GM Technology Impacts in India - Good and Bad
On a gray morning, an Indian cotton farmer swallowed a bottle of pesticide and fell dead at the threshold of his small mud house. The farmer, Anil Kondba Shende, 31, left behind a wife and two small sons, debts that his family knew about only vaguely and a soggy, ruined 3.5-acre patch of cotton plants that had been his only source of income. Whether it was debt, shame or some other cause that drove Mr. Shende to kill himself rests with him alone. But his death was by no means an isolated one, and in it lies an alarming reminder of the crisis facing the Indian farmer.
Across India, 17,107 farmers committed suicide in 2003, the most recent year for which government figures are available. Anecdotal reports suggest that the high rates are continuing. Though the crisis has been building for years, it presents an increasingly thorny political challenge for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. High suicide rates and rural despair helped topple the previous government two years ago and put Mr. Singh in power. Changes brought on by 15 years of economic reforms have opened Indian farmers to global competition and given them access to expensive and promising biotechnology, but not necessarily opened the way to higher prices, bank loans, irrigation or insurance against pests and rain. Mr. Singh’s government, which has emerged as a strong ally of America, has become one of the loudest critics in the developing world of Washington’s $18 billion a year in subsidies, which have helped drive down the price of cotton. At the same time, frustration is building in India with American multinational companies peddling genetically modified seeds. These companies have made deep inroads in rural India, bringing new opportunities but also new risks as Indian farmers pile up debt. M. S. Swaminathan, the geneticist who was the scientific leader of India’s Green Revolution 40 years ago and is now chairman of the National Commission on Farmers, was quoted as saying, “The suicides are an extreme manifestation of some deep-seated problems which are now plaguing our agriculture. They are climatic. They are economic. They are social.”
Monsanto has more than doubled its sales of Bt cotton here in the last year, and Indian growers are adopting the technology heavily. Indian government figures recently released predict plantings of 8.1 million acres of GM cotton, up from 3.1 million acres in 2005. The modified seed can cost nearly twice as much as non insect-protected seed, and the allure of pest-free plants has nudged many farmers toward taking on ever larger loans, often from moneylenders charging exorbitant interest rates. A legal challenge from the government of the state of Andhra Pradesh forced Monsanto and its Indian associate to reduce the royalty it collected from the sale of patented seeds in India. The company has appealed to the Indian Supreme Court. (New York Times, 9/19/06 & Conversations About Plant Biotechnology, 9/26/06).
