Civil Society's Monitoring of Bt Cotton Performance from 2002

Right from the beginning, the official regulatory bodies in India have shown their inability, disinclination and sheer apathy towards proper biosafety testing and monitoring during research and commercial use. Then there are issues beyond biosafety which are not part of the impact assessment process related to GMOs in any case. A larger issue of course is the decision-making related to whether GM crops are needed at all! It is not clear where, when and how it had been decided that GM alternatives with specific traits for particular crops are definitely needed in this country.....

Right from the beginning, accountability mechanisms have always been unclear and missing even though the EPA itself has a penal clause for violations of the legislation. In fact, it is not clear if the mandate of the regulatory bodies is to protect the interests of the farmers and consumers of the country or the commercial interests of biotech promoters. The DBT for instance had always appeared to see its mandate to be that of promoting biotechnology and that biosafety concerns should be addressed by other agencies, departments and ministries.....

It is in this context that civil society groups have taken it upon themselves to project the real growing conditions of farmers, their experiences, the problems being encountered and observed and so on.  

One of the important efforts from civil society was in the area of monitoring the performance of Bt Cotton in various states. A paper presented by Centre for Sustainable Agriculture in a national seminar in Kerala, with a special focus on information obtained from official records, gives a clear picture of the economics of GM crops as seen with Bt Cotton in India so far, especially in Andhra Pradesh.

Some of the civil society groups that consistently monitored the performance of Bt Cotton include:

Andhra Pradesh Coalition in Defence of Diversity [APCIDD] - 2002-03, 2003-04, 2004-05, 2005-06

Centre for Sustainable Agriculture [CSA] - 2002-05, 2004-05

Monitoring & Evaluation Committee [MEC] of 20 civil society groups - 2005-06 (in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra)

Gene Campaign - 2002-03 and 2003-04

Other groups like Greenpeace India, WWF-India, FAO's pesticides policy project etc., have also monitored the performance of the crop on the ground over various years.

In 2006, Centre for Economic & Social Studies (CESS, Hyderabad) came out with a performance assessment report which showed that cotton cultivation itself was proving to give negative economic results to farmers.

Bt Cotton has been hyped as the reason for increased cotton production and productivity in the country - however, a deeper reading into the situation across states gives us a different picture. It makes you ask "is it really Bt Cotton"?