AT PRESENT, Pakistan does not have bio-safety laws, which would provide guidelines for importing, testing and commercialization of genetically improved products and hence a lot of confusion prevails in this regard.
The latest example of such a confusion is about the clearance of commercialisation of Bt cotton which is cultivated in India. It is important to explain for the benefit of the readers that the proposed bio-safety guidelines have a three-tier safety mechanism that controls and monitors the whole process from the lab-testing, field-testing to commercialization and the project can be stopped at any time, at any tier, if found hazardous to human beings or environment.
There are three tiers for monitoring and implementation:
Institutional Bio-safety Committee (IBC): This would enforce regulations and report infractions to the institutional head/MBC/NBC. It will have authority to stop a project if its continuation under the existing circumstances is a threat to public, environment or lab personnel.
Ministerial Bio-safety Committee (MBC): This would enforce measures needed to eliminate any threat to safety of personnel, community or environment from the project falling under its jurisdiction. It enjoys complete powers to stop any project on the recommendation of the relevant IBC.
National Bio-safety Committee (NBC): This body would draft and adopt legislation/measures to ensure safety of humans and environment; it would stop a project through relevant MBC after ensuring that continuation of project would be unsafe for the personnel, community or environment. It would also approve deregulation of regulated material for free movement and commercial release, on the recommendation of the relevant MBC.
The stand taken by Monsanto in this regard is that this law should first be introduced formally. When the legal frame-work is in place, we would certainly like to offer Bt cotton to our farmers as a choice, but only after ensuring efficacy and safety keeping in view the bio-safety guidelines. The whole approval process may take a couple of years. Monsanto believes that Bt cotton provides farmers with a choice. If a farmer needs protection against the bollworm, he can use Bt cotton instead of conventional varieties.
However, he is free to continue to use conventional seeds and use other methods of pests control should he prefer that option. Needless to say that countries having a science base recognize the valueof this technology and are investing. There is only a vocal minority that opposes technology and has thus held up the development.
Governments have begun challenging “anti” positions after finding that their debate lacks substance. Despite the on-going debate on GM crops, particularly European Union countries, millions of large and small farmers in both industrial and developing countries have increased their plantings of GM crops.
Currently, 14 countries grow eight genetically-improved crops. The global hectarage on six continents last year was more than 100 million acre or 44.2 million hectare. They included the USA, Australia and developing countries like China, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay and South Africa.
The figure of 44.2 million hectare represents a 25-fold increase in 5 years and is the highest adoption rate for any new technology by agriculture industry standards.
According to a survey conducted by Dr Clive James, chairman, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), the global area of transgenic crops is likely to reach 50 million hectares, or 125 million acres, at the end of year 2001. All this is happening only because farmers see multiple benefits in switching to biotech crops.
The Bt cotton provides effective pest control. The Centre for Chinese Agricultural Policy was recently quoted as saying that farmers who grew Bt cotton have reduced their costs of production by 20-23 per cent over non-Bt cotton, the use of which has substantially reduced pesticide pollution.
The Bt cotton technology has been approved as safe in seven countries — the US, China, Mexico, Australia, Argentina, South Africa and Indonesia — and is being used effectively by millions of farmers in several of these countries for the past five years to tackle the bollworm menace. It was planted on 3.2 million hectare in 2000. Over 300,000 small farmers in China alone planted it on one million hectare area last year.
Almost 80-85 per cent of the insecticides used in Pakistan agriculture is sprayed in cotton fields, mainly to tackle the bollworm, the chief scourge of our cotton farmers. Use of Bt cotton will go a long way towards reducing the use of pesticides and will provide farmers an environment-friendly alternative to tackle the bollworm.
Some people express worry that insect pests will become resistant to the Bt protein, the naturally occurring insecticidal protein contained in Bollgard cotton. But resistance, according to Jim Cook, a plant pathologist at the Washington State University at Pullman, is not new to agriculture.
“We’re constantly dealing with insect pests that become resistant to traditional insecticides or have the ability to defeat the genes deployed in plants for resistance,” he says. In fact, resistance is a natural phenomenon that helps ensure species survival. Without the natural development of resistance, it would be possible for whole species to become extinct.
Controlling insect resistance is called Insect Resistance Management (IRM), and one of the primary methods involves planting non-Bt cotton within a specified radius of Bt cotton’ fields. “This creates a refuge, where insects can reproduce without the influence of Bt. It maintains species diversity and preserves species still susceptible to the protein, slowing the development of resistance in the insect population. Extensive monitoring of Bt crops over the past three years indicates that IRM has been successful in minimizing the likelihood of resistance.
In contrast, there have been more than 500 recorded cases of insect resistance to applied insecticides, including foliar Bt spray. Although the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not require farmers to plant insect refuges, Monsanto banded together with the biotech industry and growers to develop a common recommended IRM plan. And the benefits are significant.
In Bollgard cotton alone, US insecticide applications were reduced by an estimated one million gallons in the first three years of commercial use. It is also worth noting that resistance to products used to control pests is an issue with which farmers have been dealing long before the introduction of crops developed using biotechnology.
That’s why the principles of Integrated Crop Management (ICM) are being increasingly adopted by farmers worldwide. ICM is designed to prevent the weeds and insects from becoming immune to control. Thanks to biotechnology, growers have another way to protect crops by enabling plants to protect themselves from harmful pests.
The use of biotech crops is growing across the world and it is growing much more in developing countries, which accounted for a quarter of the global area of genetically improved crops last year.
Their share of biotech plantings has risen from 14 per cent in 1997 to 16 per cent in 1998 to 18 per cent in 1999 and 24 per cent in 2000. In fact, of the 4.3 mha (million per hectare) increase in global hectarage in 2000, 3.6 mha (equivalent to 84 per cent) was in the developing countries compared with 16 per cent (0.7 mha) in the industrialized countries.
A country like Pakistan with its population growing at one of the highest growth rate and its current state of economy, could do nothing more to harm its agriculture in particular and economy in general by imposing a moratorium on genetically improved crops.
It is heartening to note that the government has fully realized the significance of biotechnology and their recent initiatives in this regard clearly demonstrate that biotechnology would feature prominently in the future scheme of things in the area of science and technology.