The Hindu Business Line : Sow Bt brinjal with care

The next time you take mouth of baingan ka bartha, as they call it in North India, the popular katthirikai poriyal of Tamil Nadu, or the vazhuthininga thoran/upperi in Kerala, all made from brinjal, you may well be ingesting Bt toxin, which is meant to kill the shoot borer, an insect pest of the popular vegetable crop.

This is mainly because of the opaqueness of the approval process of genetically-modified crops. Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that the proceedings of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) be made absolutely transparent and also vetted by independent and competent experts.

Need for caution

The fate of Bt cotton, which has been the cause for suicides by farmers of Maharashtra's Vidharba region and parts of Andhra Pradesh, is enough reason to tread the GMO path with caution. Cotton is a fibre crop that enters the human food chain nly indirectly when the cotton seed cake is fed to milch cows. But brinjal is consumed directly with little processing, and greater caution needs to be exercised.

Brinjal, which originated in India thousands of years ago is used in several Ayurvedic preparations and is part of the diet of the rich and the poor alike. Now, an MNC , along with its Indian subsidiary, is pushing Bt brinjal in India as it is supposed to incorporate resistance to the shoot and fruit borer.There are a number of local and high-yielding varieties, such as Pusa kranti and Pusa navkiran, brought out by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), which are popular with farmers. So why the need for the Bt brinjal?

Bt brinjal is a transgenic variety created by inserting a gene, Cry1Ac, from the soil bacterium Bacillus thurengiensis into the brinjal cell through an agrobacterium-mediated vector, along with other gene-like promoters/markers. This is supposed to make the Bt brinjal resistant to the shoot and fruit borer. No GM brinjal has so far been released for field trials in open conditions anywhere in the world and is being attempted in India — which has proved incapable of regulating the GM technology; the proliferation of illegal Bt cotton, through unscrupulous seed traders, is evidence of this. What is worrying is that the biosafety norms seem to have been thrown to the winds in this case. In India, the clearance of a GMO has to go through two committees — the Regulatory Committee of GM Products of the Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India, and the GEAC of the Ministry of Environment. Molecular biologist Dr Pushpa Bhargava, founder Director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad and now Vice-Chairman of the Knowledge Commission, Government of India, has said, in Economic and Political Weekly (April 13, 2002), that: "I believe that both these committees, with the solitary exception of the decision taken by GEAC under the chairmanship of the new Secretary, Environment and Forests, at its meeting in August 2001, at which it did not permit Monsanto to immediately release its Bt cotton in India, for commercialisation, have suffered from the following flaws:

they have been professionally incompetent, inexperienced and unknowledgeable, especially about the world scenario; and

they have shown virtually a total lack of social commitment, courage, integrity and transparency."

Protocol lapses?

The civil society has brought to the notice of the GEAC various aspects of Bt brinjal that need to be re-examined, such as pollen flow studies, agronomic trials, soil impact studies, toxicity and allerginicity tests, food cooking and protein estimation studies, biodiversity issues, socio-economic impact assessments, and rights of farmers and consumers.

The Indian subsidiary of the MNC involved in the production and promotion of Bt brinjal is allegedly in breach of scientific protocols (detailed by the Department of Biotechnology):The allerginicity of the protein extract from the Bt brinjal was apparently carried out on brown Norway rats and not on male rabbits, as prescribed by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).

DBT guidelines prescribe in vivo and in vitro immunological assays for the detection of reactogenic antibodies in the test sera. The in vivo assay was allegedly not done.

Though Cry 1Ac gene was earlier considered innocuous, recently published evidence indicates that Cry 1Ac protein from Bacillus thurengiensis is a potent systemic and mucosal adjuvant, which enhances mostly serum and intestinal lg G antibody responses.

There is apparently conclusive experimental evidence to show that root exudates of GM crops alter the soil microflora profile, negatively impacting soil productivity.

The field data from the experiments conducted by the Indian subsidiary of the MNC promoting the Bt brinjal allegedly failed to statistically analyse the collected data, which made the conclusions scientifically invalid. It is also important to investigate the cost-benefit ratio for the farmer to arrive at valid conclusions to decide whether or not the new technology is economically viable.

The introduction of Bt brinjal in India calls for a "holistic," rather than a "reductionist," approach, particularly because it is a favourite vegetable. Are we risking the health of millions of Indians, especially when published scientific data, as of now, are ambiguous about the safety of the GM food products? Does the country have a choice? Should we not look at alternatives to GM crops, such as organic farming, integrated pest management to control the shoot borer in brinjal? A tiny State such as Mexico, where the food crop maize originated, had the courage to say "no" to the US and outlaw GM technology in maize. Why is India hesitating?

(The author is Chairman of an independent expert committee constituted by civil society organisations, in response to the Supreme Court order, to examine the issues concerning Bt brinjal.)

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