INDIA: BIOTECHNOLOGY BILL

Missing the purpose

Critics of the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India Bill say that instead of providing a framework for regulation it seems geared to promoting biotechnology.

“IN their tearing hurry to open the economy to private prospectors, the government should not make the same fate befall the agriculture sector as has happened to the communications, pharma, mineral wealth and several other sectors in which the government’s facilitative benevolence preceded the setting up of sufficient checks and balances and regulatory mechanisms, thereby leading to colossal, unfettered loot and plunder of national wealth in some form or the other, incalculable damage to the environment, biodiversity, flora and fauna, and unimaginable suffering to the common man,” says the Departmentally Related Standing Committee on Agriculture in its report on “Cultivation of Genetically Modified Food Crops: Prospects and Effects” tabled in August 2012.

Deposing before the Standing Committee on Agriculture, S. Ramachandran Pillai, president of the All India Kisan Sabha, explained that the government, while devising strategies and policies, should not lose track of the fact that 70 per cent of India’s farmers were small and marginal. Speaking in the context of genetically modified (GM) crops, he said that common peasants did not get any benefit from them as profit was the chief driving force behind the use of GM crops. He also pointed out that the pro-poor features of the use of biotechnology should include solutions to the problems of food security, malnutrition, poverty, unemployment and backwardness.

Notwithstanding the concerns expressed by the Standing Committee and several experts, Jaipal Reddy, Minister for Science and Technology (S&T), introduced the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) Bill, 2013, in the Lok Sabha on April 23. Its stated aim is to promote the safe use of modern biotechnology by enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of regulatory procedures. Critics of the Bill claim, however, that there is an inherent contradiction in the Bill because while the nomenclature purports to provide a framework for regulation of biotechnology, the objectives seem somehow designed to promote it, thereby compromising the regulatory features. Biosafety protection should be its basis, they argue.

They also say that the wrong Ministry tabled the Bill; either the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) or the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare should have tabled it as the Ministry of S&T does not have the mandate to protect health or the environment. There is also a conflict of interest as the Ministry of S&T is a promoter of GM crops. Other problems with the Bill include its expediency clause, which, critics argue, undermines the constitutional authority of State governments. The Coalition for a GM-free India says that the BRAI Bill is a blatant attempt to bulldoze through the public’s concerns about GM crops and makes the regulatory mechanism weaker than that of the MoEF’s Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC).

Sixteen Members of Parliament, cutting across party lines, wrote to Jaipal Reddy on April 25 expressing their disappointment at the manner in which the Bill was introduced on the first day of Parliament after the Budget session; it seemed like an attempt to circumvent opposition to GM crops. They wrote: “The BRAI Bill is a single-window clearance mechanism for genetically modified crops in the country. There is growing scientific evidence on the adverse impact of GM crops on the safety of our food, farming and the environment…. The introduction of the BRAI Bill was unexpected as the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture had recommended that the BRAI Bill was not the way forward to regulate GM crops.” They urged Jaipal Reddy to withdraw the Bill and instead bring a biosafety protection law after effective and thorough pre-legislative consultations. “We need to protect and enhance biosafety and to ensure democratic processes are adhered to when dealing with issues as important as food, farming and the environment in our country,” they wrote. It was learnt that Jaipal Reddy wrote to the Speaker asking that the Bill be sent to a joint committee of both Houses because of the reservations expressed in this letter. But the Bill was instead referred to the Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment and Forests.

Critics of the Bill are also surprised at the minimalistic composition of the proposed BRAI, which only has five members, whereas the GEAC is a multi-ministerial, broad-based body. Under Section 26 of the Bill, an environmental appraisal panel has to be constituted, an idea mooted by the then Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, but this panel is rendered toothless because no norms and procedures have been laid down for the selection of its members. The panel’s opinion has to be sought in the case of organisms and products that will have an environmental impact, but the panel clearly lacks autonomy in function and authority. Additionally, the BRAI Bill does not include within its framework public consultations, a concept enshrined in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, of which India is a signatory. Nor does it make provision for the prohibition of GM organisms from particular areas or particular kinds of GMOs or even transgenic technology in particular crops.

It was in 2003-04 that the idea of an independent regulatory authority, termed then the National Biotechnology Regulatory Authority, was formally mooted in the report of a task force, set up by the Ministry of Agriculture and headed by the eminent agriculture scientist M.S. Swaminathan. This task force had recommended that the bottom line of any regulatory authority in the country should be ensuring the safety of the environment, the well-being of farming families, the ecological and economic sustainability of farming systems, and the health and nutrition security of consumers and safeguarding domestic and international trade and the biosecurity of the nation. Critics argue that the Bill ignores this aspect completely, reducing regulation to mere technical parameters.

“While there is a lot of apprehension about the safety of the technology, what is more worrying is the absence of any liability clause or mechanism in the system that could compensate farmers and consumers in the eventuality of crop loss and harm to biodiversity, health, environment, etc. With the various crop insurance schemes also not being of much help to the majority of farmers, any prospective losses to them due to cultivation of transgenic agricultural crops will have a crippling effect on their fortunes, reeling as they already have been under a severe agrarian crisis for years now,” observed Basudev Acharia, the MP who headed the Standing Committee on Agriculture. The committee further observed that the Bill did not give the GEAC any role in policy matters relating to the research and development of GM crops, food security, pricing of GM seeds, commercialisation of GM crops and labelling for consumer awareness. In fact, the committee’s report, running into more than 500 pages, noted that 93 per cent of cultivated land the world over supported conventional cropping, and only a few countries carried out concentrated cultivation of GM crops. It also observed that neither costs nor benefits were currently perceived to be equally shared by all stakeholders, with the poor tending to bear more of the costs and receive fewer of the benefits. In the absence of any regulation, these concerns may well be valid and extend to contract farming practices as well.

Making a broad point on privatisation, the committee, quoting from a 2009 report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, observed that “as privatisation fuels a transfer of knowledge away from the commons, there is a contraction both in crop diversity and numbers of local breeding specialists. In many parts of the world, women play this role and thus a risk exists that privatisation may lead to women losing economic resources and social standing as their plant breeding knowledge gets appropriated. At the same time, entire communities run the risk of losing control of their food security.”

The government has allowed the public to send in its feedback and comments on the Bill by August 25 to the Departmentally Related Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment and Forest. The earlier deadline for receiving comments was July 11. Individuals and organisations such as the Coalition for a GM-free India made representations to T. Subbarami Reddy, the Chairperson of the committee, to extend the deadline on the grounds that the National Advisory Council had stipulated that a time period of 90 days should be provided for public feedback and pre-legislative consultations.

Regulation in agriculture

Regulation of what happens in the name of agriculture has been a matter of contention for some time. Whether it was the introduction of Bt brinjal in 2010, the continued cultivation of Bt cotton in spite of widespread national and international opinion against it, or contract farming for profits, the latest trend in farming, issues of regulation have never been of great importance for policymakers.

Vijoo Krishnan, joint secretary of the Kisan Sabha, told Frontline: “The new seemingly lucrative move [contract farming] is an act of deception aimed at granting vast areas of fertile land on a platter to agribusinesses that have stakes in all stages from inputs to processing to retailing. The unbridled flexibility they have can threaten biodiversity, promote monoculture and cause a shift away from food crops and, in the context of the BRAI Bill, promote harmful and unwanted biotechnologies. Farmers would eventually be dispossessed of their land, tenants won’t have any rights and millions will be pushed into unemployment. It is a reversal of whatever limited land reforms have taken place and the subversion of land ceiling laws. Instead of promoting farmers’ cooperatives and subsidising farmers, the government is diverting RKVY [Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana, a Central assistance scheme for the agricultural sector] funds to aid corporate profiteering. Like PPP [public-private partnership] in infrastructure and roads, it will emerge as a huge scam. It is the latest in the package of concerted moves to corporatise agriculture.”

Kavitha Kuriganti of the Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture added: “There is a concerted effort to shape Indian agriculture on the American model, without appreciating the fact that American farming is inefficient and needs massive support to prop it up in various ways and without appreciating the inherent strengths of Indian agriculture. In India, studies have shown that it is indeed an unequal relationship between producers and corporate entities that get into contract farming. Margins accruing to farmers are no better than from regular markets. The overall atmosphere of corporatisation at all ends—including on inputs into farming, on resources that are needed for food production, on the output—presents a scary picture of control over our food and farming being handed over on a platter to corporations, whose bottom line is only profit.”

Therefore, whether it is Bt brinjal or any other GM food crop, the government’s approval and regulatory mechanisms seem highly problematic. And, generally, legislation brought in to regulate agricultural practices and biosafety issues has been far from adequate. The BRAI Bill is the latest example of this.

Bt brinjal

In 2010, following widespread protests, including by political parties such as those from the Left, Jairam Ramesh issued a moratorium on Bt brinjal. One of the grounds for the moratorium was that there was “no overriding urgency to introduce Bt brinjal here, the very first GM vegetable in the world”, as the Minister’s note said.

The BRAI Bill seeks to undo all that has been done. The Standing Committee on Agriculture maintained that the country did not need a BRAI Bill but a biosafety protection authority on the lines of the supervisory authority set up under Norway’s Gene Technology Act. Existing legislation in India seems hardly adequate to address the challenges posed by the opening up of agriculture and technology, and emerging forms of agriculture are quite outside the domain of any regulation. FRONTLINE

INDIA: CONTROVERSY ON GMO

Natarajan strikes a tough stance on field trials, takes on Sharad Pawar

Environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan has dropped a bombshell that could prove to be significant in the current battle over Genetically Modified (GM) crop field trials. Natarajan, sources said, had raised issues similar to the ones in the final report of the Technical Expert Committee report submitted last week to the Supreme Court.

Natarajan wrote to Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh recommending that field trials of genetically modified (GM) crops not be allowed till a regulatory framework and safety protocols were put in place. Natarajan’s missive was her response to Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar accusation that she was stonewalling the development of GM crops and technology in India. The letter clarified the environment ministry’s stand on GM food crops.

Natarajan also questioned Pawar on his argument that GM food crops were necessary to ensure food security in the country, quoting several studies which questioned this logic and the relationship.

Instead, Natarajan said, improving the productivity of small land owning farmers can improve productivity without GM crops and the resultant issues.

Field trials of 56 varieties of GM crops cannot be allowed without a proper regulatory mechanism because the government has only introduced the Bio-Technology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) Bill in Parliament, not approved it, she has stated.

The letter also flagged off the issue of many state governments refusing permission to allow field trials of GM crops. Without the cooperation of state governments it would not be possible to conduct proper field trials of GM crops even if Natarajan’s environment ministry gave approvals.

The minister has reportedly written that the approvals to GM crops cannot be given till the Supreme Court takes a final view on the TEC report. Earlier this month, a committee of the court had submitted a report with one dissent recommending a ban on trials of GM crops till regulatory mechanism and adequate safety protocols are put in place. THE HINDUSTAN TIMES

INDIA GMO FOOD

The fight for your plate

Imagine you have a choice of bananas – one that you have always preferred from the 200 varieties India has to offer and another engineered to give you extra iron but whose impact on your physiology is uncertain. Imagine a similar choice with your staple rice; regular rice or fortified with beta-carotene whose long-term impacts are not fully studied. Or mustard.

Conventional wisdom would have you pick the first item in every category. That’s if you knew which banana, rice and mustard in the market was the natural organism and which genetically modified. The idea of choice works when there’s information to make it.

The pitched debate around genetically modified (GM) crops, including food crops, revolves around two important themes: ambiguity about long-term health and safety impacts and inadequate labelling that hinders choice. The genetically modified organism (GMO) industry – international and Indian companies – believes GM food could deliver food security to India, a line parroted by Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar. The broad-based anti-GM coalition believes existing data is inadequate to embrace GM food and evidence of its adverse impacts is rising.

The battle is likely to get sharper, perhaps ugly, in the months ahead. There’s a clear division in Dr Manmohan Singh’s cabinet itself. “We have two senior cabinet ministers ranged on either side,” said a Congress party source, referring to environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan and Pawar, “It’s not right to link GM foods to food security.”

“Let’s be honest. Farmers don’t fund elections; rich and big companies do. Besides, we know the PM’s stand on the issue,” says Devinder Sharma, food policy analyst and anti-GM campaigner. Sharma and others like him say “a false crisis about food security is being created; the real agenda is to create a market” in India for GM foods.

The Technical Expert Committee (TEC) of the Supreme Court, recommended last Monday an indefinite moratorium on all field trials till a proper regulatory authority was put in place. Natarajan had announced in April that 20 food crops has been approved for field trials and trials had been initiated in cotton, corn and mustard.

While the Coalition for GM-free India urged the government to accept “the recommendations based on sound science, justice and principle of sustainability”, Monsanto spokesperson stated, “The TEC report sought to go beyond the Terms of Reference and recommendations made are discouraging of science and agriculture.”

In the high-stakes battle, the role of an independent regulatory authority – to   safeguard people’s health and protect the country’s bio-diversity – becomes crucial. The dispute over GM crops these days often segues into a debate over the proposed Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI). “There’s the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee. The new regulatory authority will be under the science and technology ministry which is responsible for promoting GM technology. What’s this if not conflict of interest,” asked Sharma. However, the industry believes India’s regulatory framework is good. “India has a robust science-based regulation and regulatory process in place which is comparable to global standards,” stated the Monsanto spokesperson.

This divergence of perspectives is forcing people to take sides. Politicians seem to have chosen theirs. For people to weigh in, “more honestly scientific information” about GM food impacts has to be in the public domain, said Sharma. This includes letting people know what they are consuming by adequate labelling. Cotton seed oil derived from Bt Cotton could already be in your kitchen. “Cotton seed oil contributes to domestic edible oil needs, it’s the number 1 choice in Gujarat,” admitted Monsanto spokesperson. What exactly it does to your gut is still in the realm of research. What a GM-rich diet does to health is left to your imagination. THE HINDUSTAN TIMES

GM CROPS IN PAKISTAN

Firms pitch GM crops in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: Three multinational companies and a number of national firms have approached the Ministry of Food Security seeking licences to grow genetically-modified (GM) crops in Pakistan.

A senior federal government official, refusing to give his name, said that “a request in this regard has been received by the Ministry of Food Security a few weeks back and it is being reviewed.”

He added that the ministry had received the request to grow GM maize and cotton. He identified the firms as Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta.

When approached, the director general of Pakistan Environment Protection Agency (Pak-Epa), Asif Shuja, said: “The three companies have also approached us. But we are only concerned with the assessment of environmental impact of these companies.”

Asked to comment on the genetically-modified food products, he said: “It’s a long debate as research is still continuing internationally whether genetically-modified products have an impact on human health.”

A number of Pakistani companies have also approached Pak-Epa for launching genetically-modified food products, but “we have not given a no-objection certificate to any of them,” Shuja said.

“Many of the local companies want to import genetically-modified food products from China and we have not given any approval in this regard,” he added.

Shuja said the Ministry of Climate Change had also established a committee to review the requests from these companies.

Meanwhile, Dr Jawad Chishtie, a public health and environment management specialist, said: “Genetically-modified products have been rejected in Europe, and most recently in France, for damaging crops and endangering human health.”

He warned that effects of genetically-engineered organisms were not yet known to researchers and “they are suspected of causing dangerous allergies and even cancer.”

He said GM seeds had terminator genes which did not allow the same crop to be planted again from harvested seeds. “Once a genetically-modified agri-product is planted, the farmers are trapped into buying the seed and its related pesticides each and every year from the same company,” he said. Internews

HYBRID CROPS WAY

Kew’s growth strategy: hybrid crops without the genetic modification

British researchers are leading an unprecedented global project to track down and store wild relatives of common crops – to help breed hybrids with higher yields that could be resistant to the effects of climate change.

Crossing staple crops such as wheat, potatoes and rice with their wild cousins offers a natural, safe alternative to the genetic modification of plants in the lab, according to experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, which is behind the scheme.

A report by researchers at Kew found that so-called “crop wild relatives” offer a badly neglected “treasure trove” of genetic information that, if harnessed properly, could boost agricultural production and be worth up to £128bn to the global economy.

But global stocks of crop wild relatives are woefully low and many species are close to extinction, with aubergine, potato, apple, sunflower and carrot varieties most at risk, the report found.

More than half the 455 known crop wild relatives of the world’s 29 most-consumed food plants have either not been collected at all, or are badly under-represented, making it essential to build stocks as soon as possible, warns Jonas Mueller, of the Kew Millennium Seed Bank.

“Now that we have identified the gaps the next step is to collect them and make them accessible for agricultural research. We know the climate will change but we don’t know how. So we don’t yet know how it will affect the crops that have been bred in the past specifically for the climate of today,” said Dr Mueller.

“It can take 15 to 20 years to breed a new crop variety, so every year we delay has a knock-on effect. It is a matter of urgency,” he added.

Locating and storing the crops will begin this summer in Italy, Cyprus and Portugal. It is a huge task that in many cases is easier said than done. Many crops lie in conflict-ridden regions such as Pakistan and Sudan, where wars can put both the species and the collectors at risk.

Some wild relatives of the faba bean – better known in this country as the broad bean – are found only in war-torn Syria and are a particular cause for concern. Bolivia, China, Ecuador, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Mozambique, Australia and the US also have large numbers of priority crop wild relatives that need to be collected and stored.

Britain could benefit tremendously from an injection of wild genes as its widely grown crops of conventional wheat, potatoes, barley, carrots, sugar cane and apples face an increasingly unpredictable climate.

A new generation of wild-domesticated crop hybrids could be more resistant to floods, droughts and extreme temperatures, using a technology which many scientists say is better understood and more effective than genetic modification. Ruth Eastwood, of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, said the procedure could potentially be safer than GM because their similar genetic backgrounds meant there was a “lower likelihood of unexpected interactions between genes”.  “It certainly is another option that has proved to be effective already,” she said.

Andy Jarvis, of the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia, also involved in the project, said: “Crop wild relatives are a potential treasure trove of useful characteristics that scientists can put to good use for making agriculture more resilient and improving the livelihoods of millions of people.”

Kew’s global 10-year programme with Germany’s Global Diversity Trust to identify and plug gaps in wild relative stocks is unprecedented.

Britain is also playing a leading role in the science. In May, the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridge claimed to have developed a new type of wheat that could increase its productivity by 30 per cent. It did this by recreating the original rare cross between an ancient wheat and wild grass species that happened in the Middle East 10,000 years ago, to form a “synthetic” wheat that can be crossed with modern UK varieties.

Advocates of plant breeding with crop wild relatives, which has been going on for decades, say it is a much safer and more effective way of improving plant yields than the fledgling process of genetic modification, which the Government is promoting in the face of an effective ban in Europe.

Success stories include a nutritionally enhanced variety of broccoli which contains higher levels of glucoraphanin, thought to slow down the progress of skin cancer.

An analysis of Kew’s research by the financial consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that commercial crops that have already benefited from the input of crop wild relatives will generate a total of £44bn in their lifetimes. This would rise to £128bn if the technique boosted the yield, disease resistance, and tolerance to temperature, drought and flooding of the world’s 32 most-consumed crops.

Ms Eastwood said: “Adapting agriculture to climate change is one of the most urgent challenges of our time. Crop wild relatives are already being used to improve our food crops right now and are extremely valuable economically as well. But they are underutilitised.”

The project team first identified all known wild relatives of the world’s most important crops. It then spent two years scouring gene banks,  dried plant collections  and museums to determine stock levels and gather data on sightings in the wild. From the data, the team identified species that are a high priority for collection.

The report comes a week after the UK Government announced plans to invest £160m setting up centres for innovation in sustainable farming and bringing new agricultural technologies to market.

The 29 crops: What’s involved?

The 29 crops covered in the project are: African rice, alfalfa, apple, eggplant (aubergine), bambara groundnut, banana, barley, wheat, lima bean (butter bean), carrot, chickpea, common bean, cowpea, faba bean (broad bean), finger millet, grasspea, lentil, oat, pea, pearl millet, pigeon pea, plantain, potato, rice, rye, sorghum, sunflower, sweet potato and vetch.

Early winners: potatoes and wheat

The breeding of staples with their “crop wild relatives” (CWRs) has already proved beneficial.

Late blight is one of the most damaging diseases for potatoes: its negative economic impact is thought to be $3.5bn per year in developed countries alone. Resistance to the condition in current European potato varieties has been exclusively derived from CWRs. Varieties of potato with CWR-derived late-blight resistance, such as the C88 potato, are also being introduced into China. In one study, it was estimated that CWR-derived resistance was responsible for preventing the loss of approximately 30 per cent of the annual yield, where conditions for blight were prevalent.

Wheat varieties such as Veery have benefited from the introduction of genes from rye, a relative of wheat. The beneficial traits inherited include tolerance to extremes of temperature and drought conditions, as well as resistance to a variety of diseases such as wheat rust. These wheat varieties have had a significant impact in the developing world, as well as in developed-world markets such as the US.  THE INDEPENDENT