Behind Bt-cotton's decline

Govt's reluctance to allow gene-engineered variety is to blame

India's genetically modified (GM) plants-based cotton revolution seems in jeopardy, with Bt-cotton, the mainstay of cotton cultivation, succumbing to pests such as pick bollworm and whitefly, apart from some viral diseases. With new variants of transgenic Bt-hybrids capable of withstanding the onslaught of new pests not being in sight - thanks to the government's ill-advised policy to block GM crops - the country stands to lose its prime place in the global cotton sector. The unprecedented success of the pest-protected gene-altered Bt-cotton had transformed India from a net importer to the world's second largest producer and exporter of this natural fibre in just about a decade. The downturn in cotton productivity and heavy crop losses due to pests in the past couple of years have, predictably, forced many cotton growers to ditch Bt-cotton and switch over to non-GM strains or other crops such as pulses, oilseeds and millets.

The latest available data on kharif sowing indicates shrinkage of around one million hectares in cotton acreage. The drop in area under Bt-cotton is even sharper with over 1.7 million hectares being diverted to the long-forgotten desi kapas (indigenous short-to-medium staple cotton) or other non-Bt cotton strains. Such a diversion has been relatively more pronounced in intensive Bt-cotton growing states, such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Punjab, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, where average crop productivity has dipped to the lowest in five years.

At one level, this development is hardly surprising, given that every crop variety or hybrid, whether produced with biotechnological tools or conventional crop breeding methods, has a limited effective life. It needs to be replaced with newer and better varieties with higher inbuilt yield potential and resistance against ever-changing threats. Numerous good varieties of various crops, including those of wheat and rice - harbingers of the green revolution - have gone out of cultivation because of loss of their vitality. The downfall of Bt-cotton has been hastened because of virtual monoculture of Bt-hybrids having the same or similar pest-killer genes. Such lack of varietal diversity invariably encourages development of immunity in pests and pathogens, making them more virulent and difficult to control. The government's reluctance to allow cultivation of new gene-engineered crops being bred in the private and public sector is solely responsible for the lack of much-needed crop diversity.

Though the breakdown of Bt-cotton will hurt cotton farming in many states, the impact in Gujarat is likely to be the most conspicuous. That's because cotton had spearheaded the state's exponential agricultural growth, which hovered close to 10 per cent a year since 2001-02. Farmers' incomes also appreciated noticeably due to higher production and reduced expenditure on plant protection chemicals. Fortunately, there is still room for sustaining the cotton revolution provided the government quickly grabs opportunities offered by newly evolved high-yielding varieties of desi and other types of non-Bt cotton, and novel yield-enhancing agronomic techniques.

One of the outstanding new technologies that merit attention is the "high-density cotton planting system" developed by Nagpur-based Central Institute for Cotton Research (CICR). It involves planting of a larger number of seeds per hectare to ensure higher plant density and, thus, increased fibre output. It is claimed that it can nearly double cotton production even in an area like Vidharba, which has been infamous for farmers' suicides due to frequent crop failures. However, such developments do not automatically do away with the need for promoting GM technology, which is vital for finding solutions to emerging problems in agricultural and other sectors of the economy.