The Bt brinjal saga

Kanpur: The poor man's vegetable, brinjal, is in the midst of a hot controversy. NDTV's Science Editor Pallava Bagla recounts the tale of Bt Brinjal, even as India awaits a decision on whether the country will embrace genetically modified foods or not.

An Indian private seed company, Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Limited (MAHYCO), Mumbai in which Monsanto has a minority stake has developed a special variety of the brinjal plant that carries in it insecticidal genes extracted from a common soil bacterium Bacillus thurigiensis (Bt).

This modified variety is able to kill a common pest called the Fruit and Shoot Borer. According to the National Horticulture Board in 2006 brinjal was grown over 0.55 million hectares, with a total production of 9.13 million tonnes and India is the second largest producer of brinjal in the world after China.

The pest has caused losses of up to 70 per cent of commercial plantings, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications in New Delhi, a GM food advocacy organization. The group asserts that farmers must apply pesticides to brinjal up to 40 times during the 120 days from sowing to harvest, which is every third day.

The Bt brinjal saga starts in 2000 when MAHYCO transformed egg plants by inserting the cry1Ac gene licensed to it from Monsanto to eight Indian brinjal hybrid varieties.

Since then the company says it has carried out field trails, animal toxicity, bio-safety, allerginicity, pollen transfer tests in accordance with Indian regulatory authorities. Dr Usha Barwale Zehr, a genetic engineer and Chief Technology Officer, MAHYCO said: "We are very confident with the testing to show efficacy and improved performance of Bt brinjal since all the mandated testing has been complied with."

After nine years of testing on a total of about 25 hectares of land area spread on 59 different locations of which 42 were sites where the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) independently tested the Bt Brinjal plants, on October 14, 2009, India's apex regulatory body the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) housed in Ministry of Environment and Forests concluded that 'Bt brinjal is safe for environmental release' but in an unusual move it said: "Since this decision will have major policy implications ... (recommendations were being submitted) to the government for a final view."

In an unprecedented move India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh a mechanical engineer and a known critic of genetically modified foods intervened and sought to hold public hearings all over India for him to arrive at 'a careful, considered decision in the public and national interest'.

Pushpa M Bhargava a molecular biologist, former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad and a Supreme Court appointed special observer on GEAC who opposed the introduction of this variety since he feels 'the safety assessment is not complete'. Bhargava wants the company to do another 30 tests that include among others a complete protein finger printing of the Bt brinjal variety and a chronic toxicity test that lasts much longer than the 90 day long test done by MAHYCO on rats, goats and cows.

The eight Bt brinjal varieties awaiting a final nod from the government are all hybrids, which means farmers need to buy proprietary high value seeds year after year, but in an unusual move the company with funding from USAID routed through Cornell University in USA has also transferred its technology to three public sector institutions in India who have been allowed to develop open pollinated varieties of Bt Brinjal, where farmers can retain the seeds and plant it year after year, but obviously the yields are lower, the only caveat from MAHYCO is that these public sector facilities will not develop and market hybrid varieties.