The Indian Council of Agricultural Research's (ICAR) Deputy Director General (Crop Science) Swapan Datta said here today that anti-GM protestors do not seem to understand science and that genetically-modified crops are an extension of modern science. [...] He said that farmers will not produce crops if they do not get a good price. ”We cannot produce something that farmers don't get a good price. It has to be profit-oriented and at a reduced cost,” he said.

Genetic engineering has been hailed as a panacea for the problem of global hunger and population explosion, but research studies reveal that it has failed to deliver the goods. At the same time, it has created more problems than it could solve. The Union of Concerned Scientists, an international research group based in the US, said none of the genetically engineered crops under cultivation so far has boosted farm yield or overcome the problem of drought conditions. ”Genetic engineering has actually done very little to increase the yield of food and feed crops. It appears unlikely that this technology will play a leading role in helping the world feed itself in the foreseeable future,” said the Union of Concerned Scientists. In a document — Failure to Yield — released at the CoP-11, the research group reviewed the data on soybeans and corn, the main GE food/feed crops in the USA.

As director, Centre for Integrated Research in Bio-safety, University of Canterbury (New Zealand), Jack A Heinemann, along with his team, has been tirelessly working for years to contribute to an increased understanding and more effective management of emerging biotechnologies. He has also authored a chapter on biotechnology for the International Assessment on Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). Excerpts from an interview with Heinemann who was recently in Hyderabad to participate in the ongoing biodiversity meet, CoP-11.

India should put in place a domestic legislation on liability and redress for damage to biodiversity resulting from living modified organisms, pending its ratification of the supplementary protocol to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. This was sought by a group of civil society groups during the on-going United Nations conference on biological diversity here on Tuesday.

Urge governments to implement biosafety protocols and adopting cautious approach towards risky technologies like genetic engineering

On the second day of sixth the meeting of parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, civil society groups, particularly from the host country India, urged global leaders to follow the Convention on Biological Diversity, in letter and spirit. They appealed to global nations to ensure that biodiversity and with it the access of the local people to their biological heritage is not sacrificed for risky and irreversible technologies like genetic engineering in agriculture. They demanded that genetically modified organisms and living modified organisms are not released into the environment.

The five-day Meeting of Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety concluded here on Friday with a call to nations to involve local communities in policy decisions on adapting genetically modified organisms. The MoP-6 also decided to set up an international ad hoc expert committee to decide on economic considerations of the people involved. It called for giving utmost importance to the wishes of the indigenous and local people before a country decides on new genetically modified crops. India as the new Chair of the Convention on Biological Diversity played a key role in pushing the agenda on socio-economic considerations.

The Meeting of Parties to the Cartagena Protocol in Hyderabad has been discussing safety issues pertaining to living modified organisms for the past two days. Experts warned that there are possibilities of new viruses arising through recombination of the naturally-occurring relatives of genetically modified vaccines in the same ecosystem. It may be recalled that in clinical trails in 2010, four girls died in Khammam district after they were given the Human Papilloma Virus vaccine, a recombinant DNA-based vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. Prof. Terje Traavik of the Centre for Biosafety in Norway said that his study found ”many first-generation live, genetically-engineered vaccines are inherently unpredictable, possibly dangerous and their use should not be widespread until all issues are clarified.”

In the winter of 2005, a sleepy village in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra served a wake-up call to the nation when its villagers said they were putting the entire village, roughly 600 acres, up for sale. The act of desperation by 40 debt-laden families of Dorli village, barely 20km away from Wardha, became one of the most poignant symbols of Vidarbha's agrarian crisis. Vidarbha, the eastern part of Maharashtra, poses a stark contrast to the prosperous cotton-growing region of south Gujarat and also to the sugarcane belt of western Maharashtra. Dominated by resource-poor cotton farmers, the region has been notorious for farmer suicides since the nineties.

The farmer in Nanudi village in south Gujarat, roughly 350km from Ahmedabad, is among the overwhelming majority of Indian cotton growers who have sown Bt cotton this year. Unlike most farmers though, he's using bina bill wala beej (seeds sold without the bill), or illegal Bt seeds, available on credit at roughly three-fifths of the price of officially certified seeds in Gujarat. Bt cotton is a genetically modified crop, named after a soil bacterium, the gene of which has been inserted into the cotton plant to produce a toxin that works as an in-built insecticide to control bollworm, a major cotton pest. ”I have sown only the uncertified seeds this year,” said the farmer. More than 60 years old, he owns two hectares or roughly five acres of land in Nanudi, located in the Khambha block of Amreli district, and grows cotton and castor.

Voicing its concern over 'unbridled' field tests of genetically modified crops in the country, civil society groups have asked the government to immediately put in place a legal framework on liability and redress. Claiming that the GM crops had put the nation at risk, the Coalition for GM-free India and Centre for Sustainable Agriculture said the firms introducing GM crops should be made liable for the damage their proprietary technology is causing to biodiversity.