After ten years of Bt cotton in India, the policy governing genetically modified (GM) food in the country, needed an urgent review, keeping in mind the hype about the high yield it created amongst the farming community, the coalition for a GM-Free India said Tuesday. 

 “Closer examination of the data from the last 10 years negates the two important claims of dramatic yield increase and significant fall in pesticide usage,” Sridhar Radhakrishnan, Convener of the Coalition said.

March 26 marks the tenth year of the introduction on Bt cotton in India.

Presenting some of the analysis in the report, the coalition had prepared using government’s own data, Kiran Vissa, co-convener of the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA) said, “The real yield gains in the past decade (from 278 kg/ha to 470 kg/ha) happened from 2000-01 to 2004-05, i.e. when Bt cotton area reached only 5.6% of the total cotton area. From 2005-06 to 2011-12, when the Bt cotton area grew to exceed 90% of the total cotton area, there is no sustained yield gain – only going from 470 kg/ha to 481 kg/ha. It is the pre-Bt cotton yield gains that have proved to be stable, resulting from various factors including fresh land brought under cotton cultivation, expansion of irrigation and use of high-yielding hybrids.” 

Kishor Tiwari of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti a farmer’s body that has been campaigning for several years on farmer suicides and agrarian crisis in Vidarbha said, “The fact is that the crisis of cotton farmers in Maharashtra has only become deeper after the adoption of Bt cotton. This year, we estimate that Bt cotton farmers have lost Rs.10,000 crores due to crop failure.” 

Vijay Pratap of the Kisan Swaraj Sampark Kendra said, “We are asking farmers around the country to be aware of the dangers of the technology and the manipulations and monopolistic control of these corporations. Farmers who were frustrated with one unsustainable technology of chemical pesticides were asked to adopt another unsustainable technology promoted by the same companies which sold the pesticides.”

Sridhar Radhakrishnan, Convener of the Coalition for a GM-Free India demanded, “The government, political parties and scientists should reject the false hype, and perform a comprehensive, independent and participatory review of 10 years of Bt cotton. The Parliament should have a special discussion on cotton farmers’ crisis and 10 years of Bt cotton. Government agencies should stop promoting Bt cotton, and rejuvenate the non-Bt seed production to make it available for farmers. Strict action should be taken against false claims and advertising by the companies. It is shameful that while the Indian farmer is reeling under the crisis and Bt Cotton faced its worst failure, the recent State of Indian Agriculture report talks of Bt Cotton as an unqualified success and promotes GM technology as a magic bullet.”