India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 15 :: No. 25 :: Dec. 05 - 18, 1998

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AGRICULTURE

On Monsanto-alert

Fears in the public mind over the implications of the Terminator gene technology overshadow the American seed company's plans to conduct field trials of a transigent cotton strain in Karnataka.

PARVATHI MENON
in Bangalore

MONSANTO, the American seed company that holds a patent for the "Terminator" gene, is now embroiled in a controversy over the field trials of its transgenic cotton strain - Bollgard (Bt Cotton) - in India. In August, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) of the Ministry of Science and Technology gave permission to Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Ltd or MAHYCO, in which Monsanto has a 26 per cent stake, to conduct field trials of Bt Cotton in 25 sites located in nine States. The company claims that BT Cotton has a bacterial gene that protects the plant against bollworm attacks. The joint venture of Monsanto and MAHYCO, MM Biotech India Pvt Ltd, plans to test-launch the hybrid cotton variety in 1999.

The fears in the public mind over the implications of the Terminator technology - it does not allow seeds to germinate a second time - for the future of agriculture in developing countries such as India have resulted in a growing suspicion of all activities of Monsanto. Hence the widespread concern, which is however misplaced, that the Bt Cotton variety also contains the killer gene. Despite the fact that the Terminator technology (gene protection technology as Monsanto prefers to describe it) is only undergoing laboratory tests, the DBT and other central agencies have put strict institutional mechanisms in place to ensure compliance with safeguards at all stages - laboratory research, all trials including field trials, commercial production and release to the environment of genetically engineered germplasm. It would be extremely difficult for any seed company, Indian or foreign, to dodge the regulatory mechanism and sell genetically modified Terminator seeds in India.

The publication in September of a comprehensive list of biosafety guidelines by the DBT is expected to tighten the regulatory mechanisms further. Four advisory and regulatory bodies have been set up to implement the guidelines - the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, the Institutional Biosafety Committee, the Review Committee on Genetic Manipulation and the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee. The roles and functions of these have been defined.

In Karnataka, a section of the media has implicitly linked the field trials of Bt Cotton to the Terminator gene. Professor M. Nanjundaswamy, President of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS), an organisation of farmers, even alleged that Bt Cotton contained the Terminator gene. On November 25, he issued an ultimatum to the State Government, to cancel within 24 hours, any permission granted to Monsanto to conduct field trials of Bollgard cotton. The KRRS, he threatened, would set fire to the three fields in Karnataka where the trials were on. (The State Government has no power to withdraw the permission granted to the company, as, in the first place, it did not grant the permission.)

A withering cotton plant of an unidentified crop variety in a pest-infested cotton field in northern Karnataka earlier this year. Will Monsanto's moves to introduce pest-resistant varieties of cotton prove a boon or bane for the ordinary farmer?

"Monsanto may be the Microsoft of the seed world, but they have a reputation at stake and will not do anything outside the strict regulations laid down by the Department of Biotechnology," Dr. Villoo Morawala-Patell, a plant molecular biologist who works out of the University of Agricultural Sciences and the National Centre for Biological Sciences set up by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore. "Bt Cotton is a good product as it requires far less pesticide and comes as part of an integrated pest management approach. There is work on Bt cotton being done in laboratories (not government-run) in India. China has in fact released a Bt cotton strain developed in its own research laboratories." Dr. Patell drew particular attention to the regulations that have now been put in place by the DBT and stressed that it would not make business sense for a profit-driven company like Monsanto to disregard or violate these. "Even assuming someone smuggles in the Terminator gene for laboratory research, there are terrific regulations at the trial level. I think the DBT has done a tremendous job in the last four to six months."

However, in the background of the growing global opposition to Monsanto's products, its technologies and its business strategies, at least in Karnataka, the State Government, the media, farmers organisations and plant genetists are on a Monsanto-alert. In the wake of media reports on Monsanto's field trials, C. Byre Gowda, Karnataka's Agriculture Minister told the press that the State Government was fully aware of the field trials in transgenic cotton in three sites in Raichur, Bellary and Haveri districts. Drawing a distinction between the Terminator technology and the Bt Cotton technology, he said that while the former should be opposed, it was absolutely necessary to develop transgenic pest-resistant cotton strains that would help lower the need for pesticides. (Significantly, pest attacks on cotton crops resulted in a spate of suicides in Karnataka recently.) The Minister also announced the setting up of a State Biotechnology Coordination Committee, which would monitor and regulate all genetic engineering experiments, including Monsanto's field trials of "genetically improved" cotton.

Monsanto enjoys a dominant position in the world cotton seed market. According to the Canada-based non-governmental organisation RAFI (Rural Advancement Foundation Internat-ional), Monsanto holds an 85 per cent share of the U.S. market and a enjoys a dominant position in cotton seed markets elsewhere. India is obviously an important new territory, which is why Monsanto has been at pains to clear all misconceptions about Bollgard Cotton. "Bollgard Cotton is the fastest adopted new product ever launched in the history of agriculture," claimed Mark. W. Wells, National Marketing Manager, Monsanto. Bollgard Cotton has been commercialised in the U.S., Australia, Mexico, China and South Africa.

The cotton variety, however, has not had an entirely straight track record. According to the September-October issue of the magazine The Ecologist, "Monsanto and its partners" agreed to a multimillion-dollar out-of-court settlement with farmers in the southern U.S., who used Monsanto's Bollgard Cotton seed. The seed had not proved effective against bollworm attack. Three farmers, who refused such a settlement, were awarded nearly $2 million by the Mississippi Seed Arbitration Council.

Mark Wells, however, told Frontline that Monsanto had never paid settlement money for the failure of its Bollgard crop in the U.S. or anywhere else. Monsanto's Web page admits to problems with the 1996 Bollgard Cotton crop grown on 1.8 million acres of land in the U.S., owing to "unusually high bollworm infestations". Even so, the Web page claims, a "vast majority" of cotton growers were satisfied with the product's overall performance. It does not mention legal costs or out-of-court settlements.

Meanwhile, the world's largest international agricultural research network in the public domain has banned the Terminator and related genetic seed sterilisation technology from its crop breeding programmes. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) at a meeting on October 3 adopted the anti-Terminator proposal put forward by agricultural scientist Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, who is the chair of CGIAR's Genetic Resources Policy Committee.

While Monsanto tries to push the Terminator genie back into its bottle, there is concern in the scientific community that opposition to Monsanto's project may take the form of blind opposition to all genetically modified crops in the absence of public awareness of biotechnology and its uses in increasing agricultural production.