Genetically Modified Crops:

Ø Parliament Standing Committee report- “for the time being all research and development activities on transgenic crops should be carried out only in containment, the ongoing field trials in all States should be discontinued forthwith.

Ø Support to GM- Conventional Agriculture Technologies may not be adequate to meet India’s Food Security Challenges. And conventional techniques are not science based.

Ø There is no GM crop anywhere in the world which increase crop productivity (Even US department of Agriculture acknowledges that the productivity of GM Soya and GM corn in the US is less than the conventional varieties.  Moreover, the prevailing drought in the U.S. has conclusively shown that it is only non-GM crops that have withstood the vagaries of weather.

Ø In India, on June 1, a record 82.3 million tonnes surplus of wheat and rice was stored. This surplus existed at a time when an estimated 320 million people went to bed hungry. Mr. Pawar is making all efforts to export a large chunk of food stocks or make open market releases, but no serious effort is being made to feed the hungry. In fact, since 2001-03, India has been holding on an average anything between 50 to 60 million tonnes of foodgrains and yet its ranking in the Global Hunger Index shows no improvement.

FOOD INSECURITY

Ø Food insecurity, therefore, is not the result of any production shortfall. To ensure that farmers do not produce more, and thereby add to existing storage problems, the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) has frozen the wheat price at last year’s level. Paying more to farmers would entail more production. This does not make any economic sense. After all, the farmer too is impacted by rising inflation. Why penalise farmers for the government’s inability to handle and store surplus foodgrain?

Ø The fact remains that food production is being deliberately kept low, and only enough to meet basic food security needs. Provide market price to wheat and rice growers, and I am sure production will go up manifold.

Ø SAC-PM is a committee made up of distinguished scientists. Although the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) had given the green signal for commercial cultivation of Bt Brinjal, the SAC-PM should take note of the 19-page submission by the then Minister for Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh; the analysis is the best “science-based” justification for stopping GM food crops.

FINDINGS:

Ø Even when the Bt Brinjal debate was hot, I had pointed out the inability of the scientific community to conduct long-term feeding trials on rats. Internationally, the practice is to have 90-day feeding trials, which corresponds to 24 years of human lifespan — and that’s what the GEAC followed. I had always wondered why the industry as well as the scientific community was not conducting feeding trials for two years, which means the entire human lifespan. Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini, professor of molecular biology at the Caen University in France, finally did it. He recently published the findings of the two-year study on the long-term toxicity of GM maize NK 603, engineered to resist Roundup herbicide — and as expected the industry was up in arms.

Ø In these first-ever long-term feeding trials on rats, published in the scientific journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, Prof. Séralini and his team observed that “females developed fatal mammary tumours and pituitary disorders. Males suffered liver damage, developed kidney and skin tumours and experienced problems with their digestive system.” The team also found that even lower doses of GM corn and Roundup weedicides resulted in serious health impacts. Moreover, 50 per cent male and 70 per cent female rats died prematurely. The tumours were 2.5 times bigger than what would normally appear in the control population.

Ø As expected, the study was branded “bogus,” “inadequate” and of course “unscientific.”