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The Supreme Court has passed an interim
order directing the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) not to give
any further approvals for field trials of genetically engineered crops and other
products til further notice
This interim order will hold only until the
GEAC has responded and when the Court will review their decision. Too much
should not be read into this temporary restriction as the Supreme Court has made
it very clear in its statement that it is not inclined to order large scale
curbs on field trials.
This interim injunction has a bearing on the
proposed approval for Large Scale Trials (LST)for Bt brinjal, which is poised to
become India's first
genetically engineered food crop. Civil Society Groups had raised objections to
granting approval to a food crop because of safety concerns and the lack of
clarity on the kind of safety tests conducted on Bt brinjal and their outcomes.
The GEAC has withheld permission to the Mahyco seed company for LST until an
expert committee has evaluated the comments sent in by concerned citizens.
According to the GEAC, the LSTs will be
subject to several conditions even if they are granted approval. In fact, there
are many issues that have not been addressed. For instance, though the GEAC has
proposed the involvement of Gram Sabhas in the LSTs for which the state
agriculture universities would provide the technical support, the module for
such support has not been decided, nor is it clear how it would be provided and
what it would include. If the gram sabhas object and do not approve of the
trials, would their objections be considered? Would the gram sabhas be informed
about the health and environmental implications of the GE crop, or about the
gene flow and increased risk of weediness?
The only information available on the
website of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF)is a brief background
note on the development of Bt brinjal and presentations made by the Mahyco
company. On the advice of Ministry of Environment and Forests,the Indian Council
of Agriculture Research (ICAR)has conducted field trials of Bt brinjal
independently, using its own protocol during Kharif seasons 2004-05 and 2005-06.
But, the results of these trials are neither published anywhere nor placed on
the Ministry's website for public viewing.
Similarly, the comments of the Monitoring
and Evaluation Committee that monitored the field trials conducted by the
company are also not placed on the website. In the absence of these reports, the
claim of the company that Bt brinjal is very beneficial and useful remains
purely one sided.
According to the information on the official
website, the company would be required to conduct a number of additional studies
including foliage toxicity study in goats, analysis of fruit dry matter to
determine differences in yield from the agronomic traits and flavour analysis of
Bt and non-Bt fruits. It is not clear what these studies will achieve but what
is striking is the minimal involvement of our vast network of public sector
research institutions in conducting any of these investigations. As it is,
government laboratories were involved in only four of the large number of
studies conducted on environmental effects, soil analysis, substantial
equivalence, protein expression in cooked fruits, toxicological and allergenicity
assessment and nutritional content. In future studies also, public sector
institutions are not being involved, nor has GEAC recommended any independent
public sector study on any of these aspects. The concerned companies themselves
will provide data on biosafety and food safety.
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