India’s President Endorses Biotech Crops for the Poor and the Wildlife

Dennis Avery

India, set to become the world’s most populous nation, just fired a major broadside at the First World activists opposing genetic engineering in agriculture.

India’s President A. P. J. Kalam publicly endorsed genetically engineered crops in a January 26 speech commemorating the 54th anniversary of India’s independence. Dr. Kalam urgently recommended biotechnology for agriculture to launch “a second Green Revolution.”

The first Green Revolution boosted India’s grain production from only 60 million tons per year in the late 1950s to 240 million tons in 2002. However, President Kalam says that 400 million Indians still lack adequate nutrition, and that further population growth is likely to drive the country’s grain needs to 320 million tons by 2020. Simply putting more fertilizer and pesticides on today’s fields is unlikely to produce the needed food production increase.

India also must reforest millions of hectares of marginal land and protect the existing wildlands that harbor its tigers, barking deer and other unique wild species, said Dr. Kalam. He warns that these urgent needs could cut India’s available farmland from the current 170 million hectares to less than 100 million.

“All our agricultural scientists and technologists have to work for doubling the productivity of the available land . . . While doing so, utmost care should be taken for various environmental and people-related aspects leading to sustainable development.”

India’s population surge has slowed remarkably, as urbanization and rising affluence have helped cut the birth rate from nearly 6 births per woman in 1960 to only about 2.7 today. However, India’s current population of about 1 billion is likely to pass China’s 1.3 billion before leveling off around the year 2030.

India debated the biotech crop issue for more than four years, while continuing biotech research but allowing no farmer plantings. Farmers demonstrated both for and against the biotech crops. The president of the Karnataka Farmers Association led a demonstration to burn test plots of genetically modified cotton, in a “direct action campaign that will not stop until all the corporate killers leave the country.” Many small farmers, however, said they were optimistic that biotech seeds would need less pesticide, produce more cotton and yield more profit. (Small Chinese cotton farmers reported doubling their incomes with Bt cotton.)

The impasse was broken last year, after Indian fields planted with Bt cotton — without government approval — came through a major infestation of pink bollworms virtually unscathed. The conventional cotton plantings were devastated, leading to many farmer suicides and a major supply problem for the cotton industry — India’s largest single employer after farming. India ultimately approved Bt cotton (cotton genetically engineered to contain a natural pesticide) as its first genetically modified crop release.

“India is the largest democracy in the world,” says Dr. Kalam, “and it must consider those 400 million people who are struggling to come out of poverty. . . . Technology is the only tool we have. It is the only unifying force that will keep us together, lift the level of our prosperity and well being, and give our people a better quality of life. Technology is a group activity, inherently social, and interacting the intelligence of many people.”

Dr. Kalam, a scientist by training, has thus aligned himself with two Nobel Peace Prize winners (Dr. Norman Borlaug and Former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias) a Greenpeace co-founder (Patrick Moore) and the head of the World Conservation Trust (Eugene LaPoint) who endorsed a “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature With High-Yield Farming Forestry” at the National Press Club in D.C. last April 30th.

Next year, more than 6 million Third World farmers in at least 16 countries are expected to plant more than 60 million hectares of biotech crops. Most of these farmers will plant cotton in China, in India, or in the resource-poor province of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa. Many other small farmers around the world will also plant biotech soybeans, corn, canola and limited acreages of virus-resistant squash and papaya.

In the coming years, expect the well fed of the First World to continue trying to deny prosperity through technology to the poor of the Third World. But also expect them to fail as Third World leaders respond to the unmet needs of their people.