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From May 2002 Anthropology News Biotechnology and Suicide in India Glenn Davis Stone Were it not for the debate over Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), few outside of India ever would have heard of the suicides. St Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Bill Lambrecht only found the story because he was covering the GMO controversy in India, and even then his paper ran the story under a headline about Monsanto’s problems (“India Gives Monsanto An Unstable Lab For Genetics In Farming,” Nov 22, 1998). The Facts Who: cotton farmers, particularly small and marginal ones. What: suicide, mostly by drinking pesticides. Where: the epicenter was Warangal District of Andhra Pradesh, although agrarian suicides were (and still are) occurring elsewhere. When: the worst was in 1998, when over 500 took their own lives in Warangal, but the suicides have continued, topping 1,000 in Warangal alone. But why? This is the subject of sharp disagreement, largely because of GM issues. India is a key battle line in the global war over GM crops, and both sides interpret the Warangal suicides as supporting their position. Monsanto attributes the suicides to crop destruction by pesticide-resistant bollworms; they offer GM “Bollgard” cotton, which they have been trying to get approved for sale in India, as a solution. Vandana Shiva, one of the world’s top anti-GM activists, blames the suicides on globalization, purchased farm inputs and intrusive technologies; she contends that GM crops would worsen poverty and indebtedness by concentrating power, promoting ecologically unstable monocultures, and discouraging traditional seed-saving and exchange. Why Suicide? For such competing interpretive claims, the stakes are very high: dozens
of GM plants are at various stages of development and approval for use
in developing countries, and public opinion often turns on striking
and memorable stories. For Monsanto and Shiva, Warangal is a means of
promoting polarized views on GM crops. Yet as an anthropologist who
studies farmers in developing countries, I cannot see how Warangal can
offer any lessons on biotechnology until the case is understood on its
own merits. Pesticide Treadmill Cotton is the classic “pesticide treadmill” crop. Warangal farmers spend heavily on pesticides that are applied desperately and indiscriminately to combat a plethora of increasingly resistant pests. Monsanto emphasizes the predations from the “American bollworm,” against which Bollgard is effective (it is modified with a gene from the “Bt” bacterium to produce proteins lethal to some lepidopteran insects). Monsanto’s India marketing director even has claimed Bollgard could have prevented the 1998 suicides. Unfortunately, the American bollworm is only one of many cotton pests in India, and the main destruction in 1997-98 was caused by Spodoptera, against which Bollgard is not effective. Pesticide sprayings will have to continue even with Bollgard. Preliminary studies in China and Mexico show the higher cost of Bt cotton initially is offset by reduced pesticide costs, but those areas do not have Warangal’s problems with insects unaffected by Bt. In the short run, Bollgard may have as much potential to exacerbate debt traps as to mitigate them. In the long run, bollworms surely will develop resistance to Bt; the US practice of planting non-Bt refugia to prevent resistance is unworkable in India. Spurious Seed Warangal crops also fail because of “spurious seed”—inferior
cotton seed packaged as popular brands. Warangal farmers need much tighter
regulation at the point-of-sale (the input vendors), but India’s
regulatory focus long has been at the other end of the seed system (approval
and certification). This year, unapproved and illegal GM cotton (apparently
developed with stolen germplasm) was found growing in Gujarat, prompting
“corporate fury” and great pressure to increase regulation
of production and distribution of seed. If this comes at the expense
of the point-of-sale regulation that Warangal farmers need, the spurious
seed problem will only get worse. Glenn Davis Stone conducts research on political ecology and agricultural change. His current research on biotechnology involves comparative material from sub-Saharan Africa, India, Western Europe and the US. An expanded version of this commentary, with references, is available at http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/research/biotech_suicide.html |
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