Genetically modified mustard, if approved, would become the first GMO in India's food chain. This is why the battle concerns not only India, but the entire world. An editorial by the director of Navdanya International.
While agrochemical industry lobbies continue to exert strong pressure on institutions to accelerate the approval of genetically modified (GM) mustard in India, civil society movements and farmers have taken to the field to resist this new product of genetic engineering. If approved, GM mustard would become the first GMO present in India's food chain, with serious social, health and environmental consequences.
The introduction of GM mustard would represent a threat to the local subsistence economies of small farmers and would pose a high risk of contamination to the germplasm of a crop that finds, in India, an important centre of plant diversity. GM mustard also presents potential negative consequences for bees. Farmers are expressing concern about the impact of GM mustard pollen on honey quality and the possible repercussions on production and exports. Farmers and civil society are worried that any approval would open the door to dozens of other GM food products: the herbicide-resistant Liberty Link GM crops developed by Bayer are just two of the main glufosinate-resistant crops.
The struggle against the commercialisation of GM mustard (Dmh11) in India is therefore intensifying and resistance is growing in every corner of the country. In May, hundreds of farmers and activists gathered outside the gates of the Ministry of Environment's office in Delhi, while the main farmers' unions wrote to the minister Harsh Vardhan explicitly calling for the rejection of GM mustard. Vardhan is also the minister of Science and Technology and was among the funders of the GM mustard development project. And it will be precisely he who takes the final decision on the approval, in a scenario where conflicts of interest are clearly apparent. Social resistance to the takeover by multinationals is therefore growing at a local level. While the multinationals and their lobbies, such as Able in India, have raised the stakes on the approval of GM mustard, five major Indian states, including those where mustard is intensively cultivated, have got ahead of the game by banning the cultivation of genetically modified mustard. The latest state to take a stance is Rajasthan, which has officially declared that it will not permit the cultivation of GM mustard even if the federal government approves it. A hopefully decisive stance, given that as much as 46 per cent of India's mustard comes from Rajasthan itself.
This is not the first time that Indian mustard has been threatened. In 1998, traditional Indian edible oils, produced from mustard, coconut, sesame, linseed and groundnut in artisan mills using cold pressing, were banned on food safety pretexts. At the same time, restrictions on soya oil imports were removed. One million artisan oil mills were closed, while thousands of tonnes of low-cost GM soya oil continue to be distributed across India. Last year, more than 124 groups of farmers, scientists, lawyers and activists joined together to organise a nationwide people's assembly across India and to launch a widespread distribution campaign throughout the country, while also working with farmers on ecological farming practices using local seeds and organising festivals and debates to celebrate traditional mustard and invite citizens to join in civil disobedience. As resistance to the imposition of GM mustard consolidates, it is indeed important to safeguard and propagate indigenous mustard varieties.
The opposition of Indian civil society movements to the approval and commercialisation of GM mustard does not represent a problem confined to the use of a technological tool in a specific part of the world, but rather concerns a global issue: what future do we want for our agricultural and food system in every part of the world.
The introduction of specific GM crops in areas recognised as centres of biodiversity for those same plant species raises alarming questions about the problem of germplasm contamination and represents a threat to the future of biodiversity at a global level. In Greenpeace's 2003 report entitled Maize under threat, Ge maize contamination in Mexico, it is stated that "GMO contamination in plant biodiversity centres is a global threat and urgent protective measures must be implemented to guarantee their integrity. We cannot afford to let primary supply sources become irreversibly contaminated".
Just as the great diversity of mustard varieties is currently under threat in India, so too in other parts of the world heated political debates and popular mobilisations have been under way for several years to counter similar problems. In Mexico, a decade-long battle has been waged by Monsanto and other representatives of the agrochemical industry to impose GM maize on the territory. In 2012, faced with yet another application for authorisation to cultivate and commercialise GM maize by Monsanto, a Mexican coalition of scientists, the Unión de científicos comprometidos con la sociedad (Uccs), published a declaration and launched an international resistance campaign.
The declaration states that "Mexico is not only the area where maize was developed, but also represents one of the few centres of origin and genetic diversity from which the entire world has obtained the basis for developing and adapting new varieties capable of countering epidemics, particular and extreme climatic conditions". With reference to and in support of the declaration, the Etc group [a group that addresses environmental and socioeconomic issues linked to new technologies that could have an impact on the world's poorest and most vulnerable populations, ed.] described the possible authorisation by the Mexican government as "a crime of historic proportions". "The genetic contamination of traditional native varieties," the statement reads, "would be inevitable; we are talking about irreversible damage to the seven thousand jobs of indigenous peoples and local smallholder farmers who have made maize one of the three most widely consumed crops in the world".
Since its approval in Bangladesh in 2013, the cultivation of GM aubergine (Bt brinjal) has been strongly criticised. Farida Akhtar, founder of Ubinig, a Bangladeshi NGO working on the conservation of biodiversity in local traditional seed varieties, has explained how Bangladesh is a centre of origin for more than a hundred aubergine varieties: "These varieties," the activist stressed, "are now at risk due to genetic contamination through indirect pollination."
In India, cultivation of the same GM aubergine was blocked in 2010. Popular movements and numerous independent scientists had at the time expressed serious concern about the irreversibility and ease of the indirect contamination process between traditional and GM aubergine varieties. The Supreme Court recommended a ten-year moratorium on any kind of open-field experimentation, and a technical advisory committee recommended a cultivation ban "on types of GM crops, such as rice, aubergine and mustard, for which India is a 'centre of origin' of diversity."
The only GM crop currently grown in India is cotton. Experience with growing this cotton over the past fifteen years has exposed the falsehoods promoted during the marketing phase about GMOs and the devastation caused to the lives of farmers and to biodiversity. To date, around seven million farmers, accounting for approximately 97 per cent of the areas where cotton is grown, have adopted Bt cotton. The pests that the cotton was genetically modified to resist have in turn become more resistant, leading to a sharp increase in the use of chemical substances in cultivation.
History could repeat itself. The fact that GM mustard is a crop resistant to herbicides based on glufosinate — a chemical that causes damage to the nervous system and the brain — has been carefully kept from public knowledge. Mustard is commonly used as a medicine and is present in every kitchen in India. If the crop is resistant to the herbicide, greater residues of it will consequently be present in the plant. The battle of farmers and movements is therefore not against technology. What the country demands is rather a democratic debate on agricultural and food systems, on the protection of biodiversity, on people's health and on farmers' livelihoods. Decisions about food quality and how it is produced cannot be left in the hands of obscure committees that have evident ties to the biotechnology industry, yet are entirely disconnected from the democratic processes that should underpin our lives and our access to food. The movements are therefore calling for a high-level inquiry to shed light on the links between institutions and the so-called poison cartel, made up of the sector's largest multinationals.