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Monsanto seeds - For good or evil?

Technology… the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it

— Max Frisch, Swiss novelist and playwright

Why do MNCs excite extreme emotions in India ? If you take any one of them from banks to pharma and chemicals to defence and aerospace, they are all clubbed together with the “usual suspects” who do more harm than good despite all the good intentions they might have had. Is it because technology is always a double-edged weapon that we understand so little of, or because the numerous variables and different parameters have unintended consequences that cannot possibly be anticipated? Whatever, the latest to join the gang is Monsanto Seeds that the noted French journalist and documentary filmmaker Marie Monique Robin writes about in The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Politics, Power (Tulika Books and New Press, Rs 675), that is a devastating critique of one biggest chemical companies in the world and the provider of seed technology for 90 per cent of the world’s genetically engineered (GE) crops.

First the bare facts before getting into the pros and cons of the ongoing worldwide debate.

1. Monsanto’s $11.7 billion of annual sales comes from seeds, increasingly of genetically modified (GM), or transgenic, varieties and from licensing genetic traits. Indeed, it is now best known, for better or for worse, for applying biotechnology to seed production.

2. GE/GM means “the deliberate modification of the characters of an organism by the manipulation of genetic material and is a special set of technologies that alter the genetic make up of an organism expecting better results”. In Indian agriculture, this has led to debates between NGOs, representing farmers, and regulatory bodies, representing biotechnology advancement, regarding the hazards and potential for solving problems of this technology.

3. Monsanto’s innovations fall into two categories. The first is selective breeding, which accelerates better mapping of a seed’s genetic qualities and its suitability to grow in a particular place.

4. Monsanto was founded in 1901 as a chemical company in the US. But it has got a bad name because it is intimately linked to the production and promotion of highly toxic chemicals such as Agent Orange (used as a chemical weapon in Vietnam ) and PCBs (widespread toxic pollutants).

5. Because of acquisitions over the last decade, Monsanto has bought up over 50 seed companies around the world to become a global power. Today, 90 per cent of all GE seeds planted in the world are patented by Monsanto and hence controlled by it. This gives Monsanto unprecedented power, to the extent that it prohibits farmers from saving patented GE seeds from one crop to replant the next season, through “a gene police”, according to Ms Robin.

6. As would be expected, for a company with such muscle power, its influence doesn’t stop at the US border. The book documents the impact of Monsanto’s seeds which includes real-life stories of cotton farmers in India (Bt cotton) who ended up with hopeless debts. (Some farmer suicides in India have been traced to GE technology and the increased costs of inputs that have left farmers in debt to local money-lenders.) Much the same story gets repeated with families in Paraguay that have been bankrupted with Monsanto’s GE soya seeds.

These six factors have been accepted as controvertible facts and have not been challenged. So, how does Monsanto’s claim stand that without this sort of technological breakthroughs, there was no chance of doubling agricultural output by 2050 when there would be less land and water available? Look at the ground realities where nothing dramatic has happened. And what are the costs of increased yields, if any, and would the Indian farmer be able to buy it?

When pudding comes to proof, the picture doesn’t look too bright from our point of view. Consider the basic question of costs which is what the Indian farmer (or for that matter farmers all over the world) would first take into account.

The fact that GM crops don’t produce their own seeds, which have to be bought afresh for the next crop, is the first disincentive to the farmer. Also, are these seeds as disease-resistant as the traditional seeds? What about extra costs for fertilisers and irrigation? Above all, what is the guarantee that yields would increase commensurate with the increased costs of inputs? Some field studies have been done on these vital questions and initial results have not been encouraging. Much the same has been the case in Latin America and Africa, where GE seeds have been much more widely used. These may be early days, but technological breakthroughs have never been achieved without increased costs.

Ms Robin’s The World According to Monsanto (it is also a documentary film, snap shots of which can be accessed on the Net) is a blow-by-blow account of Monsanto’s malpractices around the world. Based on field research over a three-year period across four continents, it will make you think about the whole nature of agri-business run by MNCs and giant corporate houses that use science “to squeeze the last penny out of the world’s poor”.