Science, Politics, and the Framing of Modern Agricultural Technologies - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 53

commercial advantage to seed companies, because it would mean that farmers would
always have to buy new seeds. The patent for this, now owned by jointly by Monsanto and
the US Department of Agriculture, does exist (though no one has ever actually applied
for a license to use it, and, contrary to the claims of anti-GMO campaigners, the gene has
not actually been incorporated into any seeds that have been put on the market).
These reasonable concerns are then married to fears about the possibly harmful eco-
logical effects of the introduction of transgenics (see Thies and Devare 2007), and to fears
about their implications for human health (e.g., Sahai 2011)—all in a context in which it is
held that the regulatory capacities of states in regard to biosafety are woefully inadequate—
and to claims about the impoverishment of rural people. The widely reported suicides of
farmers in some parts of India that are held to have been because of indebtedness brought
about by GM cultivation have provided a potent narrative in support of these claims. The
whole has made for an extraordinarily powerful negative framing: “rDNA plants have
been successfully constructed as uniquely risky plants” (Herring 2011a, emphasis added).
One of the effects of this has been that in India and elsewhere, transgenics are being sub-
jected to far more extensive testing than other products of agricultural biotechnology
(such as those that have been developed through mutagenesis involving irradiation), even
while the standards of biosafety that are required of them may be set impossibly high. The
consequence has been that there is still no “gene revolution” in food crops.
But how justified are all these concerns? They cannot be finally disproved. That
is certain. But just as certainly, there is contrary evidence. There is no doubt that
Mahyco-Monsanto Biotech (MMB), a 50:50 joint venture between Mahyco and
Monsanto, which markets Bollgard and Bollgard II Bt cotton technologies, has
made massive profits from the Bt cotton hybrids that it was responsible for introduc-
ing into India (Damodaran 2010). Equally, there is no doubt at all that Indian cot-
ton farmers have sought to cultivate Bt cotton hybrids on such a massive scale that
they now account for 92 percent of the total cotton acreage of the country (Kranthi
2011). They have “voted with their ploughs” against the activists who sought to ban
Bt cotton cultivation. Nor is there any doubt about the extensive pirating of genetic
material from Mahyco-Monsanto, and of the development of a cottage industry that
supplies pirated, “stealth seeds,” the products of the back-crossing of MMB-derived
plant material with local cultivars, and that are available much more cheaply and may
be saved by farmers, even if their insecticidal properties are weaker than those of
MMB hybrids (Herring 2007b). The evidence in support of the claim that it has been
because of the cultivation of GMOs that large numbers of Indian farmers have been
committing suicide is thin to say the least (see Nagaraj 2008 for a measured state-
ment). With regard to the ecological and health hazards associated with transgenics,
it is very striking, given the extent of hostility to them in Europe, that the European
Commission Directorate-General for Research, in a publication titled A Decade of
EU-funded GMO Research (2001-2010) , should draw the following conclusion:
The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects,
covering a period of more than 25 years of research, and involving more than 500