Strange bedfellows

Are Monsanto and Greenpeace in league?

Preposterous though this might sound, I have come to increasingly believe that the agendas of agri-biz multinationals and green groups aren’t as divergent as one would assume. On the contrary, there seems to be a convergence of interests.

Only last month, the Government put on hold confined field trials of genetically modified (GM) cotton, rice, maize, castor, and wheat lines, following lobbying by a clutch of NGOs that included Greenpeace.

The decision came even as the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) – the official body for approving commercialisation and also undertaking of field trials in GM crops – had given the go-ahead.

This is second time, after Bt brinjal in February 2010, that the Government has overruled the GEAC, a statutory body constituted under the Environment Protection Act.

But in Bt brinjal – where the then Environment Minister himself assumed the role of regulator by ordering a ‘moratorium’ on cultivation – the issue involved commercialisation .

In the present case, the Government has withdrawn the permit for even conducting pollen flow studies or testing out performance of candidate plants (‘event selection’) in isolated one-acre plots. Effectively, it extends the moratorium to research as well!

The real losers

The NGOs will say that only Monsanto or Bayer CropScience stand to lose out from all this. The former’s GM maize and the latter’s cotton lines – both harbouring insect pest-resistance and herbicide-tolerance traits – were headed for first-stage bio-safety research trials in the current kharif season This will not happen now. What the NGOs won’t tell you, however, is that the Government’s decision will also affect the event selection trials of Bt cotton and castor transgenics developed by the Central Institute for Cotton Research (CICR) and the Directorate of Oilseeds Research.

Blocking field trials of CICR’s Bt cotton, in particular, represents a victory for Monsanto more than anybody else. GM hybrids today cover over 90 per cent of India’s cotton area. Within that, 95 per cent-plus is accounted for by hybrids incorporating Monsanto’s proprietary events.

In CICR’s GM cotton, the Bt genes have been inserted into open pollinated varieties such as ‘Anjali’. Since the seeds from these can be saved for use in the next season, they work out cheaper than hybrids, where farmers have to shell out around Rs 1,400 per acre for sowing each time.

One reason why Bt cotton has ‘failed’ in rain-fed areas with marginal soils is because of planting of long-duration hybrids requiring more water and nutrients. Also, their high cost induces farmers to sow well after the monsoon’s arrival – when the fields have enough water – so that the seeds don’t have to be bought again if rains are delayed.

Late planting, in turn, impacts yields as the crop suffers moisture stress during peak boll formation stage after October, when the monsoon would have receded.

Who benefits from early-maturing Bt cotton varieties, whose seeds can be saved for re-use and are amenable for timely sowing as well as high-density planting to give better yields? Well, obviously farmers in Vidarbha or Telangana. And who gains from CICR’s trials getting blocked? Monsanto, of course. So whose cause is Greenpeace and Co really serving?

Leveraging public sector R&D

CICR is not an isolated case. Take the GM mustard hybrids developed by Deepak Pental’s team at Delhi University’s Department of Genetics, which have already completed first-stage multi-location bio-safety research trials. These transgenics – giving 25-30 per cent extra yields over the existing best available mustard varieties – were to undergo second-stage trials in rabi 2012, possibly setting the stage for commercial release in the ensuing season.

As it turned out, the trials didn’t take place, since the GEAC got reconstituted only this March after the previous panel’s term ended last June. And with the Government’s latest move, one can be sure there will be no trials in rabi 2013 as well. Meanwhile, Bayer CropScience has opened a new mustard breeding station in Haryana; for all we know, it may well come out with proprietary hybrids in due course.

Whose interests again are our NGOs serving by ensuring that the publicly-bred GM hybrids of Pental’s team don’t finish field trials? Multinationals ultimately have deep pockets and, unlike public sector institutions or private Indian seed companies, can afford to wait. After all, the Government at some point – given the country’s growing food, feed and fibre requirements – will have to open the doors for transgenic crops. Doesn’t it make great strategy, then, to stifle indigenous research in the meantime so as to guarantee long-term monopoly?

Contrast this to the way China has commercialised its own publicly-funded Bt technology in cotton, focusing on transfer of genes into open pollinated ‘straight’ varieties and not just hybrids. The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences has similarly bred a GM phytase maize that allows better phosphorus absorption in pigs, leading to faster animal growth and improved meat yields.

The same goes for Brazil, where the annual budget of Embrapa – the country’s equivalent of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research – has more than doubled to $1.1 billion in the last five years. In 2011, Embrapa commercialised a home-grown GM kidney-bean resistant to the golden mosaic virus.

The above approach of not relying exclusively on proprietary multinational technologies is the opposite to the preservation of monopoly, which is what the anti-GM campaigners in India are inadvertently (?) facilitating.

Fostering monopolies

This rather strange convergence of interests has, interestingly, been seen even vis-à-vis pesticides. Few, for instance, had problems with endosulfan until about 2001. That was when the sole European manufacturer, Bayer, decided to phase out the product from its portfolio.

Given that endosulfan is a generic insecticide priced at less than a fourth of new-generation proprietary molecules, a ban on its spraying would certainly have suited multinational crop protection majors.

The striking thing about reports of health disorders caused by endosulfan poisoning — the focus of a concerted NGO campaign — was their originating from Kerala (where its usage was very limited) and not from the States consuming the maximum quantities.

One can see a similar pattern in the recent European Union ban on imidacloprid and thiamethoxam, originally patented by Bayer and Syngenta respectively. While the former went off-patent in 2008, the same for the latter is set to expire this year.

It raises the question: How were these insecticides, belonging to a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids, found to cause harm to honeybees only now? They did not appear to pose serious problems even five years back, when imidacloprid alone generated over $800 million in annual revenues for Bayer? Why don’t NGOs ever demand a ban on pesticides that enjoy active patent protection — say, DuPont’s Coragen?

It brings us back to the point made at the beginning: The interests of global agri-biz majors and the greens may not be as divergent as is made out. The sufferer here is the poor farmer, who is seeking solutions to genuine on-the-field, not abstract, problems. At the current rate, he/she will only have the multinationals to go to.

( >blfeedback@thehindu.co.in )

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