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Monsanto advert masks its expansionary role in Indian agricultural sector, points out forum

Indian Biodiversity Forum secretary S Faizi today said the advertisement campaign launched by Monsanto in response to the public opposition to their field testing of genetically modified cotton, though a welcome exercise, sought to mask the real issues and painted an innocent picture of the multinational agrochemical giant.

Monsanto's rapidly expanding role in Indian agriculture had posed a new and serious threat to the way the farmers in the country had been doing agriculture since the very beginning. The suspicion about the use of terminator seeds was, of course, at the apex of our concern, he said in a statement in Thiruvananthapuram.

He said the danger to Indian society posed by Monsanto was multi-pronged. The bacilus thuringiensis or BT gene, infused into cotton, constituted a misappropriation of farmers' knowledge and resource. BT, a soil bacterium, had been used by organic farmers since the 1960s for its ability to produce protein that destroys the gut walls of several insects and pest species.

He said it was this collective innovation of the farmers that was "pirated" by Monsanto and a number of life industry companies for providing a wide range of genetically modified crops such as cotton, soyabean, maize, potato, tobacco and rice, he added.

Faizi said the farmers were the losers as about 440 BT related patents were granted by 1995. Now Monsanto and its brand of agriculture industries have reduced crop genetic diversity by 75 per cent. This genetic erosion continued at the rate of two per cent per annum, he added.

He said it was totally inappropriate on the part of the authorities to have permitted Monsanto to undertake field trials of a genetically modified organism in the country when it had not yet developed the required regulations and institutional mechanism to monitor or control such a potentially dangerous exercise. Besides, India had been at the forefront of demanding a strong bio-safety protocol within the convention on biological diversity.

The permission to Monsanto to undertake field trials to test transgenic cotton at 40 locations constituted a betrayal of the country's cause and would have unpleasant repercussions on the biosafety protocol negotiations.

He said the company, which had a revenue of $ 3 billion from the sale of agrochemicals in 1996 had fast expanded into life industry by taking over or buying shares of major life industry companies. The objective was to produce genetically programmed seeds that required proprietary chemicals manufactured by themselves, he alleged.

UNI

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