India finds itself increasingly on the defensive in agricultural trade for permitting field trials across the country in a host of genetically modified (GM) food crops — rice, brinjal, okra, potato, tomato and groundnuts — and thereby exposing conventional crops to the risk of transgenic contamination. A case in point is a rather dodgy no-contamination certificate that the regulator, Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), was forced to give two months ago in response to a restriction imposed by Russia on import of rice, groundnuts and sesame seeds from India.