After the suspicion and hostility of a few held up the introduction of Bt brinjal, the prime minister’s economic advisory council has stepped in to provide some good sense. In the context of Bt cotton’s success, the council recommended farm evaluations and a comprehensive risk analysis of GM crops, the results of which should be brought into the public domain as soon as possible.
In India, the Bt brinjal case fed into a reflexive hysteria about biotech — that these monstrous GM plants would contaminate their ‘natural’ neighbours with GM pollen and eradicate biodiversity, or that they would spur the growth of ‘superweeds’, resistant to pesticides, or that they could have health hazards for those who unwittingly consume them. These are vital concerns. But while they have been put to field trials, their vague fears still managed to scupper a decision on what could have been a dramatic improvement for small farmers — boosting yields and cutting pesticide costs. After China, India is the biggest producer of brinjal. It is mainly cultivated by small farmers who have to contend with the fruit and shoot borer — a hardy little bug that has now developed resistance to many conventional pesticides. The environment ministry, however, decided to roll over institutional propriety and go with the anti-Bt activists, despite an array of expert opinion and many sane, responsible voices in his own government defending technology and underscoring its importance for Indian agriculture.
Instead of framing in the issue in ideological terms, it makes sense to have a clear regulatory framework that would assess the state of scientific knowledge on GM crops and foods, and address these anxieties. The PM’s economic advisory council is entirely right in demanding a consensus and a new outlook on the technology. On one hand, much of the innovation is being driven by the private sector. On the other, relying largely on corporate data on risk assessment is a dodgy proposition. After the wreckage of the Bt brinjal episode, the government needs to firm up the regulatory framework to dispel the notion that there now exists an uncompromising moratorium on GM technology and its case-by-case implications. Delay only costs us.