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GM crops: fears and excitement
RAJESH KOCHHAR
Genetic engineering constitutes the second industrial revolution. The first one involved physics and went hand in hand with colonialism. The present one involves biology and is being accompanied by globalisation. Biotech is in fact the most revolutionary of all revolutions.
So far, right from the making of stone tools to landing on the moon to the development of the internet, humankind has been arranging and rearranging building blocks provided by nature. Now it has become possible to modify these building blocks themselves.
Other dimensions
This development is unprecedented in human history and raises questions of ethics and consequences. So far, questions of ethics have pitted man against man. Now it is humankind against nature. Any meaningful discussion on genetic engineering cannot be confined to its science; it must incorporate the other dimensions also.
Plants owe their characteristics to their genes, which they inherit from their parents. Since ages, it has been possible to cross-breed closely related varieties. Such exercises have been carried out in the fields and have involved evolutionary timescales that are reassuringly large. It has now become possible to quickly change the genetic composition of a plant, working in the lab itself. Genes can be added or silenced. They can come from totally unrelated sources: other plants, microbes or even animals.
Agri-biotech business
As much as 90 per cent of the world’s agri-biotech business is in the hands of the American company Monsanto while the remainder is shared by Syngenta, Bayer CropScience, Dow, and DuPont. Only four genetically modified crops are in commercial production: soybeans, maize, cotton and oilseed rape (canola). The next in line is sugar beet.
The genetic manipulation in these crops has been at the level of two traits. A gene from a bacterium with the abbreviated name Bt has been transplanted in maize, cotton and others to give them insecticidal properties. Secondly, plants have been engineered to develop immunity to herbicides so that chemicals sprayed on the crops will kill weeds but leave the main plant untouched.
Is GM safe? The Nobel Prize winning geneticist Brenner notes wryly that most scientists are unwilling to say that GM is completely harmless lest they be proved wrong in their own lifetime. GM crop technology may in fact be un-testable, on methodological grounds. Scientific analysis pre-requires that the system under investigation be isolated.
But it is manifestly not possible to isolate GM from the non-GM. The pollinators such as the birds, bees, butterflies and wind move from one agricultural field to another unmindful of whether a conventional crop is being grown or a modified one.
Europe sees no benefit in plant biotech and is not ready to take risks.
It is curious that battles over a new technology are being fought by the U.S. and Europe in the corridors of the WTO instead of in labs and seminar rooms.
Driven by commerce
It is an extraordinary situation that the most momentous scientific development in the history of humankind, concerning the vital commodity of food, is not driven by curiosity but commerce.
Nobody views GM technology as the fruit of collective human effort. Rather it is seen as a handiwork of localised commercial interests. It has been noted that “many of the arguments that are used against GM crops are really arguments against the misuse of power by large multinational companies.” GM crops have become a symbol of broad opposition to globalisation and American domination.
Agriculture is the basis of the present phase of human civilisation as we know it. If world agriculture becomes a child of high technology owned by a few big companies, what happens to local freedoms? I am sure if agri-biotech were in public domain, with the option of take-it-or-leave it, the world response would be different.
International agencies such as the FAO should buy out the patents on GM crops and make the technology freely available to one and all. Give freedom to different countries to modify plants to their own requirement and at their own pace, as happened in the case of green revolution.
It is unlikely that biotech companies read poetry or appreciate poetic wisdom. In the 19th century, when quantum mechanics and relativity were still in the future, and scientists were enamoured of a mechanistic, deterministic world, it was left to William Blake to record for posterity that “To be an Error & to be cast out is a part of God’s design.” A bird or a bee or a weed may be an error from the point of view of a commercial crop, but they are certainly an inseparable part of nature’s design.
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