India’s agricultural sector is in danger of being left behind, as its neighbors China and Bangladesh are moving ahead with their embrace of genetically modified food crops.
Are GM crops the secret to India’s Next Green Revolution?
China and Bangladesh, have been keen on utilizing the newly invented GM crop varieties to boost their agricultural sector and also address their food security.
Among the various GM crops they’ve introduced in recent decades, GM rice is of special importance. Also known as Golden Rice, the Provitamin A Biofortified Rice Event (GR2E), is a rice variety that is rich in Vitamin A and was developed with the aim to reduce Vitamin A deficiency in developing countries.
Globally, one in nine people do not have access to nutritious food. And the situation is worse in countries like Bangladesh and India. Development of such crop varieties is critical to fighting food poverty and loss of life from Vitamin A deficiency.
The rice was approved by the health and agricultural agencies of both the U.S. and Canada. Despite the worldwide approval (except European Union), Golden Rice still faces opposition in India from anti-GMO activists.
Researchers have hinted that anti-GM activism against the use of Golden Rice in India has resulted in the loss of 1.4 million life-years.
India’s battle is not just with the Golden Rice. The Bt Cotton (GM cotton) had to go through a lot of opposition before reaching the hands of the farmers in India.
Having lived in the two cotton capitals of India (Bombay and Coimbatore), I was witness to the plight of farmers whose cotton crops suffered from diseases.
Barun Mitra of Pragati expounds this more clearly in his article about Bt cotton, “Traditionally, cotton has been plagued by various types of bollworms, including larvae of moths and butterflies. Insecticides used to fight the menace were a major expense for farmer, apart from posing risks to health and environment. In addition, some of the pests were developing resistance to chemical insecticide.”
Thankfully, the farmers found a solution in Bt Cotton, which was first commercially planted in 2002. It reduced the dependence on pesticide and increased the yields. Successive development of the Bt crop enabled it to become a very strong and dependable livelihood crop. The yield now stands at 550 kg/ha against the 300 kg/ha during its initial days of introduction.
But lately GMO crops have largely been shunned. Bt Brinjal (eggplant), Golden Rice, GM maize, GM soybean, and many other GM crops have been denied entry in India. With the empowerment of anti-GMO groups from foreign funds, the war against GM crops in India has reached an ugly stage.
India now also plans to ban the weed killer glyphosate. A number of states have already banned it and similar formulas. Even worse, some states are planning to go completely organic, with the elimination of gene-edited crops as well.
The anti-GMO and the craze about organics is a big blow only to the farmers, but also to the 1.2 billion consumers in India. India’s current agricultural success was only possible because of its embrace of genetically edited crops developed by Norman Borlaug.
In a desperate attempt to rescue millions from dying of starvation, the Indian government in the 1970s sought the help of genetically edited crop varieties which eventually rescued India. Dubbed the green revolution, the event transformed India into an agricultural superpower, and the country now exports the excess production globally.
However, the country has shot itself in the legs with its defiant stance against GMO food crops that is already benefitting farmers and consumers in Bangladesh and China.
If this attitude of India continues, there will be a repeat of the dark 1960s and just as they pressed the panic button, they will again find out that they are desperately in need of GMO crops.
Thankfully, not everyone in India is against GMO. The press in India is open to publishing the discussion and even openly asking the people to not believe in unauthenticated anti-GMO campaigns.
The future of India will be decided by what it will do with the seeds.
Photo by Trisha Downing on Unsplash.
Vijay says
“There are 800 million hungry people in the world, for them, food is like medicine! pretty much everything we eat today has already been genetically modified compared to the original plants. Most of these plants have been selectively bred over many generations to increase both their yield as well as their resilience to inclement weather conditions or pests. But in contrast to the very targeted (precise) interventions of gene-editing tools, conventional breeding has to go through trial and error and a coincidental increase in yield is often linked to other, sometimes unwanted, changes in the physiology of the plant. Thus, modern gene-editing is more precise and much faster – so why is there no widespread use and application of it yet?”
– Richard J. Roberts, Nobel Prize in Medicine together with Philip A. Sharp in 1993 “for their discoveries of split genes”
Vijay says
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the well-known journal Science, once summarized in a statement on labeling of GMOs that “the science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe.The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.”
louis wachsmuth says
I hate to bring up more bad news, but you may want to closely review today’s news from one of the so-called “fake news sources.” Are all these scientists all wrong or part of a socialist plot?
“Climate change is sapping nutrients from our food — and it could become a global crisis” By Samuel Myers, August 8 2019, Washington Post. Samuel Myers is a principal research scientist at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and director of the Planetary Health Alliance. “Feeding a planet inhabited by 10 billion people by mid-century — already a daunting task — is getting harder due to a little-known impact of global warming: the decline of essential nutrients in the world’s staple foods that exist in almost every single person’s diet around the world. The mechanism by which rising carbon dioxide saps nutrients from our food crops remains somewhat unclear, but the effect is consistent across most plant types from trees to grasses to edible crops: It is reducing the availability of zinc, iron, protein and key vitamins in wheat, rice and several other fundamental grains and legumes. ….These findings, which will appear this week as part of the most comprehensive review ever compiled on the two-way relationship between global warming and land use, highlight the urgent need to slash the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change. Human activity has increased atmospheric carbon more than 40 percent since the mid-19th century, enough to unleash a deadly onslaught of extreme weather made more destructive by rising seas. Without a drastic drop in emissions, those levels will climb even more quickly over the coming decades.”
….Scientists from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are meeting in Geneva this week to validate a 30-page summary for policymakers of a 1,000-page underlying report. Food security is high on the agenda.
Vijay says
Classic as ever, Louis.
Vijay says
Louis, I am well aware of the proceedings. It is just that they have been misleading people and some end up trusting them. I myself have worked for 4 years with a Lead author of United Nation IPCC’s 5th assessment report on Climate Change, in his office, going through temperature data sets. And I have also was trained by scientists from Climatic research unit, which produces the HadCrUT global temperature data. The very same scientists you mention here. I must admit that you always comment saying that I am not scientist while I am technically one and I have worked with the very guys you quote. I can say the same about you though. I request you to objectively study this matter without being carried away by outlandish claims like Polar will be ice free by 2013.
Mekasha Girma Zeleke says
Following …