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Policies Toward GM Crops In India cont.,

VI. Public Investments in Research

The Government of India, principally through its Department of Biotechnology, has for more than a decade directed a small but steady stream of treasury resources toward the development of its own GM crop varieties, as well as toward the simple backcrossing of foreign-developed GM traits into local germplasm. Between 1989-97, DBT spent a total of nearly 270 million rupees from the treasury (roughly $6 million) on plant and molecular biology research, with projects focused primarily on development of transgenic plants (Ghosh 1999). India’s public research investment policies toward GM crops thus deserve to be classified here as "promotional." Tangible scientific payoffs from these investments have been slow to develop, however, reflecting both the modest total size of the investment plus some longstanding limitations within India’s public sector research establishment. Without greater public spending on research, and without significant institutional reforms and policy adjustments, including some to help public researchers partner more effectively with the domestic and international private sector, India’s goal of developing its own commercially useful GM crop technologies could remain elusive.

As noted earlier, India has a long and distinguished history of making effective public investments in agricultural research through the national institutes and universities that operate under ICAR. Public research by state level governments in India has also grown since the mid-1970s, even to rival total ICAR spending at one point in the mid 1980s. India’s public sector investments in agricultural research, together with its formidable extension system, have had large impacts on productivity growth. By some estimates these impacts from research and extension have been larger even than those from government investment in rural infrastructure, education, irrigation, or power (Fan, Hazell, and Thorat 1999). Agricultural research and extension investments have been the source of roughly three fourths of all agricultural productivity growth in India in recent decades (Evenson, Pray, and Rosegrant 1999). Not all agricultural research in India has been public sector-led. After the mid-1980s, India’s more liberal international investment policies helped attract more private agricultural R&D spending into the country. Between 1987 and 1995, private seed company R&D expenditures in the country increased from 41.7 million rupees to 154.9 million rupees. Still, total public sector agricultural R&D in India continued to exceed private sector R&D by a wide margin of roughly 6 to 1 (Pray et al 1991 and Kelley 1998).

Modern biotechnology was first introduced into the Indian research community in the 1970s, when a significant number of Indian scientists trained in the United States and Europe returned to take up work in India (Balasubramanian 2000). Significant government investments began quite early as well, with establishment in 1982 of a National Biotechnology Board. In 1986 this board was established formally as India’s Department of Biotechnology inside the Ministry of Science and Technology (Sharma 1999). A significant part of DBT’s mission has always been to distribute and finance specific research contracts, and in the area of agriculture DBT set up six centers for plant molecular biology in different regions of the country and has provided research funding to those centers - primarily through ICAR - for the improvement of specific priority crops such as rice, mustard, chickpea, pigeonpea, and wheat (DBT 1999).

DBT must secure its budget every year from the Planning Commission and the Ministry of Finance, and the resources it receives are quite modest, despite the fact that senior political leaders frequently list biotechnology as among the keys to India’s future economic growth and prosperity.⁷ In 1998-99, the total research budget of DBT across all agricultural and non-agricultural areas was 1,040 million rupees, or roughly US$26 million. About 15 percent of this total (US$3.8 million) went for all plant biotechnology, including medicinal and aromatic plants, tree and woody species, and pilot plants for tissue culture. DBT’s investments in transgenic plant biotechnology in 1998-99 totaled only about US$ 1.3 million.⁸

With these modest treasury investments, DBT has been attempting to fund a significant spread of GM crop research activities, including not only basic transformation work but also research in extremely challenging areas such as abiotic stress (e.g., drought tolerance) and improved nutritional quality (e.g., protein quality, oil quantity and quality, or higher starch content). For example, ICAR is making efforts at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi to engineer potato and rice with improved protein content, and elsewhere it is using GM to modify the starch content of potato and the Vitamin E activity of mustard and groundnut (Paroda 1999). A number of more standard GM applications are also being researched, including Bt varieties of rice, cotton, pigeonpea, potato, and mustard. National researchers have also worked with transformed eggplant, cabbage, cauliflower, and tomato.

As ambitious as this GM research agenda is, most of the work so far is at an early stage, or confined to laboratory or greenhouse trials only (Ghosh 1999, Table 1). Of all the ICAR GM varieties under development, DBT as of 2000 had approved field trials only for GM eggplant and mustard. The Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) and the Central Institute for Cotton Research (CICR) have produced their own transformed Bt cotton, but as of 2000 just 100 plants had been grown in the laboratory only, and several years of backcrossing with local varieties would have to take place before any full scale field trials.

Over time, there is little doubt that India’s national researchers will be able to develop and field test their own GM crop varieties suitable and ready for farmers to use. Prior to commercial release, however, some significant IPR impediments are likely to be encountered. Many of the transgenes India’s researchers have been inserting are owned by foreign companies and have been made available for research purposes only. In the case of India’s GM rice, the transgenes come from IRRI free of charge, but IRRI in turn has them for research purposes only via MTAs from the private patent holders. When the time comes to consider a commercial release in India, negotiations will be necessary with these international patent holders. ICAR presently has no clear strategy to break through such looming IPR bottlenecks, and it has yet to undertake the kind of IPR literacy program for its researchers that Embrapa earlier undertook in Brazil. ⁹

In several other respects ICAR may face difficulties pursuing its independent course toward GM crop technology development. ICAR continues to be dominated by conventional plant breeders, many of whom were trained years ago, well before the latest advances in GM technologies (Murthyunjaya and Ranjitha 1998). Younger scientists have been trained to do GM work for ICAR through the Rockefeller Foundation’s rice biotechnology program, but often these people are hired away by the private sector, which pays more than twice the public sector salary. Younger scientists with good ideas can get support from DBT via ICAR, but excessive paperwork and long delays are routine. DBT’s budget is not only small; it also tends to be spread too thin since each separate institute in the national system lays its claim to at least some financing. For example, India's rice transformation budget is divided up between at least five different locations within the national system, which weakens the impact at any one location.

India’s national system takes pride in its independence yet some of its best work in the area of agribiotechnology has resulted from international donor support. Beginning in 1988 the Rockefeller Foundation became an important catalyst, helping India’s national institutes and universities to build infrastructure, train younger scientists, yet this important source of external support has recently been phased out. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is also providing assistance, since December 2000 through a new joint research project run by Michigan State University and India's Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI) in Delhi, working to enhance the beta-carotene content of mustard oil to fight blindness caused by Vitamin A deficiencies. Also, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands has funded an Andhra Pradesh-Netherlands Biotechnology Programme for Dryland Agriculture since 1996, engaging several ICAR institutes in a fruitful partnership to bring biotechnology applications to non-irrigated low-resource farmers producing sorghum, castor, groundnut, and pigeon pea. This project, supported at 18 crores Rs over its first six years, has been more successful than the parallel biotechnology programme funded by the Dutch in Kenya, and discussed earlier in Kenya, so it is now scheduled to be extended for another 10-15 years. The programme focuses on low-end village level biotechnology applications, such as biopesticides and biofertilizers, but it has also given some financial support to ICAR researchers working on insecticidal GM varieties of sorghum and castor (IPE 2000). ICAR also has benefited from a substantial National Agricultural Technology Project (NATP) loan from the World Bank to upgrade its scientific skills, infrastructure and management procedures, and to facilitate better links between the component parts of the fragmented system, but little of this money seems to be reaching the labs of younger researchers in the biotechnology area. Meanwhile, links between ICAR and the private sector remain difficult to establish (Hall, et. al 1998).

Partnerships with the international private sector should be an attractive option in India, where national researchers could offer international companies not only their rapidly improving transformation skills and their long established conventional breeding skills, but also access to Indian germplasm from the 150,000 accessions and samples in India’s National Gene Bank, established by ICAR as a part of India’s National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources. When private companies show interest in working with ICAR or DBT, the response is muted however. The Monsanto Company at one point offered to share its Bt technologies with ICAR free of charge for transformation and production of orphan crops such as chickpea and pigeon pea within India, but ICAR showed little interest. And just as ICAR is leery of partnering with the private sector, most international companies are leery of depending too heavily upon ICAR, which has a reputation for slow movement of scientific results from the lab to the market place. The international private sector has shown its preference to work in India not with ICAR but with local joint venture partners in the private sector. In 2000 when Monsanto agreed to share its GM technology for high beta-carotene mustard with Indian scientists, it agreed to work through the private Tata Energy Research Institute, not through ICAR. Private seed companies in India have not only been ahead of ICAR in commercializing improved varieties such as hybrid rice; they are also known to have control over the highest quality hybrid germplasm. The international private sector will also be shy of working with ICAR on GM crops so long as the other policies of the Government of India - especially in the areas of IPRs, biosafety, and trade - remain highly precautionary or preventive rather than permissive. This is a loss, since the chances of getting a new GM crop variety through India’s recently cautious biosafety screening process would probably be higher if the application for deregulation came via ICAR, rather than from a purely private applicant such as Mahyco/Monsanto.

Summarizing, the desire of the Government of India to promote GM crop technologies primarily through public sector research investments is in some respects logical and commendable, since private sector companies are unlikely to make the GM crop research investments needed to enhance nutritional traits for the malnourished, or to address abiotic stress production problems encountered in semi-arid regions by low resource farmers. Yet the success of this strategy will remain in doubt so long as the treasury resources being invested are so small, so long as the public sector institutions in question retain their current limitations, and so long as the policies of the government in other critical venues - biosafety in particular - remain preventive or highly precautionary.

7. At the 87th Indian Science Congress in Pune in January 2000, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said that Indian science and technology, including "information technology, biotechnology and other knowledge-based sectors of science and technology" were going to be the propellers for India's next "big leap forward."

8. These calculations are based on an exchange rate of US$1=Rs40

9. At ICAR the culture is still to publish any significant finding as quickly as possible, not considering the option of patenting first. In contrast, Indian scientists at CSIR are far more comfortable with the new world of IPR protection; CSIR has had a special IPR coordinator working at its headquarters for two decades.