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Policies Toward GM Crops In India cont.,
As innovative and ambitious as these provisions for financial compensation
to farmers might be, they have not gone far enough to satisfy India’s
most determined critics of UPOV-style plant variety protection. In 1998,
India’s activist Research Foundation for Science, Technology and
Ecology (RFSTE) headed by Vandana Shiva, who is an internationally known
opponent of GM crops, the green revolution, and all other market-led scientific
advances in Indian agriculture. RFSTE proposed an alternative Biodiversity
Rights and Protection Bill that would give local farming communities not
just financial compensation but actual property rights over the crop varieties
to which their traditional on-farm breeding efforts had made contributions.
The Bill specifies that local communities would share these property rights
with the Central Government of India so that private companies suspected
of seeking to pirate away valuable genetic materials would not be able
to approach local communities separately to gain access to these materials
on unequal terms (Cullet 1999). The intent of this proposal was to reject
any movement in India toward a western-style IPR system in the area of
plant genetic resources; when the Government persisted with its PVPA approach,
RFSTE initiated a public interest litigation action (PIL) against the
Government.
The issue of GM crops only adds new complication to this already intense
internal debate in India over plant variety IPRs. In 1998, when the Monsanto
Company of the United States purchased a 26 percent share of India’s
own Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Limited (Mahyco), a Monsanto executive
was quoted in the Indian press saying "We propose to penetrate the
Indian agriculture sector in a big way. Mahyco is a good vehicle."
(The Economic Times, New Delhi, April 26, 1998). Opponents of transnational
corporations within India took this as a direct challenge, and began directing
harsh criticism at all of Monsanto’s GM crop technologies, especially
the "terminator gene" patent it had recently acquired, which
was presented as a direct threat to the tradition of seed saving in India.
It was Monsanto’s misfortune that word of this new gene use restriction
technology (GURT) reached India just at the time limited trials of Mahyco's
Bt cotton were being authorized for the first time. A Canadian based NGO,
the Rural Advancement Foundation International, or RAFI, spread the alarm
that Monsanto's terminator gene might be turned loose in India. Local
NGOs opposed to international companies and non-traditional farm technologies
were thus mobilized easily against GM crops. In November 1998, a local
political leader in Karnataka state who had previously gained attention
by attacking both the Cargill seed company and a Kentucky Fried Chicken
restaurant in Bangalore, staged for the media a brief attack on some of
Mahyco’s Bt cotton field trials. Soon thereafter local communist
party leaders in Andra Pradesh pressured the Chief Minister into calling
for an end to the Mahyco Bt cotton field trials underway there as well.
Gene use restrictions technologies had not yet been inserted into GM
crops anywhere let alone the Bt cotton being tried out in India, but this
issue made Monsanto and Mahyco easy targets for NGO and opposition party
criticism. The mere existence of a terminator gene patent seemed to confirm
suspicions that international seed companies were seeking to take away
from India’s farmers their traditional right to replicate seed on
their own farms. In India, 92 percent of all wheat seed planted is home
grown, and 88 percent of paddy rice seed. NGOs and globalization critics
feared that India's small farmers would be pressured by Monsanto or Mahyco
into purchasing expensive GURT seeds, only to discover too late that they
had to keep purchasing them year after year. The same argument could have
been made against conventional non-GM hybrid seeds, which are currently
used and repurchased annually by small as well as large farmers in India
growing maize, sorghum (jowar), millet (bajra), sunflower, cotton, and
vegetables, but the terminator technology was far more inviting as a proxy
for criticizing profit-making foreign companies. Monsanto announced in
the fall of 1999 that it was not going to commercialize the technology,
yet by then the damage was already done, including damage to the Government's
continuing efforts to move the PVPA law through Parliament.
Enactment of the PVPA in India was also made more difficult by links
to the TRIPs agreement in WTO. Many of the same groups who saw IPRs for
plants as the opening wedge for external corporate domination of India
also feared the WTO, which is often criticized in India as an instrument
used by rich countries to bully poor countries. Under the TRIPS agreement
India was technically obliged to change its patenting system from processes
to products, and to have a plant variety protection law in place by January
2000, but this deadline came and went without parliamentary action.
Prospects for eventual Parliamentary passage of some version - probably
a weakened version - of the Government’s PVPA bill were nonetheless
strong in 2000. The National Democratic Alliance government sent its most
recent version of the bill to Parliament for approval in December 1999,
just before its January 2000 WTO deadline for TRIPs compliance. It was
then referred to a thirty-member joint committee of both Houses which
redrafted the bill so as to strengthen its farmers' rights provisions,
by recommending that appeals be heard not by the High Courts but by a
specially formed tribunal. The delays continued, but WTO was unlikely
to criticize India for not having a PVPA in place so long as the delay
seemed to reflect the slow movement of democratic procedures.
This failure of India through 2000 to set in place any formal IPR protections
for plants was not, however, the principal reason that GM crop technologies
were not yet in use by farmers. Because of the size of India's commercial
seed market, private international companies have at times been eager
to bring GM technologies into the country even in the absence of IPR guarantees.
Their preferred means for doing this has been to seek to introduce hybrid
varieties, which carry their own inherent biological protections against
seed saving and replanting. It has not so far been a corporate unwillingness
to bring valuable proprietary GM crops into India that has kept this technology
out of farmers' hands. India's weak IPR policies do, however, place some
limits on what international private companies are willing to do, as well
as on what India's own breeders have an incentive to do. Because of weak
IPRs, private companies do not like to conduct advanced research in India
labs. In its Bt cotton venture the Monsanto company conducted no plant
transformations within India itself; instead it brought in hybrid cotton
seeds that had already been transformed abroad. Nor did not begin field
trials until it owned a secure share of a local corporate partner that
had been entrusted to do the backcrossing. A Belgian biotechnology firm,
Plant Genetic Systems, was almost as cautious when it decided to bring
its transgenic "seedlink" technology into India, to develop
an improved brassica (mustard). It invested an initial US$1 million
in a joint venture with a trustworthy local private sector partner, Pro
Agro, and even so it limited its transfer of transgenic materials to local
Indian hybrids only.
If India wishes to partner with foreign companies to secure access to
GM technologies for plants other than hybrids (for example, glyphosate
resistant soybeans), passage of a credible plant variety protection law
will be critical. Up to a point, bilateral contracts can be used to compensate
for a weak internal IPR law, yet without at least a UPOV 1978 plant breeders
rights system in place, India’s public sector researchers risk being
passed over as unsafe technology development partners by the more dynamic
international private sector. Guarding India’s own nationally managed
germplasm accessions from private appropriation could also become more
difficult, public registration strategies notwithstanding. For these reasons
India's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has been
campaigning for a stronger IPR and patenting system in India, in agriculture
as well as in other sectors.
In the longer run, IPR guarantees even stronger than those contained
in the current draft PVPA may be necessary if India wishes to keep pace
in GM science. The draft PVPA has been criticized by the private seed
companies as unattractive for their purposes in several respects. The
draft PVPA lays a basis (in Chapter X) for compulsory licensing after
three years to meet "the reasonable requirements of the public for
seeds." It creates a registration process open to delay and challenge
which could add another three years to the already long time period (currently
6-7) years required in India to get a new seed variety completely de-regulated
and eligible for commercial release. And by embracing the UPOV 1978 standard
the PVPA does not provide scientists with sufficient incentive to innovate
at the molecular level, since protection of GM varieties may not be extend
to included essential derivations from those varieties. The President
of India’s private Seed Association, while a supporter of the PVPA,
has stated his view that it "does not provide sufficient protection
for bioengineered plants." (Selvarajan, Joshi, and O’Toole 1999,
p. v). Private seed companies would of course prefer product patents as
the best means to encourage innovations in biotechnology, but Indian scientists
working at the molecular level inside the national research system also
want stronger standards; they would prefer the UPOV 1991 standard over
the weaker UPOV 1978 standard contained in the current draft PVPA .
Without a plant variety protection law formally in place, India as of
2000 must be classified as taking a preventive stance toward GM crops
in the IPR area, and even after the draft PVPA is eventually enacted India's
posture in this area will be no more than precautionary. Still, it has
been India's biosafety policies, not its IPR policies, that have most
conspicuously slowed down the nation's GM crop revolution.
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