The chances of genetically-modified food, finding a place on your
dining table are not remote. As consumers, we have a right to ensure
that the food we eat and serve our family lovingly is not
'frankenfood'...
If you thought that the chances of genetically-modified food finding a
place on your dining table are remote, chew this. GM rice trials have
been approved in 10 out of India's 25 states. The GM crops under field
trials in India are: Brinjal, cabbage, cauliflower, chickpea, cotton,
groundnut, maize, mustard, okra, pigeon pea, potato, rice, sorghum and
tomato (source- Press Information Bureau, July 26, 2007).
Multinational seed companies have promoted GM seeds as a key technology
for feeding growing populations. But GM seeds do not solve the world's
hunger problem; these merely destroy soil and the biodiversity.
Fewer than half a dozen giant multinational companies control the world
market in GM seeds- Monsanto, Cargill and DuPont of the America and
Syngenta of Switzerland.
GM technology arrived in India in 1995, when the American biotech giant
Monsanto formed a joint venture with India's Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds
Company (MAHYCO). In 1998, Monsanto-Mahyco Biotech (India) Pvt Ltd
introduced BT cotton across 40 locations in the country that carried a
gene from a naturally occurring toxic bacterium bacillus thurigensis
(BT) to resist a notorious pest - boll weevil. The government had
allowed the field trials without scientifically carrying out mandatory
bio-safety tests. The trials created a controversy and a petition was
filed in the Supreme Court in 1999 by Vandana Shiva, president of the
New Delhi-based research foundation for science technology and ecology,
who said the field trials had violated the 1989 rules for the use of
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) under the Environmental Protection
Act 1986.
Without waiting for the outcome of the petition pending in the Supreme
Court, the department of biotechnology gave the bio-safety clearance in
March 2000, and Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) granted
permission in July 2000, for large-scale field trials.
Here's data to ponder if you would like to question the objectivity of
GEAC - GEAC co-chairman CD Mayee is the sole Indian representative on
the International Service for the Acquisition of Agribiotech
Applications (ISAAA), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that is
funded by biotech giants like Bayer Cropscience, Monsanto, Syngenta,
Pioneer hi-bred and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research
(BBSRC) whose field trial proposals come to the GEAC for approval time
and again.
In one single meeting held on May 22, 2006, GEAC approved an astonishing
array of 24 items for 91 field trials.
Smuggling transgenic material
Lax monitoring mechanisms could not stop the cross-flow of pollen to
non-BT crops in field trials.
Greenpeace provided evidence in June 2001, to show that genetically
modified (GM) food had illegally entered the Indian market - Hong Kong
DNA Chips, an independent laboratory, conducted tests and showed the
presence of Monsanto's GM roundup ready crops in Pringles potato chips
and Isomil baby food.
Another instance:
In 2001, MAHYCO's investigators found BT gene in Navbharat 151, a
special variety of cotton seeds sold by Desai, a farmer in Gujarat that
were resistant to cotton plant's main enemy, the bollworm.
GEAC ordered the government of Gujarat to recall and destroy every stock
of the offending seeds and burn every field where this variety was
growing.
Perhaps as a result of the publicity over Navbharat 151, GEAC granted
licence in 2002 to Monsanto to market GM cotton.
The yields from GM seeds were high for a short initial period in India,
creating a rush for the new seeds, but later the yields became low.
Large-scale crop failures caused enormous miseries to debt-ridden cotton
farmers from the northern state of Punjab to Karnataka in the south.
Many farmers borrowed heavily to buy expensive GM seeds and herbicides
and the low yield left them saddled with debts.
Intellectual property rights and patents
Amendments were made in 2005 to the 1970 Patent Act. These now allow for
the production or propagation of genetically engineered plants to count
as an invention.
Methods of agriculture and plants were excluded from patentability in
the Indian Patent Act 1970 to ensure that the seed was held as a common
property resource in the public domain. In this manner, it guaranteed
farmers the inalienable right to save, exchange and improve upon the
seed.
Monsanto used its influence in the American government circles to shape
the trade related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) of
World Trade Organisation (WTO). Under WTO rules on free trade in
agriculture, countries cannot impose their own national health
restrictions on GMO imports as it is considered to be an 'unfair trade
barrier'.
Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is being used as a
protectionist instrument to promote corporate monopolies over
technologies, seeds, genes and medicines. Through TRIPS, large
corporations use intellectual property rights to protect their markets,
and to prevent competition.
Wishes of industry cannot be put above the needs of consumers. Yet
America fights the EU 'moratorium' on importing GMOs to be
discriminatory to its trade interests, and says GMOs are 'substantially
equivalent' to conventional foods. It does not favour labelling of food
stuffs carrying the GM products.
Environmentalists' concern
Critics claim that BT cotton will become vulnerable to pest attack in
the long run and that the BT genes escaping from pollen grains might
harm other crops in the neighbourhood and the environment.
Though the prime target for the BT is the cotton boll weevil, it does
not discriminate between 'pests' and other beneficial insects and
organisms.
Environmentalists feel that BT cotton is no cure to the pest infestation
while crop rotation is. And that as pest control measures, neem and
garlic have proved more potent than pyrethroids and endosulphan.
London Institute of Science in Society chief biologist, Dr Mae-Wan Ho
says that the technology is uncontrollable and unreliable, and typically
ends up damaging and scrambling the host genome, with entirely
unpredictable consequences that might unleash a deadly 'andromeda
strain'.
GM food on the menu?
Readers, wouldn't you be concerned if the food you so lovingly serve
your family is just 'frankenfood'? As consumers, we have a right to know
what we eat, and to eat what we know, or believe, is right.
|
