As India’s central government begins a series of public meetings across the country this month on the commercial release of genetically modified (GM) brinjal – or aubergine – in this country, activists and farmers’ groups are mobilising to oppose such a plan.
The meetings are a response by Union Minister for Environment Jairam Ramesh to a storm of protests generated by the approval issued by the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) in October last year for the commercial cultivation of the genetically modified ‘brinjal’ – also called ‘aubergine’ – to resist pests with a gene from the soil bacteria ‘Bacillus thuringiensis’ (Bt brinjal).
The environment ministry’s first hearing, held Wednesday in the eastern city of Kolkata, ended up in a shouting match between Ramesh and the scientists, activists and local citizens present, who were opposed to the introduction of Bt brinjal.
While Bt brinjal is the first GM food crop to be introduced in India, the South Asian country already grows GM cotton spliced with insect-resistant genes form the same Bt bacterium, which has been blamed for serious crop failures and mass suicides by farmers in the cotton-growing belts of Vidarbha (Maharashtra state) and Andhra Pradesh.
Leading the resistance to the introduction of Bt brinjal is international food security campaigner Vandana Shiva, a biosafety expert who helped develop the Biosafety Protocol, an international treaty that became operative in September 2003 under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.
Shiva told IPS that the GEAC approval was based on a “scientifically unsound report at the level of food and agricultural systems” presented to it by the Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company (MAHYCO), a subsidiary of the United States-based agribusiness giant Monsanto, and its partners at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Dharwad, Karnataka state and the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University at Coimbatore district in the state of Tamil Nadu.
Source
Guardian
