A Note on BT Brinjal

The Govt. of India is facing strong opposition to introduce the BT Brinjal in the market. I, here, try to evaluate the pros and cons of this issue.

The first question is whether the BT brinjal is safe or not. Now, anyone who has studied bioethics or plant biotechnology, will not say it with full surety, that the genetically modified (GM) variety is totally innocuous. Actually that’s one drawback of biotechnology. You generally can’t be fully sure. Tests are conducted on a statistical and probabilistic basis, which may not be a complete representation of the broad spectrum of conditions which the new variety may be exposed to. Well, if you need to see the long term effects, you simply need to plant the new variety for long time. But that’s not feasible. If we go this way, by the time the new variety will be ready to be released in the market, it would be outdated.

However, this doesn’t mean that we should not embrace GM crops at all. The benefits of not having to rely on pesticides and the increased output from the hybrid varieties outweigh the cons stated above. An Indian farmer has got a lot to worry about. Irrigation problems, power cuts, lack of technology, education and awareness, natural calamities are some of the many monsters of agricultural growth. GM varieties atleast assure some benefits to the farmers in contrast to the ‘bharat sarkar’. Also, the Indian experience of BT cotton has been wonderful and its high time now that we replicate such benefits in other crops.

The major issue to be discussed is the monopoly of the MNCs. And this is what worries the farmers. A GM/hybrid variety is much more potent and strong than the wild type and they are engineered in such a way that they can only be used for one season, i.e. they can’t form fertile seeds. When more and more farmers start growing the hybrid variety, the wild type seeds start to vanish from the market, because there’s no one growing them. This means after some years, there is a complete monopoly of the company selling the seeds and in this case its generally just one or two.

There is no regulatory framework governing the GM varieties because the Indian Seed Act of 1966 is antiquated. What we need is to have proper regulatory framework and strict guidelines on the marketing of GM seeds. Protests and disagreements will always be there in a large democracy like India. There are some who raise valid points which need to be looked on. But then there are some who blindly oppose for the sake of opposing. Linking all the damned ill-effects , cancer and diseases to the GM seeds will neither help us gain food-independence nor solve any other purpose. But, opening our minds will!