Opinion Better sense prevails

Fears about genetically engineered plants have been persistently disproved by science, whether the worry is about pesticide-resistant superweeds, or such plants contaminating their “natural” neighbours and eradicating biodiversity. But the politics around GM crops has remained stubborn in India,  even though the global movement is now running on fumes and there have been public recantations. Peer-reviewed scientific evidence is dismissed, every advocate of GM food written off as a corporate puppet, regulation pre-emptively declared untrustworthy, and selective “facts” marshalled by NGOs and taken at face value by many policymakers. Previous environment ministers have gone to the extent of instituting public hearings where activist prejudices were given the same credence as rigorously tested scientific evidence, and imposing a moratorium on Bt brinjal. Politics has surfaced even in the technical expert committee pondering the question of field trials. Anxieties persist even though India has been a big biotech beneficiary during the Green Revolution, and even though improved yields and resistance to pests have made many farmers opt for Bt crops, even pirating them when they are not available. Bt cotton is what converted India into a cotton-exporting country.

Now, to break the impasse, a committee of secretaries of stakeholder ministries, the cabinet secretary and the PMO will file a joint affidavit in the Supreme Court. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of scrupulous and scientific farm evaluations, a way to impartially test industry data as well as NGO orthodoxy. What is needed is comprehensive, case-by-case study of each GM crop. Given the rising demands of food security and the promise of GM, it is important that the debate shift to one about optimal regulation.