Indian Scene

Bt-Brinjal: is it sustainable agriculture or the first step to food monopolization in India?
Sonali Bhattacharjee

There has to be a good reason why the government of India wishes to commercialise its first genetically modified food -bt brinjal despite:
* The presence of over 1500 natural varieties of brinjal in India
* The death of over 4000 farmers only in the first year of commercial cultivation of bt cotton
* Mysterious death of over 1600 sheep and cattle that accidentally entered the bt cotton field
There has to be an even better reason why the government brings a two year moratorium on genetically modified food after a public uproar and then plans to centralize the introduction of gm food to the market through the Biotechnology Regulatory Bill that recommends a Biotech Regulatory Authority of India putting the lives of Indians in the hands of a few technocrats.
BT brinjal as the name suggests, contains the toxic gene of the bacteria Bacillus Thuringiensis (BT), which is injected into the plant gene so that the plant can produce the bt toxin and protect itself from the pest, brinjal root and shoot borer. The technology is based on the assumption that the protein is specific to lepidopteran insect pests. However, there are ample evidences, which show that several toxin-related, organisms related and environmental factors can modulate the toxicity and consequently the specificity of a Cry-protein.
Monsanto with its Indian collaboration Mahyco (Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company) is the owner of the bt brinjal seed. They are the same company who has brought BT cotton seeds to the market.
It has been seen that the insects develop resistance to the toxin after several generations and form super pests. The farmers then have to use pesticides more potent to prevent them. The BT plants also fall easy prey to the secondary pests in the absence of the primary. The toxin is also released to the soil from the roots of the plant. So the farmer is forced to sow bt seeds only in the land as no other seeds survive in it. Contamination of natural varieties by cross pollination, during storage and transportation is a huge threat to the natural varieties. This has been seen in the case of bt cotton. Not only has the seed market been monopolized, but pollination has rendered non-GM species subject to contamination, which makes the availability of non-GM seeds practically impossible.
Given the fact that the law in India does not deal with issues relating to genetic pollution and contamination, both the farmer and the consumer are left with no choice and with no legal recourse either. This means that GM contamination is permanent and irreversible.
The government also plans on subsequent commercial release of genetically modified forms of okra, tomato, rice, mustard and a host of other plants. The most worrisome fact is that not a single study in the public domain has established the safety of these crops, either with respect to human health, or the environment. It wouldn’t be far fetched to say that after the Green Revolution, genetic Engineering is the latest step in an agro-technological developmental paradigm that has led to large scale reduction in biodiversity and depletion of natural resources (soil, water, habitats), all of which have long term implications.
It is ironic that the biotech revolution in agriculture is being promoted by the same corporate interests (Monsanto, DuPont, Novartis, Bayer, Dow) that championed the first wave of chemically-based agriculture. They now claim that by genetically modifying plants, they can reduce chemically intensive farming and help develop sustainable agriculture. However, their practices to date do not instill great confidence in the supposedly benign effects of their products in the environment. The companies are developing products(various crop varieties) that produce immense profits while completely fitting in with the approaches which have been so harmful in the past. For example, two of the main thrusts of agricultural biotechnology have been the production of crop varieties that are herbicide resistant (so farmers will keep purchasing the company’s weed-killing chemicals) or contain a toxin that kills the potential insect pests. Bt brinjal falls in the latter category.
Bayer has been carrying illegal rice field trials for an herbicide gluphosinate resistant strain of rice in a village near Hyderabad. As European Union has a strict ban on the import of any genetically modified food, there is also a strong pressure from the corporate to open the European markets for exports such that they can easily get to start selling genetically modified rice seeds in the Asian countries.
The government of India is also trying to promote GM food to fight agricultural crisis we will face for climate change and to alleviate hunger. It is common knowledge that whatever the seed might be, it needs water to grow. So GM seeds can and never will be a solution to erratic rainfall patterns. Also GM and other hybrid seeds need more water than the natural varieties to grow. The latter crisis as we know can only be combated by a proper distribution of food and not by producing more than what is already there. The government of India has a food reserve of over five years of which a lot that goes waste is exported to the European states as fodder for animals.
Why would then a single type of seed that does not germinate, over burdens the farmer of buying seeds year after year, has a potential threat of destroying all natural varieties by cross pollination, can cause cancer and sterility in humans be promoted in the market?
Like any other industrial process, the production of farm machinery, chemicals, and seeds, and the turning of threshed wheat into a box of cereal are completely controlled by capital and its demands. The problem for capital, however, are the farmers. They cannot be dispensed with as they own certain means of production and while they are economically rational, they consume their surplus rather than turning it into capital.
Post Second World War, herbicides reduced the requirement for the tillage machinery, insecticides reduced the uncertainty of a successful crop, and hormone spray allowed a close control of the ripening time in fruit crops and antibiotics prevented animal diseases.
The analysis of the growing role of capital inputs cannot be made, if the central feature of the productive process is lost sight of: the concrete use of all these inputs is to produce living organisms. But living organisms are mortal, so their production requires their reproduction. There is, every cycle of farm production begins with immature seeds to which value is added by on-the-farm operations, so seed is the central input into farming.
The control of the biological nature of these seed organisms in a critical element in the control of the entire process of the agricultural production which puts the provider of this input in a unique position to valorize other inputs.
The consequence of the central position of seed input in the production process is that seed companies are potentially in an extraordinary powerful position to appropriate a large portion of the surplus in agriculture. There is a barrier to this realization however. The seed of a desirable variety, when planted by the farmer produces plants that themselves produce yet more seed of the variety. Thus the seed company has provided the farmer with a free good, the genetic information contained in the seed that is reproduced by the farmer again in the very act of farming.
The historical answer to this problem was the development of the inbred/hybrid method of breeding, using hybrid crosses between inbred lines, which make it possible to sell seed that with produce hybrid plants but which themselves do not produce hybrids. Because second generation would not be true hybrids and thus would lose yield and be more variable, the farmer must go back to the seed company every year to buy new seed.
Major commercial hybrid seed companies at one time eventually were acquired by pharmaceutical companies like Ciba-Geigy, Monsanto, Dow and DuPont.
But inbred/hybrid method too had its own limitations. This meant that what changes could be made to agronomic species that could be profitable to seed companies and their chemical co owners/partners meant that the penetration of capital into agriculture has reached its apparent limits in the 1970s.
Any further possibility for the input providers and output purchasers to increase their appropriation of the surplus in agriculture depended on
* Making some radical changes inn the biology of agronomic species
* Guaranteeing that such changed biological system would be within their ownership and control
Moreover the appropriation could be greatly increased by a greater consolidation of both input and post-farm production sectors (purchasing, processing, and distribution), to provide near monopoly and control. Enter Biotechnology.
The purpose of commercial use of biotechnology is to excess the control of capital over agricultural production. To accomplish this:
*  The time and cost of its development must be within the limits set by the capital investments in research
* The development must not promote significant challenges from politically effective forces
*  Ownership and control of the product of biotechnology must not pass into the hands of the farmer but remain with the commercial provider of the input
The requirement that the biotechnological innovation maintain ownership and control over the altered variety creates a contradiction. The farmer as previously discussed is provided with a free good, the genetic information in the seed, when he or she purchases a new variety, and the breeder loses its ownership. How then can breeders appropriate a greater share of the surplus when they are giving away the critical material, the genes? The answer has been provided by a combination of legal and biological weapons in the hands of the breeders.
It was announced on March 3, 1998 that a patent has been granted for the genetic manipulation that would allow plants to set seed and therefore make crop, but which would render these seeds unable to germinate. The terminator gene was jointly patented by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Delta and Pine Land, one of the world’s largest producers of cotton seeds.
The terminator technology encodes within each seeds DNA a gene that kills its own embryos, thereby sterilizing the seed and forcing growers to return to seed companies on a yearly basis to purchase new seeds. Thus at one blow the problem of capitalist seed production has been solved.
Unlike in industrial production, the first step in the capture of agriculture by capital was the immense flowering of input industries and output processors, who appropriated the surplus in agriculture by selling the petty entrepreneurial farmer what he needed, and buying what he produced. No parallel exists in the industrial sphere. It is only with the saturation of that possibility of appropriation that wholly new techniques have come into play. By concentrating on the central material link in farm production, the living organism, which at the same time was the most resistant to capitalization, biotechnology ahs accomplished two steps in the penetration of capital. First, it widened the sphere of input commodity produced by including a wide array of organisms that had previously escaped. Secondly, and more profound, it is making vertical integration possible with the accompanying pauperization of the farmer. It is this second stage that is the capitalist agriculture of the future, because the physical nature of farm production, inevitably tied to the land, is such as to maintain its unique organization as a productive process.
Trans-national companies (TNCs) have been using devious techniques and twisting arms of international policies to create broad international markets for a single product, in this case by destroying the genetic diversity of the world’s rural landscape. As in the case of bt brinjal, these TNCs use the power of the state to suppress all opposition from local people. This is as expected in the formalization of a global corporate regime in the WTO’s system of rules. As a direct confrontation of the corporate with the locals will have unwarranted protests, they use states as the vehicles of universal adherence to this regime at the expense of national political debate and powers.
Needless to say that this is just the beginning for India’s agricultural imperialism. With the government’s food processing vision of 2015; WTO’s institutionalization of the global property regime, intellectual rights of property of foreign investors will just get strengthened. Citizens’ rights will keep losing to property rights. How far this can go needs to be seen now.