Celebrating the 67th year of Independence, India is slowly losing her seed sovereignty, even as environmentalists and farmers’ organisations fight in vain.
“Dependence on foreign seeds is as good as selling our land. The government is blind while framing new laws,” Rajesh Krishnan, co-convenor, Coalition for Genetically Modified (GM) Free India told Deccan Herald.
While protests saw Bt brinjal being put on the back burner in the country, Bt cotton, led by the US firm Monsanto, has made severe inroads in the country.
Karnataka, which had one per cent of its cotton-growing areas under Bt cotton in 2002, has 74 per cent now, some other states have 99 per cent (see box).
“Removal of non-Bt varieties with government support has seen 95 per cent of India’s cotton seed market lie with Monsanto,” Harish K S, president, Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha’s (KRRS) Hasiru Sene, said.
According to Coalition for a GM-Free India, 10 years after Bt Cotton officially entered India, its manufacturers have only managed to hide the truth under hypes and false promises.
False hype
The false hype is typified by recent advertisements by Mahyco-Monsanto claiming, “Bollgard boosts Indian cotton farmers’ income by over Rs 31,500 crore”. This has been pulled up by the Advertising Standards Council of India for false information.
Based out of St Luis in the US, Monsanto in India is called Monsanto India Limited, Monsanto Holding Private Limited, Mahyco-Monsanto Biotech, besides holding 26 per cent share in the Indian seed company Mahyco.
Monsanto, which holds permission to sell the only approved Bt cotton variety in India, according to Greenpeace, has been caught red-handed, trying to steal from our rich agriculture seed heritage.
Wheat patent
In 2003, Greenpeace claims, Monsanto got a patent granted in the European patent office for a variety of wheat that it had originally developed from Nap Hal, an Indian wheat variety.
“Monsanto went ahead and tried patenting not just the wheat variety but even all the usages of it, which includes making breads or rotis etc. A legal battle by farmer unions in India and Greenpeace and the civil society finally led to the European Patent office revoking this patent,” Greenpeace said in a study titled, “BRAI Bill, 2013-India’s Monsanto Promotion and Protection Act?”
Bt Brinjal
It also points out that the National Biodiversity Authority had filed the first ever bio-piracy case against Monsanto and its Indian partner Mahyco for appropriating 16 local varieties of brinjal to develop genetically modified brinjal.
It also notes how Monsanto controls the seed market in the US, where it has sued many farmers for conserving seeds and using it in the next season, a practice farmers across the globe have had for decades.
In 2012, Monsanto even got an Act protecting it from law suits in the US, and people like Rajesh argue that India’s BRAI (Bio-technology Regulatory Authority of India) Bill 2013, is poised to give more and more control to such companies and that it must be seriously revisited.
“The Bill in its current form can be clearly seen as a mechanism to give multi-national biotech giants like Monsanto a free hand to control our food and farming,” says Greenpeace.
The Bill has a diluted standard of liability and is not compliant to principles of deterrent liability, absolute liability and polluter pays principle, which are upheld in the Supreme Court of India.
This can work well for Monsanto and the likes which have an array of contamination cases against them, it says.
It adds that this is a dangerous recipe for corruption in the country that will lower the bar for approval of risky GM crops.
The Bill, among other things, will take away state governments’ rights to prevent introduction of such seeds, which is in direct contradiction of the Constitution that deems agriculture as a state subject.
