NEWS : RSS Stand on Bt Cotton Forced Government’s Hand on Monsanto

By Bhavdeep Kang on 13/03/2016 • 2 Comments

RSS-affiliates Swadesh Jagran Manch and Bharatiya Kisan Sangh have pushed the government to cut royalty on Bt cotton seeds and the cap on the price of the seeds

New Delhi: The hand of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), detectable in various aspects of policy-making, on occasion curls into an uncompromising fist that stops the Central government in its tracks, as in the case of the Land Acquisition Bill and more recently, on genetically modified (GM) seeds.

Monsanto, the controversial munitions manufacturer-turned-multinational seed giant, had threatened to quit India if the agriculture ministry capped royalty on its Bt cotton seeds – currently the only GM seeds available commercially in India. In response, RSS-affiliates Swadeshi Jagran Manch and Bharatiya Kisan Sangh said farewell and godspeed. They cheered as the ministry cut royalty on Bt cotton seeds by over 70% on March 9 and capped the price of the seeds – which earlier retailed at 1,000 rupees or more – at 800 rupees per 450 grams. A miffed Monsanto-Mahyco Biotech India (MMBL), which licensed its Bt seeds to 28 Indian companies, has moved court.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh, regarded as a competent agriculture minister in the previous NDA regime, is believed to have played a significant role in moderating the Modi government’s stand on GM technology. Singh is on the same page as the RSS with regard to GM technology and while in the opposition, he had questioned the Seed Bill proposed by the then Minister of Agriculture, Sharad Pawar, on the grounds that it allowed a loophole for registration of GM seeds.

The RSS battle against GM seeds goes back to the introduction of Bt cotton in 2002. The RSS’s aversion to GM technology is by no means shared by the government. As chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi encouraged Bt cotton. As prime minister, his signature Make in India programme touts the country as a GM destination. He has even said, “Hybrid seeds, including GM seeds, represent new business opportunities in India” and “India has the potential to become a major producer of transgenic rice and several genetically modified or engineered vegetables”.
But his view does not quite keep with the BJP’s election manifesto in 2014, which says “GM food will not be allowed without full scientific evaluation” – a nuanced statement arrived at after a prolonged tussle between pro- and anti-GM factions in the Sangh.

Environment minister Prakash Javadekar took shelter behind the “scientific evaluation” clause when the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee approved field trials of 13 GM crops, including mustard, brinjal, rice and chickpea, in July of 2014.

A few months later, he told parliament, “The Union government is of the view that research in GM and confined field trials for generating bio-safety data with all due precautions should be allowed to continue in the national interest.” Most state governments, including BJP-ruled ones, refused permission for field trials.

In a lateral move, the anti-GM lobby launched an offensive against Monsanto. “We attacked on several fronts,” said the Swadeshi Jagran Manch’s Ashwini Mahajan. First came the Competition Commission of India’s observation that MMBL was “abusing” its dominance of the Bt cotton market. Then, farmers’ groups lobbied for the regulation of cotton seed prices, which led to the setting up of a committee under the agriculture ministry for that purpose. The National Seeds Association of India (NSAI) questioned MMBL’s monopoly and restrictive licensing norms in the cotton seed sector and supported the regulation of cotton seed prices. It came down hard on the Big Seed MNCs – who are members of the NSAI – for opposing price regulation.

MMBL was further cornered when research found that its GM cotton seeds, Bollguard 1 and Bollguard 2, had failed. The USP of these seeds was that they would be a pest-proof version the cotton crop, at least from the pernicious pink bollworm. But the Central Institute of Cotton Research found that these seeds did not work. On a complaint from the BJP’s Kisan Morcha, the commerce ministry’s Department of Industry Policy and Promotion served a notice to MMBL, asking why its patent should not be revoked. Bt cotton, it now turns out, is a self-limiting technology, effective only for a few years, until the target pest develops resistance. Besides, it is ineffective against other major cotton pests, such as the mealy bug and white fly, which have heavily damaged Bt crops in recent years.

India has always been opposed to an intellectual property rights regime in agriculture, maintaining that seed sovereignty is undermined by proprietary technologies. Also, GM and hybrid seeds – developed in labs rather than by farmer-breeders on the field – eventually displace traditional varieties. Bt cotton is a shining example, now sown in over 90% of the land under cotton.
The RSS-BJP meetings of December 2015 and January 2016 are believed to have sharpened the budget’s stated focus on agriculture. Specific items on its wishlist – such as crop insurance, the U-turn on MNREGA and the emphasis on micro-irrigation – were accepted, as were recommendations on the Dalit entrepreneurship fund, which dovetails with its “samajik samrastha” campaign, and on the Deen Dayal Upadhyay centenary. On GM, however, the struggle is likely to be a prolonged one.   Powerful forces are at work, with the US government – notably current president Barack Obama and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton – nudging India towards “transformative technologies” in agriculture.

SOURCE : http://thewire.in/2016/03/13/rss-stand-on-bt-cotton-forced-governments-hand-on-monsanto-24653/

NEWS : Falling Crop Prices: Double whammy for cottonseed companies

Poor demand and price controls squeeze the once fast-growing industry.

Written by Harish Damodaran | New Delhi | Indian Express | Updated: July 2, 2015 5:16 am

Labour, fertiliser and pesticide costs have all gone up, whereas the seed price has remained the same. If our margins are going to shrink, making it difficult to pay our seed growers and invest in R&D.    

Falling crop prices isn’t good news for seed firms, given implications on demand for their product.
This is being seen in cotton, where average kapas realisations of Rs 3,900-4,000 per quintal in 2014-15, against Rs 5,000-plus for the previous year’s crop, has dampened farmers’ enthusiasm to plant. Ground-level reports suggest significant acreage diversion this time, especially to pulses, groundnut and maize whose price prospects appear more promising.

But companies selling cotton seeds are facing a double whammy, not just from lower demand, but also inability to raise prices due to controls imposed by state governments in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. These four states account for over 70 per cent of the estimated domestic market of 50-51 million packets, each containing 450 grams of Bt and 120 grams non-Bt cotton seeds.
(Bt refers to Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium that produces proteins toxic to bollworm insect pests and whose genes are inserted into crops using recombinant DNA/genetic engineering tools).


When Bt cotton was introduced in India in 2002, the seeds were sold at Rs 1,600 per packet. But in 2006, the AP government fixed the maximum retail price (MRP) for Bt cotton seeds, incorporating the US life sciences major Monsanto’s Bollgard single-gene (BG-I) technology, at Rs 750 per packet.
Other states soon followed suit, even enacting their own price control legislations. In 2008, they extended the Rs 750 rate to even seeds based on Monsanto’s more advanced Bollgard double-gene (BG-II) construct, while further slashing the MRP for BG-I packets to Rs 650.

These prices remained unchanged until 2013, when they were increased to Rs 830 for BG-I and Rs 930 for BG-II packets. The rates haven’t been revised upwards since then; Maharashtra’s BJP-led government under Devendra Fadnavis, on June 8, actually reduced the MRPs of BG-I and BG-II cotton seeds to Rs 730 and Rs 830 per packet respectively for the current year.

The above price reductions were largely enabled by a lowering of the ‘trait fee’ being paid by seed companies to Mahyco-Monsanto Biotech — a joint venture between the St Louis-headquartered firm and its Indian partner, Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company — for introducing the Bollgard gene construct into their own cotton hybrids. The trait fee, originally Rs 900 per packet, was brought down to Rs 122.96 for BG-I and Rs 183.46 for BG-II technologies.

The reduction in MRPs helped in the widespread diffusion of Bt cotton technology, similar to what low call charges did for mobile telephony though the latter was more a result of market competition than state fiat. Annual sales of Bt seed packets soared from 1.05 lakh in 2002 to 500 lakh-plus last year. But state-directed MRP reductions are proving increasingly counter-productive, with seed companies struggling to get farmers to produce for them.

 “India has some 70 lakh farmers who produce kapas (raw un-ginned cotton) for commercial sale. But there are also 2 lakh-odd growers who produce the hybrid cotton seeds that the former plant. We cannot ignore them,” observed Raju Barwale, managing director, Mahyco.

Hybrid seeds production is a highly labour-intensive affair, where the male part of a flower is removed one day and the resultant female parent manually pollinated with the pollen from another flower the next day. It takes 7-8 labourers working over two months to produce cottonseeds from one acre.

“A normal cotton grower would harvest 10 quintals of kapas and incur expenses of Rs 20,000-22,000 per acre. The corresponding kapas yield for the hybrid seed farmer will be 4.65 quintals, taking an average seed recovery of 300 kg (kapas contains 65 per cent seed and 35 per cent lint). Also, his expenses would work out to Rs 55,000-65,000 per acre, of which Rs 45,000-50,000 is labour costs alone,” noted Sameer Mulay, managing director of the Aurangabad-based Ajeet Seeds.

The high labour requirement also means that hybrid cottonseed cultivation is concentrated in select pockets: Gadwal (Telangana), Madanapalle (AP), Attur (Tamil Nadu), Gajendragarh (Karnataka), Idar, Khedbrahma and Sabarkantha (Gujarat), and Jalna, Buldhana and Nanded (Maharashtra).

 “In the last five years, we have had to increase our procurement price from Rs 275-300 to Rs 480 per kg of first-stage ginned seeds,” added Mulay, whose company sources cottonseeds from over 50,000 growers.

According to the industry, the cost of 450 grams of fully-processed clean Bt cottonseeds is anywhere between Rs 275 to 300. To these, if expenses towards trait fees (Rs 183), 120 grams of non-Bt seeds (Rs 45) and administrative/factory overheads (Rs 100) are added, the total per-packet cost comes to around Rs 620.

“An MRP of Rs 830 hardly leaves much for distribution, marketing and branding, leave alone undertaking R&D and extension work,” an industry representative claimed, while pointing out that seeds (assuming 1.6 packets per acre) makes up just 6-7 per cent of cultivation costs for the farmer. “Labour, fertiliser and pesticide costs have all gone up, whereas the seed price has remained the same. If our margins are going to shrink, making it difficult to pay our seed growers and invest in R&D, the ultimate sufferer will be the regular kapas farmer,” he said.

SOURCE: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/falling-crop-prices-double-whammy-for-cottonseed-companies/

NEWS : Bt Cotton responsible for suicides in rain-fed areas, says study

Updated: June 21, 2015 12:26 IST | Vidya Venkat
The Hindu

Annual suicide rates of farmers in rain-fed areas are directly related to increase in Bt Cotton adoption, say scientists. File photo: Kamal Narang | The Hindu

The cultivation of Bt cotton, a genetically modified, insect-resistant cotton variety, is a risky affair for Indian farmers practising rain-fed agriculture, according to a latest study published by California-based agricultural scientists in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe.

Annual suicide rates of farmers in rain-fed areas are directly related to increase in Bt cotton adoption, say the study’s authors Andrew Paul Gutierrez, Luigi Ponti, Hans R. Herren, Johann Baumgärtner and Peter E. Kenmore, who are associated with the University of California, Berkeley, and the Centre for the Analysis of Sustainable Agricultural Systems, California. 

Revisiting the raw annual suicide data for Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Maharashtra during the period 2001–2010, the authors found 86,607 of 549,414 suicides were by farmers, and 87 % were males with the numbers peaking in the 30–44 age class. Total suicides per year per state were regressed singly on states averages of proportion of area seeded to rainfed cotton, average farm size, cotton growing area, area of Bt cotton, proportion of area with Bt cotton, and simulated average yield/ha that includes the effects of weather. Excluding the proportion of area seeded to rainfed cotton, linear multiple regression shows suicides decrease with increasing farm size and yield but increase with the area under Bt cotton, the authors note. 

The study is significant for two reasons: first, most cotton cultivation in India is rain-fed. Second, between 2002 and 2010, the adoption of Bt cotton hybrid went up significantly to 86 per cent of the total cultivated area of cotton in India, according to International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications.

Though cultivating the Bt cotton variety may be economic in irrigated areas, the costs of Bt seed and insecticide increase the risk of farmer bankruptcy in low-yield rain-fed settings. Further the inability to “use saved seed and inadequate agronomic information trap cotton farmers on biotechnology and insecticide treadmills,” the authors note.

The study also challenges the common assumption in economic analyses that cotton pests must be controlled to prevent monetary losses, thus encouraging Bt cotton adoption. The annual emergence of the key cotton pest pink bollworm in spring is poorly timed to attack rain-fed cotton and large populations of the pest fail to develop in non-Bt rain-fed cotton, the authors note. This reduces and usually prevents the need for Bt cotton and disruptive insecticides. The authors recommend that high-density short-season cottons could increase yields and reduce input costs in irrigated and rain-fed cotton.

Bt cotton has been shown to improve cotton yields by past studies, such as the one conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute in 2012. This study, examining the contribution of Bt cotton adoption to long-term average cotton yields in India in nine cotton-producing States from 1975 to 2009, showed that Bt cotton contributed 19 per cent of total yield growth over time, since its introduction in 2002.

However, experts have responded to the new Berkeley study with concern. Former Union Environment and Rural Development Minister and Rajya Sabha member Jairam Ramesh told The Hindu that India, now being the second largest country in the world cultivating Bt cotton, cannot afford to ignore the findings of this new study. “These findings call for serious discussion relating to the GM crop’s long-term sustainability in Indian agriculture,” he said.

Agricultural expert M.S. Swaminathan said the merits of Bt cotton adoption remain debatable as some have approved it for giving better yield, while some question the claim. “However, I support the adoption of higher yielding crop varieties as most of our cotton farmers are small farmers who need better yields to earn profits. Back in 2004, I had advised seed companies selling hybrid cotton to farmers to also sell insurance schemes alongside, so that if crops fail for reasons beyond the farmer’s control, they can recover losses. But these recommendations remain to be adopted widely.”

SOURCE : http://m.thehindu.com/news/national/bt-cotton-responsible-for-suicides-in-rainfed-areas-says-study/article7337684.ece

ARTICLE : Pier-reviewed study on Bt cotton in India - cause of suicides

 

Authors : Andrew Paul Gutierrez, Luigi Ponti, Hans R Herren, Johann Baumgärtner and Peter E Kenmore

 

Environmental Sciences Europe 2015, 27:12  doi:10.1186/s12302-015-0043-8

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.enveurope.com/content/27/1/12

Received:	31 October 2014
Accepted:	22 April 2015
Published:	17 June 2015

© 2015 Gutierrez et al.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.

Conclusions

In the light of this more thorough holistic agro-ecological analysis, recommendations by international agricultural economists [20, 44] and some Indian government official to implement the Bt technology in cotton (and other crops) as a solution for pest problems become questionable. Worldwide, the use of pesticides to solve pest problems promised short-run economic benefit but instead led farmers onto path dependency [56, 91] that increases system complexity by inducing pest outbreaks (iatrogenic effects) that may cause crop losses (idiopathic effects) [34, 47, 92] and increase costs (see Additional file 1). In his 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics lecture titled “The Pretense of Knowledge” concerning larger economic issues, F.A. von Hayek stated “…[economists]…have… little cause for pride: as a profession [we] … made a mess of things” [93]. In biotechnology, agricultural economists have pushed forward agendas without understanding the ecological bases of the crop production problem and in the process they often wrongly filled the information gaps created by corporate intellectual property constraints on field research on GM crops [76]. The adherence to doctrines that exclusively accept or select observations and disregard fundamental ecological principles for supporting scientific claims imposes serious limitations on their conclusions and has been a hindrance to progress in agricultural research [85]. In India and elsewhere, subsistence farmers often lack a clear understanding of pest control issues that trapped them on a pesticide treadmill (e.g., [11]) and now onto a biotechnology treadmill [33] and that ignores the impending collapse of ground water levels for irrigated cotton [26]. Subsistence farmers, especially in areas with low but high variable yields can ill afford the high costs of industrial farming technologies that contribute to bankruptcy and in some suicide cases.

In review, PBW has been a chronic severe problem in long-season irrigated Indian cotton and can provide inoculum for infestations of rainfed cotton during late summer amplifying feedback and creating an inherent conflict between the two systems. When insecticides became available for control of PBW and other pests, outbreaks of highly damaging bollworms (and other pests) were induced, and F1 Bt hybrid cotton that discouraged seed saving was introduced for control. Prior to the onset of heavy pesticide use, bollworm was not a major pest in Indian cotton [48]. As a percentage of the total revenues, the costs of the Bt and insecticide technologies decrease with increasing yield making it an acceptable assurance option in high-yield areas, but not in areas with low yields with high variability where the high costs increase the risk of bankruptcy (and suicide). Suicides in rainfed areas of south-central India are inversely related to farm size and yields and directly related to area of Bt cotton adoption, or more likely the combined high costs of Bt seed and insecticide. Short-season high-density cotton is a viable solution in both irrigated and rainfed cotton reducing the need for the Bt technology. Even where irrigation is available, short-season cotton could be grown rainfed allowing the irrigation water and the period prior to the monsoon to be used for the production of other food crops. This would promote development of diversified and sustainable, including organic agriculture. A recent report shows that despite near complete adoption of Bt cotton in India, insecticide use was higher in 2013 than in 2000 and now targets induced outbreaks of hemipteran insect pests [69]. Last, assuming no change in rainfall, increases in temperature due to climate change during the monsoon season would increase productivity <8 % in rainfed cotton in central and south India. The above results amply illustrate how policy makers need holistic analyses before new technologies are promoted in agricultural development.

 

Authors’ information

A.P. Gutierrez is a professor in the Graduate School in the College of Natural Resources at the University of California at Berkeley, CA, and CEO of CASAS NGO. He has more than 40 years of experience in agro-ecosystem analysis and bio-economics with extensive experience in field research in cotton and other crops worldwide.

L. Ponti is Marie Curie Fellow and a research scientist at ENEA with expertise in modeling and GIS.

H. Herren is World Food Prize Laureate and CEO of the Millennium Institute.

J. Baumgärtner is retired full professor from the University of Milan with expertise in modeling ecosystems including cotton with interest in philosophical aspects of agricultural systems study and management.

P.E. Kenmore has worked over the past 33 years in India, holds an Honorary Doctorate from Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and was formerly head of FAO Plant Protection globally and then head of FAO (Representative) in India.

 

SOURCE : http://www.enveurope.com/content/27/1/12

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12302-015-0043-8/fulltext.html#