Five years ago, India was a hostile place for researchers testing genetically modified (GM) crops. Its government barred the commercial planting of a transgenic aubergine (a vegetable locally known as brinjal) after protests from anti-GM activists. Then it gave state governments the power to veto transgenic-crop field trials. The result: an effective moratorium on such trials.
But under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, voted into power a year ago, India has quietly changed course on GM field testing. In the past year, eight Indian states largely aligned with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party have approved field trials of GM crops, between them allowing tests that include transgenic rice, cotton, maize (corn), mustard, brinjal and chickpea, according to documents seen by Nature
On the other hand, India has more than 100 million farmers, who are concerned that if GM crops become prevalent, their livelihoods and the nation’s food supply will increasingly rely on expensive, rapidly changing and proprietary seed technologies owned by large corporations, says Glenn Stone, an environmental anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
These tensions erupted in 2010, when farmers and anti-GM groups organized huge public protests that led to the brinjal ban. And they regularly flare up in criticisms of India’s 2002 adoption of GM cotton, which contains genes to ward off certain insects. This is the country’s only permitted commercial GM crop, but it is grown in such quantities that India is the world’s fourth-biggest GM-crop producer, behind the United States, Brazil and Argentina.
The new lenience on GM field trials has not reached all of India: more than 20 states and territories are still exercising their vetoes. In meetings between March and July last year, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), part of India’s environment ministry, granted permission to 80 field-trial applications, but state-government blocks meant that many of the trials were never begun.
in February, some petitioned Modi to lift barriers including the requirement to seek state-government approval for field trials after getting the thumbs-up from the environment ministry.
But activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) argue that India should be wary of welcoming transgenic crops. They frequently raise concerns that such crops may be unsafe for the environment or human health, and that Indian regulators have conflicts of interest and have not put in place sufficient mechanisms to carefully monitor field trials. Similar criticisms were raised in 2012 by a technical committee convened by India’s Supreme Court. The court is still considering a moratorium on planting GM crops (including in field trials), which anti-GM activists requested in a petition a decade ago.
— source nature.com