The Hindu Business Line : Centre bans GM crop trials on farmers’ lands

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Centre bans GM crop trials on farmers’ lands

‘Seed firms should use own premises or long-leased lands’

The issues
Till now, multi-location research trials were down on farmers field on a limited scale.
Problem is finding land for largescale trial of crops such as GM cotton or GM rice.

Harish Damodaran

New Delhi, Aug. 17 The Centre has banned multi-location research trials (MLRT) of new genetically modified (GM) crops in farmers’ fields. These trials — which precede the large scale field trials (LST) prior to commercial release — will henceforth have to be done by seed companies/institutions either in their own premises, research farms and long-lease lands or at farms belonging to State Agricultural Universities and Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) institutes.

‘EVENT’

Currently, any new GM “event” or foreign gene construct incorporated in a host plant has to go through five stages before being accorded permission for commercial cultivation. In the first stage, the “event” itself has to take place in the laboratory, which involves transformation of a cotton or brinjal hybrid into a GM plant through insertion of a foreign gene (for example, the cry1Ac gene isolated from a soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt).

FIELD TRIALS

In the second stage, the company is allowed to conduct glasshouse experiments of the new “event” (by growing the transformed plants in enclosed pots), which is then followed by controlled field trials to test out performance in natural conditions.

In the MLRT stage, the GM crop is planted in open fields in order to produce material that can be used for undertaking bio-safety studies, i.e. whether the grains or seeds produce any toxic or allergenic effect.

LIMITED SCALE

Till now, the MLRT was being done in selected farmers’ fields on a limited scale. This was supposed to be done with informed consent from the farmers. But with the Supreme Court in its May 8 judgement prescribing rigorous conditions difficult to be met in farmers’ fields, it has been decided from now on to allow MLRT only in the fields belonging to companies or ICAR/SAU institutions.

MINIMUM DISTANCE

The Court had directed companies to maintain a minimum distance of 200 meters between the trial fields and the regularly cultivated fields, besides ensuring levels of detection of as low as 0.01 per cent (to confirm whether any ‘contamination’ of normal crop by the GM material has taken place).

“It is difficult to find farmers who will offer part of their fields and not grow any within 200 meters. By allowing MLRTs only in company or institutional farms, there is no danger of any contamination to farmers’ fields taking place and so the need for observing detection levels of one in 10,000 is also dispensed with,” industry sources noted.

Issue of finding land

But that still leaves the question of what happens to the fifth stage of LST? How will companies find land for these trials that are to be conducted in different agro-climatic regions for evaluating agronomic performance and bio-safely on a bigger scale?

“For Mayco’s Bt brinjal, LST has been permitted to be done in the fields of the Indian Institute of Vegetable Research and its affiliate centres. This is fine, considering that brinjal is not a widely cultivated crop. But what about GM rice or new GM cotton events that would be grown on millions of hectares?,” the sources asked.