in the natural plant species or, genes brought in from plants having known allergy provoking properties would bring the allergenic property along with them into the new transgenic plant.

The mere act of inserting alien genes into the chromosome of the host plant can create unintended effects and the formation of new and unknown toxic or allergy provoking compounds which are almost impossible to analyse and detect.
This can be a special problem in the case of plants like brinjal, which belong to the Solanacea family. This plant family to which nightshade, dhatura and tobacco (all highly poisonous) also belong has several natural toxins.

The chance of natural toxins being recreated through genetic engineering is high and therefore the genetic engineering of plants of this kind is more risky and more likely to produce foods that could be a threat to human health. Our regulatory system for GM crops have no provisions to conduct specific safety tests of this kind. Such tests, for instance, were not done for Bt brinjal.

It is known that allergenic proteins can be transferred by genetic engineering from one organism to another. The potential for development of toxic or allergic reactions to GM foods is likely to increase with advances in the scope and range of genetic modifications, increasingly radical transgenic combinations and the introduction of a greater variety of GM foods into the market, the last resulting in an increased exposure among people to foods carrying novel proteins.
With the widespread penetration of GM food in the market, food-allergic people will have to contend with new sources of allergens. The danger will be compounded by the difficulties of implementing labeling in India and making such labels intelligible to a large section of Indian people, particularly in rural areas. Allergic consumers will not even know what to avoid, resulting in a great risk to their health.

Children will be particularly vulnerable because their young immune systems will be less able to fight the allergen and also because their exposure to such novel proteins will be of longer duration, increasing their risk. The use of GM food products as food additives and processed foods, including baby foods, will lead to earlier exposure, especially for infants either directly or via breast milk. Maternal dietary food proteins are regularly detected in breast milk, and cow milk.

A particularly controversial area in the application of GM technology has been the use of marker genes which are introduced along with the gene for the desired trait as part of the gene construct that is inserted. The marker gene is just that, a marker to identify if the gene transfer has been successful.

Historically, the most common marker genes have been those that code for resistance to antibiotics. The concern is that these genes could find their way into pathogenic microbes, potentially compromising the clinical efficacy of antibiotics used in human medicine or livestock production. The indiscriminate use of antibiotics in human medicine is a large enough risk for giving rise to antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Testing can be done when the protein created by the foreign gene is known but problems arise when the toxicological hazard results from newly formed proteins which can not be predicted. It is not possible to test for what you do not know and the hazardous proteins can remain undetected. The problem is made worse by the fact that induction of food allergies by increasing dietary exposure may be difficult to detect because of low frequency in the population to start with and because years of ingestion may be required to provoke an allergic response. This has special implications in the case of proteins where allergies are likely to show up years later.
There is plenty of evidence about the health dangers of GM foods, from animal tests.

Studies done at the Russian Academy of sciences, on rats fed with GM soya showed high rates of mortality, severe stunting of pups and high levels of sterility in the surviving litter. The startling results showed that 36% of the litter born to emales fed GE soya were stunted at the age of two weeks, by the third week over 55% had died. The mortality was six to eight times higher than in the control group which had been fed non GE soya.

Data on the health damage caused by eating GM foods comes from Monsanto's own labs. Results from a secret study conducted on their GM maize Mon 863 which were accidentally leaked, showed that rats fed on Mon 863 developed organ abnormalities, changes in the blood profile and collapse of the immune system.

Earlier studies on rats have also shown that rodents appear to be averse to GM foods and reject them in laboratory tests. When the first genetically altered tomato "Flavr Savr" was fed to rodents in the labs in 1994, data revealed that many of the rats developed lesions in the stomach. Seven of the forty rats that were fed with GM tomatoes died within two weeks. There have been numerous other reports of stomach lesions in rats, false pregnancies in cows, excessive cell growth and damage to animal immune systems, following feeding studies conducted with GM foods.

Adequate testing procedures for allergenicity are not available in India. At present food toxicity is tested merely by the chemical analysis of nutrients and known toxins. This may fail to uncover several categories of toxins and allergens. This means that animals and humans could be exposed to allergens which are not being detected. Before any further commercialization is allowed, testing procedures of sufficiently stringent standards should be put in place.

Dr Suman Sahai, trained in genetics, is the chairperson of the Gene Campaign, She has served on the faculty of the Universities of Chicago and Heidelberg. She can be contacted at mail@genecampaign.org