Seeds of Corruption: “Unneeded, Unwanted and Unsafe,” the Case of Genetically Modified Mustard in India
In India, genetically modified (GM) mustard is edging closer to
becoming the first officially approved GM food crop to be placed on the
commercial market. This is despite a series of official reports that
recommend against introducing GMOs to India. The Technical Expert
Committee (TEC) Final Report is the fourth official report exposing the
lack of integrity, independence and scientific expertise in assessing
GMO risk.
The four reports are: The ‘Jairam Ramesh Report’ of February 2010,
imposing an indefinite moratorium on Bt Brinjal, overturning the apex
Regulator’s approval to commercialise it; the Sopory Committee Report
(August 2012); the Parliamentary Standing Committee (PSC) Report on GM
crops (August 2012) and the TEC Final Report (June-July 2013).
The TEC recommends an indefinite moratorium on the field trials of GM
crops until the government devises a proper regulatory and safety
mechanism. Prominent campaigner Aruna Rodrigues argues that official
regulators have hidden all data about GM mustard from the public and the
independent scientific community, which is against constitutional
provisions and the orders of the Supreme Court. She concludes this means
one thing: mandatory rigorous biosafety protocols have not been carried
out and the data pertaining to ‘mustard DMH 11’ therefore needs to be
concealed.
Rodrigues asserts that the secrecy surrounding GM mustard exemplifies
the appalling state of regulation and smacks of corruption. She
concludes the Indian government is using underhand means to introduce GM
crops into Indian agriculture and that there appears to be no place for
science or transparency in this process.
The Coalition for a GM Free India is therefore demanding that the
Union Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Prakash
Javadekar, immediately intervenes to stop the processing and approval of
this GM mustard and makes public all the information regarding the
safety tests of the GM Mustard.
On the back of a news report confirming that an application for
approval for commercialisation of GM mustard has been moved with the
apex regulatory body GEAC (Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee in
the Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change), the
Coalition for a GM Free India has reminded the government about the
serious consequences.
Rajesh Krishnan, Convenor of Coalition for a GM-Free India, says that
the GM mustard hybrid has been created mainly to facilitate the seed
production work of seed manufacturers, whereas farmers already have a
choice of non-GM mustard hybrids in the market, in addition to high
yielding mustard varieties. He also argues that, more importantly, there
are non-GM agro-ecological options like System of Mustard
Intensification yielding far higher production than the claimed yields
of this GM mustard of Delhi University.
Krishnan says:
This GM mustard is also a backdoor entry for various
other GM crops in the regulatory pipeline – while herbicide tolerance as
a trait has been recommended against by committee after committee in
the executive, legislative and judiciary-based inquiry processes in
India related to GM crops, this GM mustard uses herbicide tolerance.
Contamination is inevitable of all other mustard varieties, while India
is the Centre of Diversity for mustard. This is clearly one more GMO
that is unwanted and unneeded and is being thrust on citizens in
violation of our right to choices, as farmers and consumers.
Kavitha Kuruganti, Convenor of Alliance for Sustainable &
Holistic Agriculture (ASHA), has been seeking biosafety data pertaining
to GM Mustard without any success. She argues that:
GEAC is functioning in a highly secretive fashion, and
while the nation does not know what is happening inside the regulatory
institutions with applications like this GM mustard, biosafety data is
being repeatedly declined by the regulators. What are the regulators
hiding and whose interests are they protecting?
She goes on to ask:
Why should the regulators be trusted for their safety
assessment when in the case of both Bt cotton and Bt brinjal, the
Supreme Court Technical Expert Committee (SC TEC) which took up a sample
biosafety analyses in 2013 showed that the regulators were wrong in
concluding the safety of these GMOs?
The Supreme Court in 2008 had ordered that biosafety data be placed
in the public domain when petitioners argued that unless the toxicity
and allergenicity data are made known to the public, the applicants and
concerned scientists in the country would not be in a position to make
effective representations to the concerned authorities.
An indefinite moratorium was placed on Bt brinjal (GM eggplant) in
2010. The regulators sought public feedback on that particular food crop
and the Government of India took up public consultations before taking a
final decision on Bt brinjal’s commercial cultivation fate in india.
Kuruganti continues:
However, this current Government seems to be keen to
conduct regulatory processes in a secretive fashion. Our past requests
to meet with the Environment Minister to share our concerns met with no
success. As the government gets more secretive and opaque around
regulation, the public has a right to know what are they afraid of, if
everything is safe and scientific?
The claim is that GM mustard will provide yield increases of 25-30%.
However, Aruna Rodrigues argues that higher yields are not the result of
these particular transgenes but rather a direct result of hybridisation
of normal crop genes. This is basically a case of deception: the use of
high-yielding hybrids is a deliberate ploy to camouflage the yield
attributable to the hybrid and assign it to the GM crop instead. She
says that this is precisely the story that ensued with Bt cotton (which
is now having disastrous consequences
for many farmers) and that thread wove its way through Bt brinjal and
now, openly for mustard. Rodrigues says that the fraud is unprecedented
and the case surrounding GM mustard in India is evidence of unremitting
regulatory delinquency.
The secrecy and regulatory delinquency that Rodrigues talks of is
integral to the speeding up of the wider agenda of restructuring Indian
agriculture for the benefit of an increasingly impatient Western
agribusiness cartel. These companies are pushing an unsustainable and
poisonous industrialised model of farming on India based on a
never-ending stream of petro-chemical inputs, commodity crops and
corporate (GM) seeds (see this).
This is already impoverishing farmers and driving them out of
agriculture and will ultimately have tremendously negative consequences
in terms of the nation’s food sovereignty and security as well as its
health (see this).
The original source of this article is Global Research
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