Bt safe than sorry

Brinjal populism should not stymie regulation

By putting an open-ended moratorium on the commercial cultivation of the gene-altered Bt brinjal, environment minister Jairam Ramesh has ended the long-pending uncertainty over this issue. If, despite nine years of testing and safety trials to the satisfaction of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), some genuine concerns about the safety aspects of transgenic Bt brinjal have still been left unaddressed, they surely need to be addressed before the country’s first genetically-modified (GM) food crop is allowed to be cultivated by farmers and consumed by people. To that extent, the environment minister has done well to subject this vegetable, carrying an alien gene, Cry1Ac, borrowed from a common soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), to further testing before granting permission for commercial cultivation. After all, in matters such as food, it is better to be safe than sorry. The developer of the Bt brinjal, the Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company (Mahyco), has reportedly accepted the decision and has agreed to conduct more trials, displaying professional integrity and sound scientific temper.

That said, the truth also is that, despite all this, the controversy over the Bt brinjal issue is unlikely to die down. For, neither the manner of taking the decision nor the decision itself is wholly incontrovertible. The way the minister reopened the matter for public scrutiny — and not scientific peer review — after the Bt brinjal got the approval of the GEAC, was suggestive of a lack of confidence in the technical competence of the GM crops regulator. If so, the minister should have taken the logical next step of disbanding or reconstituting the GEAC. By allowing public opinion to stymie the regulator, the minister has willy-nilly created an unfortunate precedent for policy-making. While apprehensions about the insect-protected Bt brinjal wiping out genetic diversity in local brinjal varieties are well founded, these issues can only be settled by competent authorities, not populist campaigns. When the high-yielding Mexican dwarf wheat varieties came in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they soon covered the entire wheat-growing belt, elbowing out the traditional wheat varieties, most of which are now preserved in gene banks. The same was the story with transgenic Bt cotton hybrids which, within seven years of introduction, have spread to nearly 90 per cent of the cotton acreage. But the country is now surplus in both wheat and cotton, which were perpetually in short supply earlier. Traditional varieties can survive only either on merit or consumer loyalty.

The issue now is how will the Bt brinjal episode affect the fate of several other transgenic strains of vegetables and other crops, including rice, which are awaiting formal approval. Some of these have been evolved by smaller seed companies which may not have deep pockets like the big companies and cannot wait endlessly for approvals. The environment ministry should clear the air on revised testing procedures without delay.