The newspaper Mint reported yesterday that the US-based agriculture giant Monsanto has settled its disputes with three prominent Indian seed companies. The companies were battling Monsanto over royalties owed for the use of the seed giant’s gene-based technology to modify cotton seeds. In 1996, Monsanto introduced the Bollgard technology, which modified cotton seeds to be resistant to the feared crop-eating bollworms. In 1998, Monsanto tied up with the India-based Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company (Mahyco) to launch Bollgard seeds in India.
Since then, Bt cotton—a commonly used name for the modified seeds—has been at the heart of a protracted battle over the benefits of genetically modified crops in farming in India. While the yields seemingly increased with Bt cotton seeds, the rising prices of the modified seed pushed the already-poor farmers further into debt, causing them to oppose the seed giant. Meanwhile, for several years, Monsanto and the Indian seed companies—who often appear to be backed by the central government—have been involved in a tussle over the regulation of the price of using the proprietary technology, a battle that cost the US seed giant nearly $83 million in business in 2016. Despite the recent settlement, Monsanto remains at loggerheads with several other Indian companies as well as the central government.
In their book A Frayed History: The Journey of Cotton in India, the journalist and writer Meena Menon and the activist and researcher Uzramma trace the growth of cotton in India from the pre-colonial era to present day, when cotton “hand-weavers are reduced to penury,” while its growers battle “rising costs of cultivation … and the spectre of suicide.” In the following extract from the book, Menon and Uzramma tackle the “Bt cotton conundrum.” They describe how Monsanto encouraged farmers in India to start using Bollgard seeds, its run-ins with the government, and whether the tussle over GM crops directly impacted farm-related suicides.
Monsanto has had an aggressive media campaign and has, in interactions with farmers asked them to increase the number of cotton plants per acre. In a video recorded by US journalist Trevor Aaronson, who travelled with a Monsanto team in Vidarbha in June 2009, Monsanto officials can be seen interacting with small groups of farmers, promoting Bollgard 2 [the second generation Bollgard technology]. Farmers usually plant cotton at intervals of three feet by three feet in an acre, i.e., about 4,800 plants per acre. The Monsanto official said now there is improved seed in the form of Bollgard 2 (and no one asked what happened to Bollgard 1), it was time to increase the number of plants per acre in deep soils to about 7,500 to 8,000 per acre and in lighter soil to 6,500 to 7,000 per acre. They asked farmers to plant seeds closer and reduce the distance between plants. They did not mention the fact that the seeds would do better in irrigated conditions, only that early maturing varieties would do better in dryland conditions. Bollgard 2 would protect against four types of caterpillars, as against the three in Bollgard 1, save the use of pesticides, and increase yields. Next came the advice on how to grow cotton. Fertilisers are needed at the time of sowing—not 20 days later. Urea was to be added at regular intervals and it was important to spray soluble chemicals for plant growth and also fungicides to prevent leaf reddening, a sign of poor nutrition. The officials kept telling the farmers to get a copy of the bill—it was their right! And they were told to look after the plants well.
In other villages farmers said they were getting ten quintals or more per acre due to good management even before Bt cotton, but now they sprayed less (note that spraying had not stopped) and yields were more. Earlier, farmers sprayed 10 to 15 rounds of pesticides, or 25 percent of the cost of production. Farmers planting Bollgard 2 in some places got from a minimum 10 quintals to even 30 quintals per acre, in a few cases. They also spoke of pests like thripps, and in any case, they sprayed for secondary pests. Farmers said that earlier Bt cotton yields were three to five quintals per hectare but now it was much more—so much so that it was difficult to get labour to pick it. Some were considering a mechanised means of harvest and were ready to invest lakhs of rupees. A few farmers said the yield increase was three to five quintals per acre after planting Bollgard. Their initial fears of Bt cotton changed after they started planting it and also the media helped them understand Bt cotton.
The government obviously left it to the good offices of the company and absolved itself of extension work. While Btcotton seeds were popular in the absence of other choices, the company was hauled up by the Maharashtra government. In September 2012, the government cancelled the licence of Mahyco to sell 12 varieties of Bt cotton hybrids for allegedly giving false information to agriculture department officials on seed supply for the kharif season. The action was taken by the office of the Controller and Director, Commissionerate of Agriculture (Inputs and Quality Control) under the Maharashtra Cotton Seed Rules, 2010. On 31 May 2012, the government issued a show cause notice to Mahyco, asking it to explain the alleged black marketing and hoarding of seeds and withholding of information on seed supply for the kharif season. The company also failed to submit detailed information at the district level.
That season, Bt cotton MRC 7351 packets could not be distributed properly. This led to unrest among farmers. As a result, Bt cotton seeds were sold at a higher price in the black market. A first information report was lodged against the company at the Beed police station on 1 June 2012 for cheating and criminal breach of trust. In the 2011–12 kharif season, the company said it would make available 1,056,000 Bt cotton seed packets and provided 1,066,000 packets. However, the number of packets made available declined to 650,000 packets. When the government asked Mahyco to explain, the company could not answer properly and blamed production issues. Mahyco had, in reality, supplied 850,000 packets, about 200,000 over the stated amount. The excess went to dealers and sub-dealers who sold them for a higher price.
In April 2012, the government filed cases of cheating and criminal breach of trust in 18 districts against Mahyco for failing to deliver the promised quota of a single variety of Btcotton seeds during the 2011 kharif season. Mahyco went to court and got anticipatory bail and a stay on the operation of the FIR.
Bt cotton was the first genetically modified (GM) crop to get the green signal, in 2002, and since then there have been conflicting reports on its qualities. The pro- and anti-lobbies are clearly set out. The government scientists and companies are ranged against a small battery of anti-GM campaigners, among them scientists and activists who are questioning the need for Bt cotton and biotechnological interventions in crops.
Some are sceptical about the way it was approved, disturbed by the fact that India does not have its own GM-testing laboratory, that data is coming from the industry and therefore unreliable, and other aspects. The private sector is also financing research in Indian agri universities in the absence of public funding. Any technology, and an expensive one at that, has to be critically appraised and reviewed. In India, unfortunately, there is little space for that, though the Economic Survey (Ministry of Finance 2015) has accepted the need for caution.
A host of studies has demonstrated significant net benefits of GM crops (Kathage and Qaim) with leading countries such as Brazil and now China opening up to new GM technologies and aggressively building their own research capacity. Nonetheless there are good reasons for some of the public apprehensions on GMOs. Therefore, the regulatory process in India needs to evolve so as to address the concerns in a way that does not come in the way [of] adapting high yielding technologies and rapidly moving towards the world’s agro-technological frontier.
Bt cotton was meant to be grown in irrigated areas yet the cotton area, 60 percent of which is rainfed, is almost covered with transgenic hybrids. Unlike the rest of the world, only India grows Bt hybrids that the farmer has to buy every year at a high cost. There is no doubt that costs of cultivation have risen after Bt cotton, since the seeds themselves are so expensive. The costs off set the need for insecticides on Bt cotton, as research is quick to point out but that has been belied by both Monsanto Mahyco’s Bollgard 1 and 2 developing resistance to the pink bollworm, which wrecked cotton in Gujarat and other states in 2014–15, and earlier too. Besides, new pests have come up for the first time on cotton—the mealy bug, for instance, and whiteflies have increased, apart from mirids.
Suicides increased in the 1990s, and some argue that since Bt cotton came only in 2002 it cannot be blamed for farm suicides. The point we are making is that Bt cotton exacerbated a fragile situation. Introducing an expensive seed like Bt cotton into a situation fraught with uncertainties of price, credit, rainfall, and inputs, has not resolved the crisis.
Unfortunately, the debate on farm suicides has been hijacked by a pro and anti-Bt cotton narrative, obfuscating the real issues. Going beyond this untenable position, we say that Bt cotton, after the initial promise of higher yields and expanding area, has not resolved the farmers’ problems of pests, yield (which it was not meant to) or reduced the cost of production. The innumerable studies and voices for modern biotechnology gloss over the need for other simpler and necessary inputs for agriculture. We are not against biotechnology at all, but that is not really the issue at stake here.
Studies on the efficacy of Bt cotton point to higher gains and tend to dismiss the exorbitant price of seeds or the attacks by secondary pests. The introduction of hybrids in India already made sure that some traditional forms of farming would cease to exist when it came to seed reuse, saving or selection, and multiplication. Farmers would be slaves to seed companies for hybrid seeds every year, adding to their expenses. It is not for nothing that seed companies have woken up to the need for straight varieties that are better adapted to dryland conditions and are resistant to pests. The numerous studies on Bt cotton and its impact have found higher yields, lesser number of sprays, and improvement in economic conditions. These studies also make it seem as if the farmer was exposed to a wide array of choices and then chose Bt cotton on merit, which is not the case, just as it was not in the case of hybrids. There is evidence that other seeds were not produced by companies or the public sector and there was, in fact, no real choice. No doubt, the farmers were keen on a new technology that would tackle the bollworm, and they did take to it in a big way, even before the official release of Bt cotton. [In “On the Failure of Bt Cotton: Analyzing a Decade of Experience,” a 2012 paper published in the Economic and Political Weekly, Ronald Herring and N Chandrashekhara Rao wrote:]
Despite court stays and state government bans, Bt cotton hybrids are now essentially universal. In his announcement of the moratorium on Btbrinjal in 2010, the then minister of environment Jairam Ramesh stated that more than 90 per cent of cotton farmers in India grow Bt cotton. Without adopting the most demeaning cultural urban bias, it is difficult to think that farmers would adopt and spread a technology that is literally killing them.
Arguments like these regarding Bt cotton that go exclusively on acreage and the belief that farmers really had an informed choice do not examine the other reasons such as market forces and the push by the seed-fertiliser lobby for the expanding area under Bt cotton. We have a biotechnological solution for a problem that did not exist in the first place—both the problem and its “solution” were introduced into the country. The existing strengths of Indian cotton were not even developed or scaled up. Bt cotton was not a technology developed by the farmer through careful seed selection as some believe. Bt cotton made an unofficial entry into the cotton fields in 2001, even before formal government approval in 2002, and people took to it because of the initial benefits.
Our argument is that technology must be suitable to the people. Farmers did not have a choice of hybrids—they chose seeds not knowing the full implications and were left battling the menace of pests, notably the green bollworm. It is also a fact that farmers want new and improved seeds, but the full consequences of using them—the kind of inputs the new seeds need—must be explained to them. The question remains, however, as to why rain-fed India is growing a water-intensive crop like hybrid cotton. Thus, the entire approach to crop research and development and agriculture must be questioned. While seed varieties play a major part in the success of the crop to a large extent, they are subject to other factors, such as water, temperature, and soil health. Reusing seeds and selecting new and improved varieties make the farmer less dependent on external factors. There are more voices in support of straight varieties of cotton. Countries like China have opted for straight varieties, and not hybrids, unlike India, which prefers expensive Bt hybrids. Even before Bt cotton, technology intervened on behalf of the farmer and made her dependent on private companies largely. [In a paper published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 1999, CS Prasad wrote:]
The present suicides of cotton farmers are directly linked to the policy of the Government to favour those varieties that were amenable to huge inputs of irrigation, fertilizer and pesticides. It is becoming increasingly clear that such policies are counterproductive and unless there is a fundamental questioning of the basis of these like the inferiority of Indian cotton, these trends are unlikely to be reversed. A techno–historical audit of cotton technology can help us examine these axioms and replace them with others consonant with sustainable cotton farming.
This is an extract from A Frayed History: The Journey of Cotton in India, by Meena Menon and Uzramma, published by the Oxford University Press.