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Policies Toward GM Crops In India cont.,

VII. Conclusion

Table 4.1 Policies toward GM Crops and Foods in India, 1999-2000

We can see from this summary a seeming contradiction between India's public research policy toward GM crops, which is promotional, versus its IPR, biosafety, and trade policies, which are precautionary or even preventive. Is there an explanation for this apparently inconsistent mix of policies? Given India's unmet farm productivity needs, and given the endorsement of GM crops by its own research community, why the extreme precaution in these other areas? India's sluggishness in developing a plant variety protection policy is perhaps understandable because it links to so many issues other than GM crops, and because it has not in any case been the highest barrier to getting GM crops into the country. But how can we explain India's strong precaution toward GM crops in the two areas of biosafety and trade policy?

A comparison to some of India's policies at the outset of the green revolution in the middle years of the 1960s can perhaps shed some light here. In 1965, when the Center for Improvement of Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT) in Mexico and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines first made high yielding varieties of wheat and rice available to India, a political debate ensued within the country not so different from the current debate over GM crops. Indian groups on the political left and those claiming to speak for the interests of small farmers were highly skeptical then toward the green revolution HYVs, just as these same groups today tend to be highly skeptical toward GM crops. The new Mexican wheat varieties had not yet been widely tested in India itself, so critics argued it might be dangerous to begin planting them on a large scale without more information regarding their local performance and impact. The new varieties also called for more sophisticated management practices that small farmers might not be able to master, and a use of purchased inputs small farmers might not be able to afford, so fears arose that only big commercial farmers would gain, and India’s rural poor might be made poorer still. The new varieties also required more fertilizer than India itself could produce at the time, so critics feared an implied dependence on fertilizer sales made by private international agrochemical companies located in Europe or the United States.

Despite these many understandable and sincerely voiced concerns, the Government of India set caution aside in 1965. Under courageous political leadership from Agriculture Minister C. Subramaniam and others, India decided in 1965-66 to import 200 tons of Mexican wheat and appropriate quantities of high yielding rice to launch an ambitious seed production and farm demonstration campaign, with a goal of planting 13 million hectares to the new varieties within five years. Subramaniam was told by western experts and by India's own Planning Commission that his goal was too ambitious, and that he should not try to move so fast (Subramaniam 1979, pp. 45-51). Subramaniam's plan to move ahead quickly with new green revolution seeds was ultimately supported by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and then aggressively implemented, despite continued internal opposition. His approach won the policy debate on this occasion because the alternative to taking the new seeds was continued dependence on imported food aid from the United States, which had always come with unwelcome diplomatic strings attached. As Subramaniam recalls telling his critics at the time, "Would you like to continue this dependence on America for imported foodgrains? Was that preferable to raising domestic production? Instead of importing food was it not better to import fertilizer and plant protection chemicals to help raise production?" (Subramaniam 1979, p. 28).

When GM crop technologies first became commercially available in the 1990s, India was no longer significantly dependent on food imports from abroad, either as food aid or even as commercial purchases. The success of the green revolution itself had eliminated the need for such imports. GM crop advocates have therefore not been able to use Subramaniam's trump argument: that an embrace of GM crops is necessary to free India from food import dependence. Instead of importing wheat as food aid, India's government today is burdened by surplus stocks of wheat. Several hundred million Indian villagers are still poor and poorly fed because they cannot improve the productivity of their own farmlands or protect their crops from pests and disease, and this could well be seen as a legitimate reason to move ahead quickly with GM crops. But this line of argument is hard to develop since most of India's leading advocates for the poor within the NGO community are opposed to GM crops on other, just as many of them were earlier opposed on similar grounds to the green revolution HYVs. RFSTE's Vandana Shiva, the leading NGO critic of GM crops in India today, had earlier made an international career out of criticizing high yielding non-GM crops in India (Shiva 1991). It was perhaps to be expected given these political dynamics, that a far more cautious approach to the new technology would prevail. In the current case the caution is expressing itself in India through controversies over the biosafety of GM crops, but the same larger background debate about the wisdom of relying on the international private sector or of importing new agricultural technologies from the West is alive and influential just below the surface.

But what is the opinion of India's farmers toward GM crops? Until farmers in India are given permission by the government to grown these crops, this important question will be impossible to answer. Farmers in India developed a strong positive opinion toward high yielding seed varieties in the 1960s and 1970s once they were given access to the new seeds, and once India's own farmers voted in favor of high yielding varieties by adopting the new seeds to quickly and so widely, the policy debate continued among some NGOs and non-farmers but otherwise became largely irrelevant. Today in India various self-styled farm leaders have taken pro-GM or anti-GM positions in the policy debate, but until GM crops are released for commercial use by actual farm communities the views of farmers will not be known. By slowing the movement of GM crops into farmers' fields, the government is postponing the day when the nation's most important stakeholders in the transgenic crop revolution will be able to develop and express their own informed opinion.