Bt-brinjal fiasco

India needs to take a hard look at its GM policy

Illegal cultivation of unapproved genetically modified (GM) Bt-brinjal in a village in the Fatehabad district of Haryana cannot be a one-off incident. The farmer concerned has been growing it since 2017 (by sourcing the saplings from the nearby town), so there is reason to believe that other farmers could also be doing so. There cannot be a supply chain of seeds and seedlings for only one or a handful of farmers. Also, different tests on these brinjals have shown the presence of more than one alien pest-protecting genes and not just the Cry1Ac gene derived from the common soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which was used by the seed company Mahyco in developing Bt-brinjal. This is indicative of multiple sources of GM seeds.

Interestingly, Mahyco’s Bt-brinjal was duly cleared for general cultivation by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) in 2009 after extensive multi-location field trials. But its seeds were not distributed to the farmers officially due to the indefinite moratorium put on its cultivation by the then environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, under pressure from the anti-GM lobby. Many eminent agricultural scientists, as also the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS), had slammed the minister’s controversial decision. Though the government had ordered all the seeds of Bt-brinjal to be deposited with the National Bureau of Plant Genetics Resources (NBPGR) for safe custody, this agency denies having received any of it. So the actual fate of the GM seeds held by Mahyco and other institutions involved in conducting field trials remains unknown. The possibility of some of them falling into the hands of the farmers surreptitiously cannot, therefore, be ruled out. There could be another source of the transgenic brinjal seeds as well. The same Bt-brinjal, which was denied permission in India, was approved for commercial cultivation in Bangladesh in 2013 and is widely grown there. Its ingress into India from there is also likely.

Since Bt-brinjal has regularly been sold in the vegetable market, the consumption of this GM product by a large number of people is certain. In fact, the reality that is often disregarded is that the Bt gene entered the human and animal food chain even before Bt-brinjal came on the scene. It actually happened with the introduction of Bt-cotton in 2002. Cotton seeds are routinely fed to farm animals whose milk and meat are part of regular human diet. Besides, many imported food items, especially the processed foods, are believed to have traces of GM ingredients though it is seldom disclosed on the labels. No doubt, the concerns over the possible escape of the GM genes into the wild and impacting the environment, biodiversity and human and animal health are valid, but it is already a fait accompli by now.

Even if all the suspected GM crops are uprooted and destroyed, the damage, if at all it is there, cannot be undone. The most prudent move now would be to launch a well-designed and transparently-conducted scientific study on randomly selected humans, animals, crop plants and wild flora and fauna to find out if there is any impact that could be attributable directly to the GM genes. The peer-reviewed findings of this study should dictate the country’s future GM policy.