Science, Politics, and the Framing of Modern Agricultural Technologies - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 55

University was successful in persuading the company Mahyco, partly owned—as men-
tioned above—by Monsanto, to sublicense its gene technology to three Indian public
sector institutions—two universities and a government research institute—free of
royalties. The idea was that these public sector institutions would then develop open-
pollinated varieties (OPVs), on a cost-recovery basis, making them available easily and
cheaply to farmers (one of the universities planned to distribute them through rural
post offices), while Mahyco would be left with exclusive rights for supplying the market
with its transgenic hybrid seeds (reckoned to account for about 30 percent of the total
market). And this is indeed what happened. The universities did succeed in developing
OPVs, and after very extensive trials the Government of India's Genetic Engineering
Approval Committee approved Bt brinjal and recommended its cultivation, in October
2009. The Expert Committee that it set up reported “Bt brinjal is effective in controlling
target pests, non-toxic as determined by toxicity and animal feeding tests, non-aller-
genic and has the potential to benefit the farmer.”
The minister responsible, however, Jairam Ramesh, then the minister of environment
and forests—in the light, no doubt, of earlier expressions of opposition to the Bt brinjal
from anti-GMO campaigners—rejected this advice and embarked on extensive public
consultation, through town-hall style meetings in seven cities. He has said, “I listened
to everybody” (Ramesh 2011). Finally, in February 2010, he placed a moratorium on the
release for cultivation of Bt brinjal. In reaching this decision, he was influenced signifi-
cantly by India's most distinguished biological scientist, M. S. Swaminathan, a founder
and original board member of the pro-GM think tank International Service for the
Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), and whose own research foundation
has a substantial biotechnology component, but who was concerned about the lack of
independent evaluation of Bt brinjal. As he has said, “our official mechanisms are inad-
equate since they do not have their own testing facilities” (Swaminathan 2011) and rely
too heavily on the work of those who have also been responsible for the development of
transgenic cultivars. He was concerned, too, about what he perceived as a threat to brin-
jal biodiversity in the area of what is believed to be its origins. In this he apparently failed
to recognize that the Bt brinjal varieties developed by the public sector institutions are
open-pollinated, and not hybrids—which, in general, attract his criticism as threats to
biodiversity. Indeed, he said, in the interview referred to above, “we should concen-
trate on the development of transgenic varieties rather than hybrids,” and that “What
is important . . . is to step up public-good research in the field of biotechnology.” This is
actually what was being done in ABSP II. The minister, too, seems not to have recog-
nized this, for he spoke in an interview about there being issues of seed control in regard
to Bt brinjal, “if 90 percent of the GM seed is going to be controlled by one company”—
which is what ABSP II was designed precisely to avoid. But if there was some misunder-
standing of the science involved in the Bt brinjal program, some scientists did the cause
of science no good at all when they contributed to a subsequent report about Bt brinjal
asked for by Minister Ramesh from six leading scientific establishments. It was discov-
ered that the report had “lifted” at least six paragraphs from a December 2009 article in
a pro-GM newsletter, Biotech News (published by the Department of Biotechnology),