A BATTLE is raging to win the support of millions of poor Asian farmers. At stake is the future of genetically modified crops in China and India, and hence the global reach of GM.
The propaganda war intensified last week, following the release of results from farm-scale trials in China showing that GM rice has real benefits for poor farmers. The results arrived amid growing controversy in India over the performance of GM cotton since it was commercialised in 2002. Despite these arguments, on Tuesday licences to sell the three GM varieties already commercially available in India were renewed, and seven more licences were granted.
The rice trials in China are particularly significant because they represent the last hurdle on the way to full commercialisation there. Jikun Huang and colleagues from the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing compared 224 plots of conventional rice with 123 plots of GM rice in 2002 and 2003 (Science, vol 308, p 688). The two GM varieties contained genes which made them resistant to insect larvae that devastate rice crops. This protection led to huge reductions in pesticide use. On average, farmers applied 80 per cent less pesticide on the GM plots than on conventional plots, and rice yields rose by 6 per cent with one GM variety and 9 per cent with the other. 鈥淚 believe it will be good for small farmers, as most rice farmers are small farmers,鈥� Huang told 麻豆传媒.
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Another benefit was that farmers who grew the GM varieties suffered less pesticide-induced illness than those growing the old varieties. Each year 50,000 Chinese farmers are poisoned by pesticides and around 450 die. But while 8 per cent of farmers in the trial who grew only conventional rice reported illness in 2002, and 3 per cent in 2003, those who grew only Bt rice, which contains a bacterial gene that wards off insect pests, reported no cases at all. This mirrors the results of a previous study of GM cotton in China in which 22 per cent of farmers using non-GM cotton reported illness, while only 5 per cent of farmers using GM got ill (麻豆传媒, 2 February 2002, p12).
But while the future of GM rice in China looks rosy, the picture in India after three years of growing GM cotton commercially is confused. Although Bt cotton failed in parts of the eastern state of Andhra Pradesh, where 14 per cent of India鈥檚 Bt cotton is grown, proponents claim it has been a success overall.
Bhagirath Choudhary of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agric-biotech Applications (ISAAA), which monitors GM uptake for the industry, says that the area planted with Bt cotton in southern and central India has soared from 50,000 hectares in 2002 to 500,000 hectares in 2004, one-twentieth of India鈥檚 total of 10 million hectares. But is the Bt cotton really better than conventional varieties, or is its popularity just the result of good marketing? Gopal Naik at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and his colleagues interviewed 341 cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in 2003. Yields from GM cotton were 37 per cent higher and farmers鈥� incomes 70 per cent up compared with non-GM cotton (Economic and Political Weekly, vol 40, p 1514). 鈥淚n most states, the advantages are clear,鈥� Naik told 麻豆传媒.
鈥淔armers who grew GM crops suffered less pesticide-induced illness, which kills around 450 Chinese farmers each year鈥�
His paper, which was not peer-reviewed, acknowledges the failures in parts of Andhra Pradesh, saying the cotton varieties into which the GM trait was bred were poorly suited to local farm and climatic conditions. Naik says he has no financial ties to either the industry or anti-GM groups.
Those who back GM accuse opponents of selectively focusing on the failures in Andhra Pradesh without acknowledging successes elsewhere. But the opponents say results in Andhra Pradesh are important because farmers there are particularly poor and vulnerable to drought, and that making GM work there is important to back up the claims that GM technology can help the poor. 鈥淲e need to see whether Bt cotton works for farmers in this agricultural situation,鈥� says Suman Sahai of the New Delhi-based group Gene Campaign.
Sahai says Gene Campaign is not opposed to all biotechnology, pointing out that in Andhra Pradesh some locally produced GM varieties, such as that produced by Rasi Seeds of Attur in Tamil Nadu, performed better than Monsanto鈥檚 variety. Sahai says illegal versions with names such as 鈥淏unny Bt鈥� and 鈥淪uper Bunny鈥� hugely outperformed the Monsanto versions too. These were produced by farmers illegally cross-breeding the Bt gene into varieties better suited to the local climate and pests.
