Navelchea Xetkariancho Ekvott (NXE), a farmers’ club from Navelim, at its meeting held recently, resolved to oppose any moves by the government to introduce genetically modified (GM) fruits and vegetables in Goa. Expressing concern over the dangers of using GM food products, the NXE urged all farmers to be vigilant and not to allow the entry of such food items into Goa.

In India, very soon, we will have in place a very effective, independent credible regulatory authority to ensure safe release of GM products. GM foods have the potential to solve many of the world’s hunger and malnutrition problems, and to help protect and preserve the environment by increasing yield and reducing reliance upon chemical pesticides. Yet there are many challenges ahead for governments, especially in the areas of safety testing, regulation, international policy and food labelling.

India has planned to increase its area under certified organic farming to 2,000,000 hectare and sale of organic products to one billion US dollars by 2012. A special agency under the Union agriculture ministry - National Centre for Organic Farming - has taken up the task of achieving this target. [...] Currently, organic cotton account for 25% of the total organic products export, followed 20% share for organic tea, 18% share for dry fruits, 13% share for Basmati rice and 10% share for organic honey.

It was on the night of August 17 that Punjilal Ahuri received the body of his 16-year-old daughter, Haju Ben. She had apparently died of snake bite while working in the BT cotton fields of Gujarat. [...] There are large BT cotton farms in Banaskantha district of Gujarat. And when cross-pollination work begins in the end of July, a large number of children from Rajasthan’s Udaipur and Dungarpur are taken there, often by coercion or deception, as the local people allege.

As food prices soar to the skies, the poor are eating less and the Government has camouflaged this brand of inflation by combining food with other commodities like steel and metals whose prices are falling, said environment activist Vandana Shiva here on Thursday. [...] ”India has emerged as the capital of hunger with 214 million people being denied the right to food. This is more than sub-Saharan Africa. Fifty-seven million children in India are underweight because of lack of adequate nutrition. This is one-third of all underweight children in the world,” she said.

Bt cotton was approved for release in India by the Ministry of Environment and Forest, Government of India, on March 26, 2002. Over the last seven years, it has revolutionized cotton production in the country, doubling it from 13.6 million bales in 2002-03 to 31.5 million bales in 2007-08. The yield per hectare, which was hovering around 300 kg per hectare for more than a decade until 2002, touched an all time high figure of 560 kg per hectare in 2007-08. In fact, India emerged as the world’s second largest cotton producer in 2006-07, edging past the US, which held the second rank till then.

The Rs. 7,000 crore Indian market for agricultural seeds is the fifth largest in the world. Of that, roughly Rs. 2,000 crore is the market for cotton seeds. This is the market Metahelix is targetting. [...] Over 90 percent of Metahelix’s target market is transgenic, or genetically modified (GM). And 95 percent of those seeds contain technology from one company — Monsanto. Monsanto is the Coca-Cola of GM seeds business.

When it was introduced in 2002, the genetically modified Bt cotton seed was greeted with distrust by farmers which was anyway then out of reach for Vidarbha’s poor dryland cultivator because of its prohibitive cost of over Rs 1000 per bag of 450 grams. Today, almost every cotton grower in the 32 lakh-hectare cotton belt of Vidarbha and Marathwada has shifted to Bt seed. Maharashtra actually gave approval for commercial trials of Bt seeds in 2005. That year, less Bt seeds were sown in less than 4 lakh hectares. But the area under genetically modified seed multiplied magically in the last three years and farm sources say now the dependence on it is total.

The US and India are back at it again. This time around, it is not the spectre of a looming famine in Bihar that is expected to kill thousands through starvation but global hunger and malnutrition, for which India and USA will collaborate to provide leadership in agriculture to raise crop yields. Never mind that India has record buffer stocks of food grains right now and still more people sleep hungry in India than ever before and that India ranks 66th on the Global Hunger Index for 88 countries. Never mind that intensive agriculture models led to more farmers killing themselves than the projected numbers of starvation before the Green Revolution was ushered in or that Punjab for example, the seat of the Green Revolution in India, is reeling under a severe environmental health crisis quite closely connected to agricultural technologies deployed in the name of increasing yields.

For a country that doesn’t take much interest in scientists, Gilles-Eric Seralini is probably as well known as a scientist can get in India. Seralini is professor of molecular biology at the University of Caen in France, and he hit the headlines here early in 2009 when his analysis of the research data on the country’s first transgenic vegetable, the Bt brinjal, was presented to the Supreme Court of India. That’s when all hell broke loose. The French scientist’s findings were stark: he said the tests conducted by Mahyco, the company producing the Bt brinjal, were simply not valid.