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The futile dispute over genetic engineering
Development theory: Who's Who Part 41
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Gain in Indian cotton yield?
The futile dispute over genetic engineering
By Tillmann Elliesen
The benefits and harm of genetic engineering in agriculture are the subject of heated debate. Civil society organisations rightly point to risks to farmers in developing countries. But a dispute over the growing of genetically modified cotton in India shows that the critics of genetic engineering are increasingly becoming an entrenched fundamental opposition and thus hurting their credibility.
Can genetic engineering in agriculture contribute to reducing poverty and hunger? This question has been debated hotly for years, and the antagonists confront each other just as irreconcilably as do the critics of globalisation and the champions of free trade. For the layperson it is difficult to form an impression because in the debate frequently only ideologies are represented and arguments are no longer exchanged. Industry's motivation for extolling genetically modified crops as miracle tools against hunger and poverty is obvious: its interest in profit. But its opponents also increasingly give the impression that for them the debate is about existential issues. For many environmental protection organisations and other civil society groups, fundamental opposition against genetic engineering appears to have become an identity-defining feature of such great significance that they must not budge an inch from it. That is resulting in the opponents of genetic engineering sometimes reacting in a superficial and small-minded way to arguments which favour the use of green genetic engineering in developing countries. An example is an ongoing dispute over the growing of genetically modified cotton in India.
In the journal Science there appeared on February 7 an article by Matin Qaim, of the Centre for Development Research (ZEF), in Bonn, and David Zilberman, of the University of California, on field trials in South and Central India with a cotton hybrid in which a gene of the insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) was implanted. This was to protect the plants against the bollworm, the worst cotton plant pest.1 (Hybrids are bred plant varieties from which farmers can no longer gain their own seed; they must buy fresh stocks every year.) The field trials were carried out by the Indian seed producer Mahyco under an approval process for the Bt cotton. In three fields, Bt cotton, the same hybrid without genetic modification, and a local popular variety were planted. In the spring of 2002 after the harvest, Qaim and Zilberman surveyed 157 farmers that had taken part in the trials about their yields. The result: compared to the non-genetically modified Mahyco hybrid, the Bt cotton had yielded harvests which on average were 80 percent higher, and were no less than 87 percent higher compared with the local popular varieties.
Higher yields from the
growing of genetic ally
modified cotton?
The article by Qaim and Zilberman provoked a great response, not only in India but around the world. In Germany, several daily newspapers reported on it. The findings of the two authors are plausible: since the conditions for all three plant varieties were otherwise the same, it would seem to suggest that the higher yields of the Bt cotton were due to their resistance to pests and thus to their genetic modification. However, Qaim and Zilberman were criticised for having drawn too far-reaching conclusions from their findings. True, in their article they conceded that the Bt cotton lead measured by them was in part to be explained by the above-average pest pressure during the 2001/2002 season. In addition, they said, it was to be expected that under the conditions of commercial agriculture the yield gains would be lower than in the field trials. But they ventured to predict that especially high yields from pest-resistant crops could be expected in Africa and South Asia. In a personal communication, Qaim in fact insisted that theoretically this forecast was well-founded. But the field trials do not offer an empirical basis for it; that would require studies over several years of the commercial cultivation of Bt crops. Qaim and Zilberman have merely ascertained the potential of Bt cotton with regard to yield gains and savings in pesticides no more, though also not less.
But the opponents of green genetic engineering are not prepared to grant even that and instead use flimsy arguments to cast doubt upon the seriousness of the research. One of their accusations is that the trials were a favour for the Mahyco company or Monsanto, the US seed producer and the world's largest genetic engineering concern, which invented Bt cotton and has a 26 percent stake in Mahyco. A Press statement of March 3 by the Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific said the research was based on data by Mahyco-Monsanto, which raised "initial doubts about its independence". And in the AgBioIndia Bulletin of February 26 of the Indian organisation Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, the article by Qaim and Zilberman was described as a PR move by the biotechnology industry. It said the article in Science "clearly demonstrates the denigration (of science) that has taken place ever since industries started sponsoring research".2
Mahyco-Monsanto
did not fund
the research
But Mahyco-Monsanto neither supplied the data nor funded the research. Rather, Qaim and Zilberman themselves gathered the data on yields and use of pesticide on the trials fields. All they received from Mahyco was merely data on pest infestation levels during the growing season (such as the number of bollworm larvae per plant), and on the size of the plants. Thus, it was data which did not influence the main finding of the research on yield gain by Bt cotton. The research also was not financed by the industry, but with public funds of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Nevertheless, in a personal communication Qaim made no secret of his good connections with staff of Mahyco's research department. "Without this contact we could not have carried out the research," he said. "How then could we have found out which farmers were taking part in the field trials?"
Qaim is convinced that genetic engineering in agriculture can also benefit smallholders in developing countries. He has for years sought to underpin this thesis in scientific terms by research work around the world. However, to conclude from this that he is working for the industry is absurd. Qaim takes an absolutely critical view of the role of companies in the biotechnology industry in monopolising and marketing knowledge and technologies. Thus, the price of seed for the Bt cotton in the first crop growing season after its licensing in March 2002 was much too high, he says. In a viewpoint article for E+Z in March 2000, Qaim spoke out for greater promotion of official agricultural research in order not to leave the field to the private sector and to facilitate poor farmers' access to biotechnological knowledge. Similarly, in the Science article by Qaim and Zilberman, they say: "(Furthermore,) public sector research investments will need to be expanded and mechanisms for technology transfer and handling of IPRs (Intellectual Property Rights) established so that promising biotechnologies can reach the poor at affordable prices on a larger scale."
Another accusation by the genetic engineering opponents, such as that insinuated by Devinder Sharma, of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, says that Qaim and Zilberman accepted that their research would be interpreted wrongly as an evaluation of the first commercial crop growing season following the approval of the Bt cotton.3 Indeed, in such German newspapers as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Berliner Zeitung, and apparently also in Indian newspapers, there were reports on the high yield gains, but not that these were measured only in field trials. But Qaim and Zilberman cannot be blamed for that, for they make unmistakably clear that they had evaluated field trials. Accordingly, the Indian professor of botany Kameswara Rao, of the Foundation for Biotechnology Awareness and Education, replied to Devinder Sharma by saying: "It is not the responsibility of the authors if someone did not read the paper properly and mistook field trial data for actual commercial data of 2002/2003."4 That Sharma's accusation itself have put journalists on the wrong track is shown by an article on Bt cotton in the Asia Times, Hong Kong, of February 19, which said that it was left to civil society organisations to point out that Qaim and Zilberman had merely evaluated field trials.5
The findings do not fit
the opponents' view
of the world
A third objection, also by Devinder Sharma, makes especially clear that the opponents of genetic engineering cannot really refute the findings of Qaim and Zilberman, but refuse to accept them because they do not fit their view of the world. Sharma wrote in the AgBioIndia Bulletin of February 14 that it was not correct when Qaim and Zilberman attributed yield-increasing effects to the genetic modification of the cotton. He said the resistance to pests had merely resulted in a reduction of harvests losses due to pest pressure. The term yield increase, however, suggested furthermore that implanting the Bt gene increased the variety's yield potential.6 That is, of course, not the case, and even the layperson understands immediately that Qaim and Zilberman also do not wish to claim that. But why one cannot talk of yield increases when harvest losses are reduced remains Sharma's secret.
In the meantime, the dispute over the Bt cotton in India has gone into the next round which admittedly already was rung in before the publication of the article by Qaim and Zilberman. At the beginning of November 2002, before the end of the first commercial growing season, the Indian government rashly announced that Bt cotton had been very successful. The Indian section of Greenpeace, no less precipitately, reacted to that with its own research which asserted the opposite, whereupon Monsanto in turn rushed to report that the farmers were very satisfied. Amid this game, the real problems linked with the introduction of genetically modified crops and which in India have also become clear, were quickly lost sight of. Thus, the potential benefit of such plants may well be great for smallholders as well. But the plants will deliver a real benefit only if they are cultivated properly. A lively black market for genetically modified seed has arisen in India following the approval of Mahyco's Bt cotton hybrids with the result that Bt cotton is now also grown in North India. But it cannot deliver the expected results there because the approved hybrids are suited only to the soil and climatic conditions in Central and South India. In addition, before the Mahyco seed was approved a seed producer in Gujarat put an illegal copy of the Bt hybrids on the market, which was grown uncontrolled throughout the entire country.
The real problems of
genetic engineering
are lost sight of
These problems show that introducing a new technology such as genetically modified seed, whose uncontrolled use can result in grave social, ecological and economic damage, must be accompanied not only by effective official supervision but also by advisory services offers for the users. In many developing countries that is not ensured, which is something that technicians and agricultural economists such as Qaim often do not take into sufficient account. The civil society watchdogs are needed to draw attention to the social, political and economic risks of genetic engineering, which are swept under the carpet by the industry and 'underexposed' by economists and technicians. But it hurts their credibility when they contradict dogmatically every opinion that does not match their own convictions.
The Indian cotton harvest of the 2002/2003 season was brought in completely by the end of February. It is only now that the pest-resistant Bt cotton can be checked to see if it has passed its first practical trial. The latest available information is contradictory. According to the AgBioIndia Newsletter, the Agriculture Minister of Andhra Pradesh on television at the end of March described Bt cotton as a flop, and the anti-genetic engineering organisation Gene Campaign had called on the Indian Federal Agriculture Minister to sue Mahyco for compensation in the name of the farmers who had suffered losses.7 By contrast, Kameswara Rao of the Foundation for Biotechnology Awareness and Education points out that the Indian cotton season of 2002/2003 as a whole was bad, not only the Bt cotton harvest.8 Matin Qaim has been in India again since mid-March to form his own impression a project which once again makes clear how entrenched the opposing fronts have become. Devinder Sharma writes that Qaim should save himself fresh study and thus official research funds because a genetic engineering-friendly finding is anyway already certain.9 Qaim, however, declines to invite his Greenpeace critics to accompany him and convince themselves of the seriousness of his work. "I work only with scientific institutions that are to be taken seriously," he says, "and I do not count Greenpeace as one of them."
1) Matin Qaim, David Zilberman: Yield Effects of Genetically Modified Crops in Developing Countries, in: Science, Vol. 299, 7 February 2003, pp. 900902
2) Bt cotton: Science under attack, in: The AgBioIndia Bulletin, 26 February 2003, www.agbioindia.org
3) A scientific fairytale on Bt cotton, in: The AgBioIndia Bulletin, 14 February 2003, www.agbioindia.org
4) Kameswara Rao: One swallow does not make the summer, in: Bio-Scope Newsletter, 24 February 2003, www.bio-scope.org
5) T. V. Padma: Report on Success of GE Cotton Sows Confusion, in: Asia Times (in its online edition since 20 February 2003), www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/EB20Df02.html
6) See Fn. 3)
7) Bt cotton failure: Its now official, in: The AgBioIndia Bulletin, 5 March 2003; Compensate farmers for Bt cotton failure, in: The AgBioIndia Bulletin, 11 March 2003, www.agbioindia.org
8) See Fn. 4)
9) Bt cotton: Speculative research, in: The AgBioIndia Bulletin, 24 February 2003, www.agbioindia.org
Tillmann Elliesen is an editor of E+Z and D+C. tillmann.elliesen@fsd.de
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