Seed Monopolies, GMOs and Farmer Suicides in India – A response to Nature

The article by Natasha Gilbert begins a section entitled GM cotton has driven farmers to suicide by quoting me:

“During an interview in March, Vandana Shiva, an environmental and feminist activist from India, repeated an alarming statistic: ‘270,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since Monsanto entered the Indian seed market,’ she said. ‘It’s genocide.’”

Yes, I am an ecologist and feminist. But I am also a scientist – a fact that Natasha intentionally avoids mentioning. As a Quantum Physicist, I have been trained to look at the interconnectedness and non-separability of processes, which in a mechanistic and reductionist paradigm, are seen as separate and unrelated.

As a scientist, I have tried to understand what is driving our small farmers to suicide. Two things are evident. One, the suicides begin with the period of globalization which allowed MNC’s entry into India’s Seed Sector, making seeds a non-renewable ‘input’, to be bought every year.

Secondly, the suicides have further intensified after the introduction of GMO Bt cotton. GMOs are intrinsically linked to Intellectual Property Rights, which in turn are linked to royalty payments. Royalties are extracted from poor farmers through credit and debt. The Monsanto representative, who appeared before India’s Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture, admitted that Monsanto was collecting Rs 700 as royalty for a 450 gm packet of seed costing Rs 1600. The shift to Bt cotton meant a jump of 8000% in the cost of seed. This is at the root of the farmers’ distress in the cotton areas of India.

As a human being, it concerns me deeply that 284,694 small farmers of India, the most resilient and courageous people I have known, have in recent times been driven to the desperation of taking their lives because of  a debt trap created by a corporate  driven economy of greed that profits from selling them costly chemicals and non-renewable seeds. And we must not forget that the agrochemical industry is the biotechnology industry is the global seed industry.

I look at GMOs as a system of corporate control over seed, a system of Intellectual Property, a system of ecological impacts on soil and biodiversity, a system of health impacts on humans and animals, a system of socio-economic impacts on the livelihoods and survival of farmers.

GMOs are not a “thing”, they are a set of relationships, and it is the context created by these relationships that is driving farmers to suicide. GMOs are not a disembodied “technology” as so many pro-GMO commentators try to present. These commentators then proceed to protect this abstract construction of GMOs as disembodied technologies from the evidence of reality. In reality, what exists is a GMO complex, or nexus, that has an impact on real ecosystems and real farmers.

Shutting out evidence from reality is a completely unscientific approach. Reality cannot be cooked up in papers, no matter how prestigious the journals in which these concoctions are published.  Reality is what happens in reality – the reality of farmers’ suicides, reality of the emergence of super-pests and super-weeds, the reality of rising costs of seed as royalties are extracted from poor peasants. These are no abstractions; rather, they are the lived realities of the consequences of GMOs.

In a systems framework, the scientific approach is to identify the interconnections in reality, and identify systems causality and contextual causation. In the cotton areas, farmers’ suicides started in a context of seed monopolies and destruction of alternatives. And that is the context that must be understood. Contexts require the understanding of contextual causality. Systems require an understanding of systems causation.

The figures of farmers’ suicides are not mine. They come from government statistics of the National Bureau of crime records. The latest figure updated up to 2012 is 284,694.  Any human being anywhere should be outraged at this tragedy. And any scientist working for social and ecological responsibility should want to go to the roots of the crisis, not try and cover it up with unscientific analysis and false claims.

As Natasha’s quote makes clear, I link farmers suicides, which are concentrated in the cotton areas, to Monsanto’s entry into the Indian seed market and its establishment of a monopoly in the cotton seed market.  However, Natasha leaves out the role of Monsanto’s monopoly in her article, and reduces the issue to GM cotton. This is not a hard look, but a blinded, blinkered and biased delusion. What Natasha, in her article, brushes off as an ‘oft repeated story of corporate exploitation’ is a story that is deeply grounded in both human and scientific realities. It is, indeed, a genocide.

The Emergence of Farmers’ Suicides

When the role of seed monopolies in cotton as contributing to farmers suicides has to be studied, one must focus on the cotton areas, not on the entire country . All studies that try and disconnect suicides in the cotton areas from Monsanto’s seed monopoly take the aggregate national data, not the figures of the regions and states where cotton cultivation and cultivation of Bt cotton is concentrated. It is equivalent to declaring that a patient suffering from throat cancer is fine by looking at the health of cells in the entire body, instead of focusing on the cancerous cells in the throat.

We have been studying the creation of seed monopolies since 1987, during the period of the Uruguay Round of the GATT, when corporations like Monsanto pushed intellectual property rights over seeds and life forms into trade treaties. This led to the TRIPS agreement of WTO. Monsanto has admitted that it was the “patient, diagnostician, and physician” in defining intellectual property in WTO. In this way, GMOs are the vehicle for introducing patents and IPR in order to collect royalties. With the introduction of Bt. cotton, the price of seed jumped 8000% because of royalties. Every year more $200 million flows from the Indian peasants to Monsanto. This is at the heart of the intensification of farmers suicides in the cotton belt of India.

We have been studying farmers’ suicides on the ground since 1997 when we first witnessed a suicide of a farmer in Warangal, who had shifted from mixed dry land agriculture to hybrid cotton cultivation and gotten into debt for seeds, fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation. We have issued reports entitled ‘Seeds of Suicide’ since 1997, based on field research on the ground, not secondary data analyzed incoherently in distant places.

In 1997, Monsanto started its illegal field trials of Bt. cotton in India. We had to sue them in the Supreme Court of India, and as a result they could not commercialize their Bt cotton until 2002. But the consolidation of the seed industry and the erosion of farmers’ seed sovereignty through creating dependence on purchase of non-renewable seed was already underway.

Farmers’ suicides started in 1995 when globalization enabled seed MNCs like Monsanto to enter the Indian seed market and start establishing seed monopolies. The suicides have increased with the commercial sales of GMO Bt. cotton. Bt. cotton currently accounts for 95% of the cotton seeds commercially sold in India. Famers have adopted Bt. cotton not because it gave higher yields or gave them higher incomes, but because all alternatives have been destroyed.

Destruction of Choice

Farmers are not choosing Bt. cotton. They have no choice left. The systematic wiping out of non Bt. alternatives from the market and the aggressive marketing of Bt. cotton has created a monopoly. It is not profits, but deliberate destruction of alternatives that have pushed farmers into the Bt. cotton trap, and as a consequence, into the suicide trap. Farmers’ varieties are displaced through the very clever strategy termed as “seed replacement”. Public varieties have mysteriously stopped being released. And most Indian companies are locked into licensing arrangements with Monsanto, and can only sell Monsanto’s Bollgard Bt. cotton seeds.

The Standing Committee on Agriculture of the Indian Parliament went to Vidarbha, an area where farmers been deeply affected, to hold public consultations. Here they found the reality to be entirely different from what promoters of Bt cotton had been telling them about increased production, productivity, and prosperity. The report from the committee states, “The last 10 years of Bt cotton also establish the fact that monopolies in the seed sector could be a great concern. In the current scenario, 93% of Bt. cotton has the propriety gene of Monsanto, the American seed giant, which is the world’s largest seed company. This monopoly has also given Monsanto the power to arm twist governments to increase prices of seeds.

Strangely, this lack of choice for the farmers is drummed around as farmers accepting Bt. cotton seeds.” (Report of Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture, Indian Parliament, 2012).

Failure to Yield

Yields of cotton have not grown since Bt. cotton was introduced. Cotton yields were higher before Bt cotton than after. Our field surveys reveal frequent failure. There has been a trend of declining yields as corroborated in the paper by Dr. Keshav Kranthi (CICR) reviewing the 10 years of Bt Cotton. “Currently the main issue that worries stakeholders is the stagnation of productivity at an average of 500 kg lint per ha for the past seven years. The gains have been stagnant and unaffected by the increase in area of Bt cotton from 5.6% in 2004 to 85% in 2010. The yield was 463 kg per hectare when the Bt cotton area was 5.6% in 2004 and reached a mere 506 kg per hectare when the area under Bt cotton increased to 9.4 M hectares at 85% of the total 11.1 M hectares.” (Kranthi.K (2011), “10 years of Bt. in India”:

http://www.cotton247.com/article/27520/part-ii-10-years-of-bt-in-india

Increase in Pests and Pesticide Use

Secondly, contrary to the claim of the GMO lobby, pests have increased not reduced, and therefore pesticide use has gone up, not come down. Insects which were not cotton pests have become pests. These include aphids and jassids, mealy bug, army bug. The mealy bug was not observed in India before the introduction of Bt. cotton. The increase in no target pests is as high as 300%. In his 2011 report Dr. Kranthi states, “Productivity in north India is likely to decline because of the declining potential of hybrids; the emerging problem of leaf curl virus on the new susceptible Bt-hybrids; a high level of susceptibility to sucking pests (straight varieties were resistant); problems with nutrient deficiencies and physiological disorders; and mealy bugs, whiteflies and miscellaneous insect problems that are likely to increase (Kranthi.K (2011). Part-3: “10 years of Bt. in India”:

http://www.cotton247.com/article/27614/part-iii-10-years-of-bt-in-india

Meanwhile, the bollworm, which was supposed to be controlled by the Bt. toxin in Bt. Cotton, has become resistant. This is admitted by Monsanto, which has now introduced the more expensive Bollgard II to replace the Bollgard I.  [Sharma, D (2010). Bt cotton has failed, admits Monsanto. India Today, March 6, 2010: 

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/86939/India/Bt+cotton+has+failed+admits].

Bollworm resistance to Bt. resistance monitoring studies done at CICR have demonstrated that bollworm (helicoverpa armigera), the target pest of Bt cotton, has developed tolerance for it. Other studies have also shown bollworm surviving and reproducing in Bt. Cotton, in both single gene and double gene Bt.

(M.T. Ranjith, A. Prabhuraj, & Y.B. Srinivasa. (2010). Survival and reproduction of natural populations of Helicoverpa Armigera on Bt. cotton hybrids in Raichur, India, Current Science, 99, (11) 1602-1606)

Our field studies in Vidarbha show a 13 fold increase in use of pesticides after Bt cotton was introduced. Farmers’ profits have not increased; in fact, the farmers have got into debt, and that is the reason they are committing suicide

Table 1: Increasing Cost of Pesticide in Maharashtra

Year	Maharashtra
	Area under Bt Cotton Million Hectares	Cost of Pesticide (Rs. Crores)
2004-05	0.200	92.10
2005-06	0.607	273.45
2006-07	1.840	847.32
2007-08	2.880	1326.24
2008-09	2.984	1335.34
2009-10	3.315	1483.22
2010-11	3.9	1654.00
2011-12	4.095	1858.00

The increase in pesticide use in Maharashtra is confirmed by the official statistics. The pesticide usage trends in the major cotton-growing states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka are shown above. While Maharashtra shows a significant upward trend from 3198 MT to 4639 MT, the other states show only marginal change, except for the downward trend in Andhra Pradesh. The decline in Andhra Pradesh is because of a major government programme to promote sustainable, non pesticide farming.

Table 2: Pesticide usage in Metric Tonnes technical grade

	2005-06	2006-07	2007-08	2008-09	2009-10
Andhra Pradesh	1997	1394	1541	1381	1015
Gujarat	2700	2670	2660	2650	2750
Karnataka	1638	1362	1588	1675	1647
Maharashtra	3198	3193	3050	2400	4639
Punjab	5610	5975	6080	5760	5810
Madhya Pradesh	787	957	696	663	645
All India	39773	41515	43630	43860	41822

Source: Directorate of Plant Protection:  http://ppqs.gov.in/IpmPesticides.htm

Seeds of Suicide: GMO Bt. cotton has contributed to an increase in farmers’ suicides

The combination of high costs of seed due to royalty collection, failure to increase yields or control pests, Bt. cotton has intensified the agrarian distress faced by farmers in the cotton areas of India.

Maharashtra is the state which today has maximum area under Bt. cotton. In the state there were 1083 farmer suicides in 1995 which increased to 3695 in 2002, more than three times jump; coinciding with the year when Monsanto introduced Bt Cotton. The scenario of Vidarbha, which is the epicenter of Bt. cotton cultivation, and the epicenter of farmers’ suicides, clearly shows that suicides increased after the introduction of Bt. Cotton. There were only 52 farmer suicides in 2001 but since 2002 suicides increased alarmingly as the area under Bt. cotton increased.

Table 3: Number of farmers’ suicides

Year	No of Suicides
2001	52
2002	104
2003	148
2004	447
2005	445
2006	1148
2007	1246
2008	1248
2009	916
2010	748
2011	916
2012	927

The figures went down in 2008 after the announcement of the Rs. 169.78 billion debt relief package by the Prime Minister:

Farmers” suicides prompts Cabinet into announcing over 16,000 crore rehabilitation package

http://agrariancrisis.in/tag/prime-minister-relief-package/

What even the accurate figures, hide, though, are the lives ruined as collateral damage. Every suicide ruins the lives of 8-9 people in a family. A simple calculation shows that during 2002-2011 the lives of 55,000-65,000 people was ruined due to the farmers’ suicides in Vidarbha. The stories of surviving members are tragic. With the husband’s death, a new vicious cycle of debt is set in motion, wherein the widows inherit their husbands’ debts and work round the clock both to pay it back as well as to make ends meet.

According to P Sainath, who has covered farmers’ suicides systematically, “The total number of farmers who have taken their own lives in Maharashtra since 1995 is closing in on 54,000. Of these, 33,752 have occurred in nine years since 2003 at an annual average of 3,750. The figure for 1995-2002 was 20,066 at an average of 2,508.”

The fact is clear: suicides have increased after Bt. cotton was introduced. The price of seed jumped 8000%. Monsanto’s royalty extraction and the high costs of purchased seed and chemicals have created a debt trap. According to Government of India data, nearly 75% rural debt is due to purchased inputs. Farmers’ debts grow as Monsanto profits grow. It is in this systemic sense that Monsanto’s seeds are Seeds of Suicide. An internal advisory by the agricultural ministry of India in January of 2012 had this to say to the cotton growing states in India – “Cotton farmers are in a deep crisis since shifting to Bt. cotton. The spate of farmer suicides in 2011-12 has been particularly severe among Bt cotton farmers”:

(http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/Business/Ministry-blames-Bt- cotton-for-farmer-suicides/Article1-830798.aspx)

Natasha quotes Martin Qaim, who in many of his studies has used data from Monsanto. She states” Bt. cotton has benefited farmers, says Matin Qaim, an agricultural economist at Georg August University in Göttingen, Germany, who has been studying the social and financial impacts of Bt. cotton in India for the past 10 years. In a study of 533 cotton-farming households in central and southern India, Qaim found that yields grew by 24% per acre between 2002 and 2008, owing to reduced losses from pest attacks. Farmers’ profits rose by an average of 50% over the same period, owing mainly to yield gains (see ‘A steady rate of tragedy’). Given the profits, Qaim says, it is not surprising that more than 90% of the cotton now grown in India is transgenic.”

Every statement of Qaim’s is false as shown from both our field studies and studies of India’s parliament and leading scientific institutions.

Natasha also cites Gruère, G. & Sengupta, D. Their findings, published in 2008 (ref. 4) and updated in 2011 (ref. 5), “show that the total number of suicides per year in the Indian population rose from just under 100,000 in 1997 to more than 120,000 in 2007.

But the number of suicides among farmers hovered at around 20,000 per year over the same period.” What she does not cite is that they admit that in the Bt. cotton dominated states of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, the suicides have increased.  “What we cannot reject, however, is the potential role of Bt cotton varieties in the observed discrete increase in farmer suicides in certain states and years, especially during the peaks of 2002, 2004 and 2006 in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.”

In the cotton areas of India, which are now predominantly Bt. cotton, the potential role of Bt. cotton in aggravating farmers distress cannot be brushed aside.

Artificially separating farmers’ suicides from seed monopolies and Bt cotton is bad science. But the issue of farmers’ suicides is not an academic debate. It is a social debate about lives unnecessarily extinguished for corporate profits. It is a debate about democracy, and the choices we make as free citizens, without our alternatives being closed by corporations and their spokesmen and women. It is a choice between corporate control over seed and over our knowledge systems.

I am not the only one connecting farmers’ suicides to debt and seed monopolies. The Agriculture Committee has made this point. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture, of India’s National Parliament led by CPM’s Basudeb Acharya, which tabled the report “Cultivation of Genetically Modified Food Crops – Prospects and Effects” has also stressed the link between Bt. cotton and farmers’ distress. Unlike the researchers who work separated from reality, the Parliamentary Committee has worked over 4 years, interacting with every sector of society – government, industry, scientists and farmers. The All Party Committee visited the epicenter of suicides, Vidarbha in Maharashtra, to interact with farmers and understand the ground reality. This is what they concluded unanimously:

“8.124 During their extensive interactions with farmers in the course of their Study Visits, the Committee has found there have been no significant socio-economic benefits to the farmers because of introduction of Bt. cotton. On the contrary, being a capital intensive agriculture practice, investments of the farmers have increased manifolds thus, exposing them to far greater risks due to massive indebtedness, which a vast majority of them can ill afford. Resultantly, after the euphoria of a few initial years, Bt. cotton cultivation has only added to the miseries of the small and marginal farmers who constitute more than 70% of the tillers in India.” NAVDANYA'S Dairy

IS BT COTTON HARMING OUR ENVIRONMENT?

IS BT COTTON HARMING OUR ENVIRONMENT?

The name ‘Bt cotton’ comes up every now and then. Bt cotton is a genetically modified (GM) variety of cotton and its seed contains genetically engineered soil bacterium gene, Bacillus thuringiensis, which acts as a natural toxin against insects and pests including bollworms. Bt cotton initially led to the increase in yield per hectare in India, and major reductions in pesticide use in China. This type of cotton seed has been used by several other countries such as USA, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa and Pakistan to reduce pesticide use, and consequently contribute to a positive impact on the environment. There is evidence that countries, which have allowed the cultivation of Bt cotton at a commercial level, have effectively gained in terms of higher yield and lower pesticide use.

Initially GM seeds (genetically modified seeds) adopted by developed countries were expensive but gradually the use of the Bt cotton seed spread to developing countries as well. It was widely believed that Bt cotton not only decreased spraying against the pest cotton bollworm, but also reduced the spreading of the pest on other crops. However, the views on Bt cotton have not always been sanguine.

Time and again, questions have been raised on GM seeds as they are super expensive. However, aggressive marketing tactics had convinced poor Indian farmers that the high seed-cost would be compensated by higher yield and savings on pesticides. Many farmers soon realized that Bt cotton was weak to fight bollworms effectively and ended up buying expensive pesticides and other GM seeds for the new planting cycle. Slowly, the steps taken to revolutionize food growth are believed to have turned into a vicious cycle of debt, poverty and suicides. GM seeds were then believed to have reinforced a farming process, which undermined the sustainability of poor Indian farmers.

The questions raised over the environmental and health impacts of Bt cotton seem to have subsided. In the recent past, little has been published on impacts of genetically modified (GM) crops on environment. But does that in any way reduce their harmful impacts? Very recently, farmers in Karnataka were found in a state of disillusion with the tall claims of genetically modified cotton and finally went back to growing indigenous varieties, after sowing Bt cotton for a few years. They believed that hybrids are costly, give low yield and lead to the disappearance of honeybees.

It is true that the world's changing climate has raised concerns about feeding a growing population. And many farmers across the world believe that genetic engineering will lead to the development of crops that will adapt to the changing climate. Bt cotton has been widely approved and a major percentage of India's cotton is now genetically modified. Nevertheless, growers face problems of non-availability of quality Bt cotton seeds and exposure to unapproved Bt varieties readily available in the market. This may lead to reduction in yields of poor quality crops. Considering the present scenario, at times it seems like adoption of biotechnology is not about science, but rather political science. As far as the environment is concerned, the conflicting views of the different schools of thought regarding GM crops’ impact will remain a lingering issue for the years to come. Skymetweather

The secret, dirty cost of Obama’s green power push

The hills of southern Iowa bear the scars of America's push for green energy: The brown gashes where rain has washed away the soil. The polluted streams that dump fertilizer into the water supply.

Even the cemetery that disappeared like an apparition into a cornfield.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. And when President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country "stronger, cleaner and more secure."

But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.

As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation _ more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined _ have vanished on Obama's watch.

Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil.

Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can't survive.

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.

Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa.

The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America's demand for it.

"They're raping the land," said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon pharmacy.

All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president's push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things.

In some cases, such as its decision to allow wind farms to kill eagles, the administration accepts environmental costs because they pale in comparison to the havoc it believes global warming could ultimately cause.

Ethanol is different.

The government's predictions of the benefits have proven so inaccurate that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases. That makes the hidden costs even more significant.

"This is an ecological disaster," said Craig Cox with the Environmental Working Group, a natural ally of the president that, like others, now finds itself at odds with the White House.

But it's a cost the administration is willing to accept. It believes supporting corn ethanol is the best way to encourage the development of biofuels that will someday be cleaner and greener than today's. Pulling the plug on corn ethanol, officials fear, might mean killing any hope of these next-generation fuels.

"That is what you give up if you don't recognize that renewable fuels have some place here," EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said in a recent interview with AP. "All renewable fuels are not corn ethanol."

Still, corn supplies the overwhelming majority of ethanol in the United States, and the administration is loath to discuss the environmental consequences.

"It just caught us completely off guard," said Doug Davenport, a Department of Agriculture official who encourages southern Iowa farmers to use conservation practices on their land. Despite those efforts, Davenport said he was surprised at how much fragile, erodible land was turned into corn fields.

Shortly after Davenport spoke to The Associated Press, he got an email ordering him to stop talking.

"We just want to have a consistent message on the topic," an Agriculture Department spokesman in Iowa said.

That consistent message was laid out by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who spoke to ethanol lobbyists on Capitol Hill recently and said ethanol was good for business.

"We are committed to this industry because we understand its benefits," he said. "We understand it's about farm income. It's about stabilizing and maintaining farm income which is at record levels."

The numbers behind the ethanol mandate have become so unworkable that, for the first time, the EPA is soon expected to reduce the amount of ethanol required to be added to the gasoline supply. An unusual coalition of big oil companies, environmental groups and food companies is pushing the government to go even further and reconsider the entire ethanol program.

The ethanol industry is fighting hard against that effort. Industry spokesman Brooke Coleman dismissed this story as "propaganda on a page." An industry blog in Minnesota said the AP had succumbed "to Big Oil's deep pockets and powerful influence."

To understand how America got to an environmental policy with such harmful environmental consequences, it's helpful to start in a field in Iowa.

Leroy Perkins, a white-haired, 66-year-old farmer in denim overalls, stands surrounded by waist-high grass and clover. He owns 91 acres like this, all hilly and erodible, that he set aside for conservation years ago.

Soon, he will have a decision to make: keep the land as it is or, like many of his neighbors, plow it down and plant corn or soybeans, the major sources of biofuel in the United States.

"I'd like to keep it in," he said. "This is what southern Iowa's for: raising grass."

For decades, the government's Conservation Reserve Program has paid farmers to stop farming environmentally sensitive land. Grassy fields naturally convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, which helps combat global warming. Plus, their deep root systems prevent topsoil from washing away.

For Perkins and his farmer neighbors in Wayne County, keeping farmland in conservation wasn't just good stewardship. It made financial sense.

A decade ago, Washington paid them about $70 an acre each year to leave their farmland idle. With corn selling for about $2 per bushel (56 pounds) back then, farming the hilly, inferior soil was bad business.

Many opted into the conservation program. Others kept their grasslands for cow pastures.

Lately, though, the math has changed.

"I'm coming to the point where financially, it's not feasible," Perkins said.

The change began in 2007, when Congress passed a law requiring oil companies to blend billions of gallons of ethanol into gasoline.

Oil prices were high. Oil imports were rising quickly. The legislation had the strong backing of the presidential candidate who was the junior senator from neighboring Illinois, the nation's second-largest corn producer.

"If we're going to get serious about investing in our energy future, we must give our family farmers and local ethanol producers a fair shot at success," Obama said then.

The Democratic primary field was crowded, and if he didn't win the Iowa caucuses the road to the nomination would be difficult. His strong support for ethanol set him apart.

"Any time we could talk about support for ethanol, we did," said Mitch Stewart, the battleground states director for Obama's 2008 campaign. "It's how we would lead a lot of discussions."

President Bush signed the bill that December.

It would fall on the next president to figure out how to make it work.

___

President Obama's team at the EPA was sour on the ethanol mandate from the start.

As a way to reduce global warming, they knew corn ethanol was a dubious proposition. Corn demands fertilizer, which is made using natural gas. What's worse, ethanol factories typically burn coal or gas, both of which release carbon dioxide.

Then there was the land conversion, the most controversial and difficult-to-predict outcome.

Digging up grassland releases greenhouse gases, so environmentalists are skeptical of any program that encourages planting more corn.

"I don't remember anybody having great passion for this," said Bob Sussman, who served on Obama's transition team and recently retired as EPA's senior policy counsel. "I don't have a lot of personal enthusiasm for the program."

At the White House and the Department of Agriculture, though, there was plenty of enthusiasm.

One of Obama's senior advisers, Pete Rouse, had worked on ethanol issues as chief of staff to Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, a major ethanol booster and now chair of the DuPont Advisory Committee on Agriculture Innovation and Productivity.

Another Obama adviser at the time, Heather Zichal, grew up in northeast Iowa _ as a child, she was crowned "sweet corn princess" _ and was one of the Obama campaign's leading voices on ethanol in her home state.

The administration had no greater corn ethanol advocate than Vilsack, the former Iowa governor.

"Tom understands that the solution to our energy crisis will be found not in oil fields abroad but in our farm fields here at home," Obama said in 2008. "That is the kind of leader I want in my Cabinet."

Writing the regulations to implement the ethanol mandate was among the administration's first major environmental undertakings. Industry and environmental groups watched closely.

The EPA's experts determined that the mandate would increase demand for corn and encourage farmers to plow more land. Considering those factors, they said, corn ethanol was only slightly better than gasoline when it came to carbon dioxide emissions.

Sixteen percent better, to be exact. And not in the short term. Only by 2022.

By law, though, biofuels were supposed to be at least 20 percent greener than gasoline.

From a legal standpoint, the results didn't matter. Congress exempted existing coal- and gas-burning ethanol plants from meeting this standard.

But as a policy and public relations issue, it was a real problem. The biofuel-friendly Obama administration was undermining the industry's major selling point: that it was much greener than gasoline.

So the ethanol industry was livid. Lobbyists flooded the EPA with criticism, challenging the government's methods and conclusions.

The EPA's conclusion was based on a model. Plug in some assumed figures _ the price of corn, the number of acres planted, how much corn would grow per acre _ and the model would spit out a number.

To get past 20 percent, the EPA needed to change its assumptions.

The most important of those assumptions was called the yield, a measure of how much corn could be produced on an acre of land. The higher the yield, the easier it would be for farmers to meet the growing demand without plowing new farmland, which counted against ethanol in the greenhouse gas equation.

Corn yields have inched steadily upward over the years as farms have become more efficient. The government's first ethanol model assumed that trend would continue, rising from 150 bushels per acre to about 180 by the year 2022.

Agriculture companies like Monsanto Co. and DuPont Pioneer, which stood to make millions off an ethanol boom, told the government those numbers were too low.

They predicted that genetically modified seeds _ which they produce _ would send yields skyrocketing. With higher yields, farmers could produce more corn on less land, reducing the environmental effects.

Documents show the White House budget office also suggested the EPA raise its yield assumptions.

When the final rule came out, the EPA and Agriculture officials added a new "high yield case scenario" that assumed 230 bushels per acre.

The flaw in those assumptions, independent scientists knew, was that a big increase in corn prices would encourage people to farm in less hospitable areas like Wayne County, which could never produce such large yields.

But the EPA's model assumed only a tiny increase in corn prices.

"You adjust a few numbers to get it where you want it, and then you call it good," said Adam Liska, assistant professor of biological systems engineering at the University of Nebraska. He supports ethanol, even with its environmental trade-offs.

When the Obama administration finalized its first major green-energy policy, corn ethanol barely crossed the key threshold. The final score: 21 percent.

"If you corrected any of a number of things, it would be on the other side of 20 percent," said Richard Plevin of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. "Is it a coincidence this is what happened? It certainly makes me wonder."

It didn't take long for reality to prove the Obama administration's predictions wrong.

The regulations took effect in July 2010. The following month, corn prices already had surpassed the EPA's long-term estimate of $3.22 a bushel. That September, corn passed $4, on its way to about $7, where it has been most of this year.

Yields, meanwhile, have held fairly steady.

But the ethanol boom was underway.

It's impossible to precisely calculate how much ethanol is responsible for the spike in corn prices and how much those prices led to the land changes in the Midwest.

Supporters of corn ethanol say extreme weather _ dry one year, very wet the next _ hurt farmers and raised prices.

But diminishing supply wasn't the only factor. More corn than ever was being distilled into ethanol.

Historically, the overwhelmingly majority of corn in the United States has been turned into livestock feed. But in 2010, for the first time, fuel was the No. 1 use for corn in America. That was true in 2011 and 2012. Newly released Department of Agriculture data show that, this year, 43 percent of corn went to fuel and 45 percent went to livestock feed.

The more corn that goes to ethanol, the more that needs to be planted to meet other demands.

Scientists predicted that a major ethanol push would raise prices and, in turn, encourage farmers like Leroy Perkins to plow into conservation land. But the government insisted otherwise.

In 2008, the journal Science published a study with a dire conclusion: Plowing over conservation land releases so much greenhouse gas that it takes 48 years before new plants can break even and start reducing carbon dioxide.

For an ethanol policy to work, the study said, farmers could not plow into conservation land.

The EPA, in a report to Congress on the environmental effects of ethanol, said it was "uncertain" whether farmers would plant on farmland that had been set aside for conservation.

The Department of Energy was more certain. Most conservation land, the government said in its response to the study, "is unsuitable for use for annual row crop production."

America could meet its ethanol demand without losing a single acre of conservation land, Energy officials said.

They would soon be proven wrong.

Before the government ethanol mandate, the Conservation Reserve Program grew every year for nearly a decade. Almost overnight, farmers began leaving the program, which simultaneously fell victim to budget cuts that reduced the amount of farmland that could be set aside for conservation.

In the first year after the ethanol mandate, more than 2 million acres disappeared.

Since Obama took office, 5 million more acres have vanished.

Agriculture officials acknowledge that conservation land has been lost, but they say the trend is reversing. When the 2013 data comes out, they say it will show that as corn prices stabilized, farmers once again began setting aside land for conservation.

Losing conservation land was bad. But something even worse was happening.

Farmers broke ground on virgin land, the untouched terrain that represents, from an environmental standpoint, the country's most important asset.

The farm industry assured the government that wouldn't happen. And it would have been an easy thing for Washington to check.

But rather than insisting that farmers report whenever they plow into virgin land, the government decided on a much murkier oversight method: Washington instead monitors the total number of acres of cropland nationwide. Local trends wash away when viewed at such a distance.

"They could not have designed a better approach to not detect land conversion," said Ben Larson, an agricultural expert for the National Wildlife Federation.

Look closely at the corn boom in the northern Great Plains, however, and it's clear. Farmers are converting untouched prairie into farmland.

The Department of Agriculture began keeping figures on virgin land only in 2012 and determined that about 38,000 acres vanished that year.

But using government satellite data _ the best tool available _ the AP identified a conservative estimate of 1.2 million acres of virgin land in Nebraska and the Dakotas alone that have been converted to fields of corn and soybeans since 2006, the last year before the ethanol mandate was passed.

"The last five years, we've become financially solvent," said Robert Malsam, a farmer in Edmunds County, S.D., who like others in the central and eastern Dakotas has plowed into wild grassland to expand his corn crop.

The price of corn is reshaping the land across the Midwest. In Wayne County, Iowa, for example, only the dead can stop the corn.

A gravel road once cut through a grassy field leading to a hilltop cemetery. But about two years ago, the landowners plowed over the road. Now, visiting gravesites means walking a narrow path through the corn.

People have complained. It's too narrow for a hearse, too rutted for a wheelchair, too steep for the elderly. But it's legal, said Bill Alley from the board of supervisors.

"This is what the price of corn does," he said. "This is what happens, right here."

When Congress passed the ethanol mandate, it required the EPA to thoroughly study the effects on water and air pollution. In his recent speech to ethanol lobbyists, Vilsack was unequivocal about those effects:

"There is no question air quality, water quality is benefiting from this industry," he said.

But the administration never actually conducted the required air and water studies to determine whether that's true.

In an interview with the AP after his speech, Vilsack said he didn't mean that ethanol production was good for the air and water. He simply meant that gasoline mixed with ethanol is cleaner than gasoline alone.

In the Midwest, meanwhile, scientists and conservationists are sounding alarms.

Nitrogen fertilizer, when it seeps into the water, is toxic. Children are especially susceptible to nitrate poisoning, which causes "blue baby" syndrome and can be deadly.

Between 2005 and 2010, corn farmers increased their use of nitrogen fertilizer by more than one billion pounds. More recent data isn't available from the Agriculture Department, but because of the huge increase in corn planting, even conservative projections by the AP suggest another billion-pound fertilizer increase on corn farms since then.

Department of Agriculture officials note that the amount of fertilizer used for all crops has remained steady for a decade, suggesting the ethanol mandate hasn't caused a fertilizer boom across the board.

But in the Midwest, corn is the dominant crop, and officials say the increase in fertilizer use _ driven by the increase in corn planting _ is having an effect.

The Des Moines Water Works, for instance, has faced high nitrate levels for many years in the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers, which supply drinking water to 500,000 people. Typically, when pollution is too high in one river, workers draw from the other.

"This year, unfortunately the nitrate levels in both rivers were so high that it created an impossibility for us," said Bill Stowe, the water service's general manager.

For three months this summer, workers kept huge machines running around the clock to clean the water. Officials asked customers to use less water so the utility had a chance to keep up.

Part of the problem was that last year's dry weather meant fertilizer sat atop the soil. This spring's rains flushed that nitrogen into the water along with the remnants of the fertilizer from the most recent crop.

At the same time the ethanol mandate has encouraged farmers to plant more corn, Stowe said, the government hasn't done enough to limit fertilizer use or regulate the industrial drainage systems that flush nitrates and water into rivers and streams.

With the Water Works on the brink of capacity, Stowe said he's considering suing the government to demand a solution.

In neighboring Minnesota, a government report this year found that significantly reducing the high levels of nitrates from the state's water would require huge changes in farming practices at a cost of roughly $1 billion a year.

"We're doing more to address water quality, but we are being overwhelmed by the increase in production pressure to plant more crops," said Steve Morse, executive director of the Minnesota Environmental Partnership.

The nitrates travel down rivers and into the Gulf of Mexico, where they boost the growth of enormous algae fields. When the algae die, the decomposition consumes oxygen, leaving behind a zone where aquatic life cannot survive.

This year, the dead zone covered 5,800 square miles of sea floor, about the size of Connecticut.

Larry McKinney, the executive director of the Harte Institute at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, says the ethanol mandate worsened the dead zone.

"On the one hand, the government is mandating ethanol use," he said, "and it is unfortunately coming at the expense of the Gulf of Mexico."

The dead zone is one example among many of a peculiar ethanol side effect: As one government program encourages farmers to plant more corn, other programs pay millions to clean up the mess.

Obama administration officials know the ethanol mandate hasn't lived up to its billing.

The next-generation biofuels that were supposed to wean the country off corn haven't yet materialized. Every year, the EPA predicts millions of gallons of clean fuel will be made from agricultural waste. Every year, the government is wrong.

Every day without those cleaner-burning fuels, the ethanol industry stays reliant on corn and the environmental effects mount.

The EPA could revisit its model and see whether ethanol is actually as good for the environment as officials predicted. But the agency says it doesn't have the money or the manpower.

Even under the government's optimistic projections, the ethanol mandate wasn't going to reduce greenhouse gas right away. And with the model so far off from reality, independent scientists say it's hard to make an argument for ethanol as a global warming policy.

"I'd have to think really hard to come up with a scenario where it's a net positive," said Silvia Secchi, a Southern Illinois University agriculture economist.

She paused a few moments, then added, "I'm stumped."

In June, when Obama gave a major policy speech on reducing greenhouse gas, he didn't mention ethanol. Biofuels in general received a brief, passing reference.

What was once billed as an environmental boon has morphed into a government program to help rural America survive.

"I don't know whether I can make the environmental argument, or the economic argument," Vilsack said in an interview with the AP. "To me, it's an opportunity argument."

Congress and the administration could change the ethanol mandate, tweak its goals or demand more safeguards. Going to Congress and rewriting the law would mean picking a fight with agricultural lobbyists, a fight that would put the administration on the side of big oil companies, which despise the ethanol requirement.

So the ethanol policy cruises on autopilot.

Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, the ethanol lobbying group, said there's no reason to change the standards. Ethanol still looks good compared to the oil industry, which increasingly relies on environmentally risky tactics like hydraulic fracturing or pulls from carbon-heavy tar sands.

Leroy Perkins, the farmer agonizing about what to do with his 91 acres, says he likes ethanol as a product and an industry. But he knows it fuels the corn prices that are transforming his county.

"If they do change the fuel standard, you'll see the price of corn come down overnight," he said. "I like to see a good price for corn. But when it's too high, it hurts everybody."

Investors from as far away as Maryland and Pennsylvania have bought thousands of acres in Wayne County, sending prices skyrocketing from $350 per acre a decade ago to $5,000 today.

One in every four acres of in the county is now owned by an out-of-towner.

Those who still own land often rent it to farming companies offering $300 or more per acre. Perkins could make perhaps $27,000 a year if he let somebody plant corn on his land. That's nothing to dismiss in a county where typical household income is $36,000.

But he knows what that means. He sees the black streaks in his neighbor's cornfields, knowing the topsoil washes away with every rain. He doesn't want that for his family's land.

"You have to decide, do you want to be the one to..."

He doesn't finish his sentence.

"We all have to look at our pocketbooks."

Associated Press writers Jack Gillum in Washington and Chet Brokaw in Roscoe, S.D., contributed to this report.