Tribal women knocked on the doors of houses around Bhubaneswar today displaying huge cut-outs of Bt Brinjal asking residents to oppose the introduction of Bt Brinjal varities in the state. They visited many houses in Chandrashekarpur, Sahid Nagar, Bapuji Nagar, Nayapally, MLA colony and OUAT colony. They were assisted by Pradyut, the co-ordinator of the campaign against Bt. Brinjal.

A six per cent rise in area under transgenic crops could double fertiliser consumption. [...] If the area under advanced transgenic seeds increases to 10 per cent in a few years from the present level of 4 per cent, the country’s fertiliser consumption will increase 107 per cent to 220 kgs per hectare (ha) from the current levels (the latest available figure 2005-06), at 106 kgs per ha.

Consumer groups are concerned about exposing Indian consumers to genetically modified Bt brinjal, even as the government is considering grant of approval to Mahyco to commercially launch the GM food this year. The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), the national regulatory authority for GM foods, has set up a special committee to study Mahyco’s biosafety data from nine years of research on Bt brinjal. It is set to give its verdict soon.

A study conducted by the global pro-GMO lobby, ISAAA, has claimed that Bt brinjal can resist the attacks of the common enemy fruit shoot borer (FSB) larvae and also be safe for human consumption. [...] The ISAAA study lauded the regulatory system in India and hoped that India would be able to give to the world the first Bt brinjal.

Those who killed themselves were overwhelmingly cash crop farmers – growers of cotton, coffee, sugarcane, groundnut, pepper, vanilla. (Suicides are fewer among food crop farmers – that is, growers of rice, wheat, maize, pulses.) The brave new world philosophy mandated countless millions of Third World farmers forced to move from food crop cultivation to cash crop (the mantra of ”export-led growth”). For millions of subsistence farmers in India, this meant much higher cultivation costs, far greater loans, much higher debt, and being locked into the volatility of global commodity prices.

Indian scientists plan to launch hybrid varieties of genetically modified cotton seeds at nearly one-third the price charged by most seed companies in the country, said a scientist on condition of anonymity. The hybrids will be developed from a genetically modified variety of cotton—Bt Bikaneri Narma, which has been developed by a consortium of research institutions and universities, including the Central Institute for Cotton Research, or CICR, Nagpur, and the University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad, Karnataka.

The Supreme Court is slated to hear next month a petition seeking moratorium on genetically modified (GM) crops as the petitioners have now come up with fresh evidence from some leading scientists with a view to strengthen their argument on the issue. In a supplementary rejoinder affidavit filed before the apex court last week, the petitioners namely Aruna Rodrigues, PV Satheesh and Rajiv Baruah submitted six letters from eminent scientists like Dave Schubert, Dr Michael Antoniou, Stuart Newman, Andrew Kimbrell, Bill Freese, Jack Heinemann and Lawrence Busch endorsing Pushpa M Bhargava’s regulatory guidelines as essential criteria for safety testing and risk assessment of GMOs.

Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Limited is hopeful of getting approval for the commercial release of Bt Brinjal seeds from the GEAC by end of the next financial year. ”[...] We have also applied for commercial release of Bt Brinjal seeds with the GEAC and are hopeful that it would be approved by the end of 2009-10,” MAHYCO Joint Director (Research) Usha Barwale Zehr told reporters here.

India became the fourth largest adopter of biotech crop in the world, displacing Canada, in 2008 and planting Bt cotton on 7.6 million hectares (82% of the total cotton are in the country), according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA). This was almost a million and half hectares over planted area in 2007 (6.2 m ha, equivalent to 66% of the total cotton area in the country).

Small farmers in India will soon have a cheaper, safer and more effective option for growing one of India’s favorite foods: genetically modified eggplant, developed with Cornell’s help, which continually expresses a naturally occurring insecticide derived from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). ”The Bt eggplant will be the first genetically modified food crop to be released in the whole of South Asia,” said K.V. Raman, Cornell professor of plant breeding. ”The impacts could be really dramatic.”