Boost for India's battling biotech
business By Raja M
MUMBAI -
Earlier this month, an agricultural biotechnology task
force led by Professor M S Swaminathan, aka the "father
of India's green revolution", mapped a path to end the
rampant confusion, suspicion and controversy choking
India's fledgling biotechnology industry.
The
one-year-old task force has met 11 times, and is
recommending the government pump US$264.9 million into
India's food security, establish a new apex regulatory
body, insure farmers and take steps to make life happier
for local and foreign biotechnology investors.
Biotechnology refers to a diverse array of
traditional and new technologies that use biological
systems, living organisms or derivatives to produce
products or processes for a specific use. Making curds
from milk is biotechnology, and so too was the
manufacturing of the late Dolly, the cloned sheep.
But between reality and promises of better
medicines, a higher yield of crops, more nutritious food
and business worth $35 billion rages a frothing battle
involving governments, scientists, multinationals,
farmers, non-governmental activists, venture
capitalists, religious leaders and a media either being
fashionably cynical or trumpeting biotechnology as the
next great mix of miracles since Moses shook his walking
stick at Pharaoh Ramses. In getting Swaminathan to
head the task force, India's agriculture department gave
the recommendations some balm of credibility. Public
fears about biotechnology being a greedy Western
multinational racket ruining scarce farmlands, driving
farmers to suicide and contaminating our digestive
systems were in serious need of soothing. Not
surprisingly, over one-fifth of the task force's
recommendations, five chapters (17 to 21), dealt with
increasing public awareness and confidence in
agricultural biotechnology.
Swaminathan, whom
Time magazine ranked one of the 20 most influential
Asians of the 20th century (the other two Indians listed
were Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore - Indian
Nobel laureate for literature ) has been described by
the United Nations as "the father of economic ecology".
A plant geneticist by training, Swaminathan's
Chennai-based non-profit MS Swaminathan Research
Foundation serves rural India, respecting the rural and
tribal families it works with as "partners" and not
"beneficiaries".
The task force has tried
bridging the gap between those for and against
biotechnology. "Among frontier technologies relevant to
the next stage in our agricultural evolution, the
foremost is biotechnology," states the Chennai
Declaration, composed during a workshop for policy
makers held in the south Indian city of Chennai last
October.
Referring to India as a "megadiversity"
country, the Chennai Declaration says: "India has a
natural advantage in becoming a world leader in food and
agricultural biotechnology."
With the aim of
heading in that direction, an 89-member Indian biotech
mission organized by the Confederation of Indian
Industry visited the United States from June 2 to 9
looking to get a slice of the US biotech industry, with
its estimated worth of $34.8 billion. Calling India a
team leader, the mission said the country had about 200
biotechnology firms and expects a 20+% annual growth
rate, a chunk of it expected from outsourced research
assignments. The visit coincided with the annual
biotechnology convention in San Francisco that started
June 6.
In attendance at the convention, yelling
from the protestors' corner, was Vandana Shiva, the
Indian nuclear physicist turned ferocious bio-piracy
warrior. Her detractors call her a false prophet denying
developing countries the benefits of frontier
technology. Her admirers celebrate her for fighting
unscrupulous multinationals trying to patent timelessly
traditional Indian knowledge and biological resource
such as the medicinally powerful neem leaf and turmeric.
Shiva, who serves as an ecology advisor to
organizations such as the Third World Network and the
Asia Pacific People's Environment Network, won the Right
Livelihood Award (also called the "Alternative Nobel
Prize") in 1993. Better known outside India than in it,
51-year-old Shiva was earlier this month rousing
American audiences, including at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, with her usual war whoops
such as "ten thousand years of expertise in feeding us
is a woman's expertise. That work is now being claimed
as an invention by a handful of corporations." To her,
biotechnology in agriculture equals corporates
dominating world agriculture.
In her commentary
"The Suicide Economy of Corporate Globalization"
published in February this year, Shiva blames the World
Bank's structural adjustment policies in 1998 for
ruining India's farmers. She says, "The Indian
peasantry, the largest body of surviving small farmers
in the world, today faces a crisis of extinction."
Shiva blames their fate on India opening its
seed sector to global corporations like Cargill,
Monsanto, and Syngenta. "The global corporations changed
the input economy overnight," says Shiva. "Farm saved
seeds were replaced by corporate seeds which needed
fertilizers and pesticides and could not be saved." The
farmer, she said, was turned from producer to a consumer
of costly seeds and fertilizers.
"More than
25,000 peasants in India have taken their lives since
1997 when the practice of seed saving was transformed
under globalization pressures and multinational seed
corporations started to take control of the seed supply.
Seed saving gives farmers life," says Shiva. "Seed
monopolies rob farmers of life."
Shiva wrote
this two months before the biotechnology-friendly Indian
state of Andhra Pradesh was booted out in the Indian
elections this year, a result widely accepted as
punishment for the high rate of debt-ridden farmers in
the state committing suicide. Their genetically modified
(GM) Bt cotton crop failed. The tragedy still continues
after the new state government took over on May 14, with
161 farmers reported killing themselves since. The
electoral loss in Andhra Pradesh was a critical factor
in the change of national government in New Delhi.
The Swaminathan-chaired task force
recommendation addresses such risks to farmers by
suggesting that companies selling GM seeds to small and
marginal farmers should also give them insurance
coverage. "An insurance system for GM crops needs to be
developed speedily," says Chapter 23 on "Liability and
Compensation". "So that small farmers who take
institutional credit for buying expensive seeds do not
suffer in case of crop failure." But while this opens
another shop window for insurance companies, the fact
remains that farmers cannot easily fight legal battles
if the insurance companies default.
The Indian
biotech industry could earn $5 billion in revenues the
next five years, says a new Ernst & Young (E&Y)
biotech report titled "On The Threshold - The
Asia-Pacific Perspective". India, Singapore, Taiwan,
Japan and Korea are crowned regional biotech leaders,
with China seen as quickly shortening the gap.
The E&Y report says India could create over
1 million biotech jobs over the next five years. But
substantial doubts remain about how much of the
predicted boom will actually benefit Indian farmers and
food security. A June 15 report in Asia Times Online on
global biotechnology (Biotechnology: Breeding hurdles and
hypeJune 15) observed: "The subsistence crops
that are most important in the war with hunger, such as
cowpea, millet, sorghum and teff, are not being improved
because they hold little appeal for the firms that own
most of the biotech patents."
In India, stifling
biotechnology growth was blamed on cluttered, cumbersome
regulatory mechanisms. The first genetically modified
crop legally used in India, the controversial Bt cotton,
was cleared after four years, eight years after it was
cleared in the US. Result: a booming black market boom
for spurious Bt cotton seeds in the states of Gujarat,
Punjab and Rajasthan, seeds that have not been cleared
as being safe for the local soil.
Instead of the
existing Genetic Engineering Approval Committee,
Swaminathan's task force proposed establishing an
autonomous National Biotechnology Regulatory Authority.
This apex body will have two wings, one for agricultural
and food biotechnology and the other to serve medical
and pharmaceutical biotechnology.
"Provisions to
protect bio-diversity, bio-security and a series of
measures for new regulatory mechanics [for GM crops]
will inspire public confidence," Swaminathan said. He
has also asked for the establishment of 30 agri-biotech
parks across India.
The new measures and the new
technology could be "pathway to an era of bio-happiness"
in India, as Swaminathan and Co hope. But reality
suggests agricultural biotechnology investors should
wisely refrain from counting their GM chickens before
they are hatched.
Raja M is a Mumbai
based journalist.
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Jun 24, 2004
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