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GM in India: Faking it on the Astroturf

Colin Todhunter

According to a recent report in The Hindu Business Line, India’s intelligence agencies are investigating the role of a global investment company and international seed companies in supporting farmers organisation Shetkari Sanghatana (SS) in the distribution of illegally procured genetically modified (GM) herbicide tolerant (HT) cotton seeds.

The planting of such seeds is an offence under the Environment Protection Act and Seeds Act.

In May 2019, SS broke the law and freely distributed these seeds.

In early January 2020, it broke the law again by distributing second-generation seeds. According to the report, a senior intelligence official had told Business Line that a global investment company, with investments in seeds and agrochemicals companies, has chosen to support the farmers’ organisation.

Business Line reports that the investment company is allegedly putting pressure on the Modi government to ensure that the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee fast tracks the clearance of HT seeds, so the seeds could be legally harvested and sold in the country.

In India, five high-level reports have advised against the adoption of GM crops. Appointed by the Supreme Court, the ‘Technical Expert Committee (TEC) Final Report’ (2013) was scathing about the prevailing regulatory system and highlighted its inadequacies and serious inherent conflicts of interest. The TEC recommended a 10-year moratorium on the commercial release of all GM crops.

The reason why Bt cotton – to date, India’s only officially approved GM crop – made it into farmers’ fields in the first place was due to ‘approval by contamination’. Bt cotton was discovered in 2001 growing on thousands of hectares in Gujarat. In March 2002, it was approved for commercial cultivation.

The pro-GMO lobby has again resorted to such tactics. The 2010 moratorium on Bt brinjal was implemented because science won out against a regulatory process that lacked competency, possessed endemic conflicts of interest and demonstrated a lack of expertise in GM risk assessment protocols, including food safety assessment and the assessment of environmental impacts.

As we have seen with the relentless push to get GM mustard commercialised, the problems persist. Now, to justify breaking the law, we are seeing unscientific claims and well-worn industry-inspired soundbites about GM crops: political posturing unsupported by evidence to try to sway the policy agenda in favour of GM.

Drawing on previous peer-reviewed evidence, a 2018 paper in the journal Current Science by renowned scientists PC Kesavan and MS Swaminathan concluded that Bt crops and HT crops are unsustainable and globally have not decreased the need for toxic chemical pesticides, the reason for these GM crops in the first place.

We need to look at GM objectively because plenty of evidence indicates it poses risks or is not beneficial and that non-GM alternatives are a better option. Moreover, many things that scientists are trying to achieve with GM have already been surpassed by means of conventional breeding.

Those behind the distribution and planting of illegal seeds talk about helping the farmer. But the real agenda is to open-up India to GM and get farmers hooked on a corporate money-spinning GM seed-chemical treadmill.

The watchdog GMWatch recently produced an article about how hired public relations agencies and key individuals with firm links to the biotechnology sector are attempting to deceive the public and policy makers. The article’s author, Jonathan Matthews, notes that in June 2019 the pro-GMO campaigner Mark Lynas began talking up what he claimed was to be “the world’s first pro-GMO protest”.

The term ‘astroturfing’ is the process by which orchestrated marketing and public relations campaigns are presented as emanating from grassroots participants or ordinary members of the public rather than from powerful corporate interests. Lynas, a well-known industry lobbyist, said the ‘protest’ would involve Indian farmers planting banned GM seeds in what he called “Gandhi-style civil disobedience”.

This attention-grabbing campaign was being led by SS, which Lynas described as “very grass roots”.

According to Matthews, SS is not a mass movement of grassroots farmers but an allegedly well-funded fringe group created by the late Sharad Joshi, a right-wing economist and member of the Advisory Board of the Monsanto-backed World Agricultural Forum, an organisation whose founder and first chairman was for many years Monsanto’s director of public policy.

Joshi was also Chairman of Shivar Agroproducts Ltd, says Matthews, but he is best remembered for his ultra-libertarian ideology, his links to certain farmers groups and the political party (Swatantra Bharat Paksh) that he founded – all vehicles for promoting his free market fundamentalism.

Matthews says:

“Lynas was not the first to present Shetkari Sanghatana as representing ordinary Indian farmers. A full two decades earlier, the European biotech industry and their PR firm Burson-Marsteller brought some of Shetkari Sanghatana’s leading lights to Europe to try and counter the view that Indian farmers opposed GMO crops. To that end, they were toured around five different countries by the industry’s lobby group, EuropaBio, which in a press release presented this free market fringe group, which is largely confined to the state of Maharashtra, as ‘the mainstream farmers’ movement in India’.”

Matthews adds that the US is the biotech industry’s chief propaganda hub for promoting wide-ranging fakery to the world. Referring to the illegal planting of HT cotton seeds and SS, he says:

Among the notable cheerleaders promoting the protesters’ cause were the Gates-backed GMO propaganda outfit The Alliance for Science, which pays Mark Lynas to lobby for GMOs; CS Prakash of AgBioWorld, who has long served as a conduit for Monsanto disinformationBayer-consultant and Monsanto collaborator Kevin Folta, who made a podcast on the protests with CS Prakash…”

Matthews piece, ‘Fake Farmer Willi part of an international fake parade’, provides details of the various characters and strategies involved in faking it for the biotech industry, not just in India but across the world.

As a market for GM proprietary seeds, chemical inputs and agricultural technology and machinery, India is vast. The potential market for herbicide growth alone, for instance, is huge: sales could now have reached USD 800 million with scope for even greater expansion, especially with the illegal push to get HT seeds planted.

With GM crops largely shut out of Europe and many countries reluctant to embrace the technology, Western agro-biotech conglomerates are desperate to seek out and expand into untapped (foreign) markets to maintain profitability.

India presents potential rich pickings. And this is the bottom line: GM is not about ‘helping farmers’ or ‘feeding the masses’ (myths that have been deconstructed time and again).

It is about hard-nose interests endeavouring to displace existing systems of production and capturing and exploiting markets by any means possible – not least fakery and deception.

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nottheonly1
nottheonly1
Jan 14, 2020 10:17 AM

Looks like only few people pay atttention to what is coming their way regarding healthy food. Or the the war against healthy food. Because there are much more profits to be generated with sickening, life-on-earth threatening genetically tampered with produce/products.

People need to watch these documentaries (and I am sure some have already) to understand that the fascist corporations are at war with the masses. They want to kill them, poison them and then sell them expensive ‘medicine’ – all under the pretense of being in the business of ‘feeding’ the world and ending poverty.

Sure, a fascist will always lie. Or, when he/she doesn’t – you’re going to be dead.

https://thoughtmaybe.com/seed-the-untold-story/

And – close to be two decades old now – this one.

https://thoughtmaybe.com/fed-up-with-genetic-engineering/

If the gullible keep ignoring, or denying this Mammoth in the most delicate China store, than they will pay – no wait, make that THEIR CHILDREN and GRANDCHILDREN will pay the heaviest price for that.

Stop corporations now. By any means available. They must go. And with it, or first, those politicians who were bought by these corporations.

Antonym
Antonym
Jan 14, 2020 2:23 AM

Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet : George Monbiot

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
Jan 13, 2020 4:35 PM

Nothing will change without naming the top executive officers of the seeds corporation and putting them in jail without trial under exactly the same circumstances as Julian Assange.

Make it clear they will be tortured, poisoned and slowly starved to death if any more seeds are distributed illegally, if Julian Assange is not released and if they do not pay a $5bn out-of-court fine to stop rather dreadful things happening to their children.

Treat these executives like terrorists: see how they like being treated extrajudicially.

They may learn the hard way that behaviour according to the law is ultimately more pleasant……..

richard le sarc
richard le sarc
Jan 13, 2020 6:47 AM

Mark Lynas was a very prominent liar during the Copenhagen climate conference, leading the racist and Sinophobic campaign to blame China for the failure of the conference, when, as all non-Western observers noted, it was the West, led by Obama in the end, that sabotaged the event, by trying to impose an unjust settlement on the non-Western world. And then he sold out to the GE Moloch, not a surprise at all.

Antonym
Antonym
Jan 13, 2020 4:29 AM

Here some numbers of GMO approved events per country according to the ISAAA https://www.isaaa.org/gmapprovaldatabase/countrylist/default.asp

US 206
Japan 198
Mexico 188
Canada 183
Brazil 111
Colombia 108
EU 108
Philippines 105
Argentina 78
China 73
South Africa 72
Malaysia 44
Turkey 36
Nigeria 28
Russia 24
Vietnam & Indonesia 22
Iran 18
India 11
Pakistan 6
Bangladesh and Egypt 1

Now ask yourselves why India is being singled out by Colin?
Have China, Russia and Iran surrendered to Western MNCs?
Have all these nations abandoned their smaller farmers?
Did the EU really shut out GMOs?

Or are GMOs is general beneficial and not necessarily tied to MNC Bayer but just to Scientific progress in general?

richard le sarc
richard le sarc
Jan 13, 2020 6:50 AM
Reply to  Antonym

Got a few shekels invested in GE poisons, have you? Then again, you’re probably more interested in the patenting of the global food system, that will give the West a life and death stranglehold over the majority word. Then you can starve your enemies into submission to your greatness.

Gall
Gall
Jan 13, 2020 8:08 AM
Reply to  Antonym

You mean “scientific progress” like nuclear ☢️ weapons and BCWs?

Antonym
Antonym
Jan 13, 2020 8:50 AM
Reply to  Gall

No! more like Internet or the phone or computer you typed this reply.

Zoran Aleksic
Zoran Aleksic
Jan 13, 2020 9:36 AM
Reply to  Antonym

You mean “scientific progress” like internet surveillance?

richard le sarc
richard le sarc
Jan 13, 2020 11:09 PM
Reply to  Zoran Aleksic

Unsurprisingly, a Judeofascist and Zionist area of expertise.

richard le sarc
richard le sarc
Jan 13, 2020 11:08 PM
Reply to  Antonym

More like other poisons such as Agent Orange and dioxins. What the Hell-the profits!!!!!!!