[A2k] Fwd: article, 'Napster Pirates of Transgenic Biotech'

[kaitlin mara]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
An article in Salon by Andrew Leonard about farmer-led experimentation with
unofficial Bt cotton seeds in Gujarat, India... much to the consternation of
both large biotech firms and the local anti-GM movement.  Article available
at the following link, and pasted below (as is relatively short).

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/index.html?last_story=/tech/htww/2007/02/08/gujarat/&source=refresh

An article in this month's Journal of Development Studies looks at the
situation in more detail, but doesn't appear to be available online without
subscription.

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The Napster pirates of transgenic biotechAndrew Leonard

 2001 was a bad year for
bollworms<http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/P/I-LP-PGOS-LV.047.html>in
Gujarat. The pink larval creatures infested cotton fields across the
Indian state, devastating harvests.

But some fields, remarkably, were mostly immune. Mayhco, an Indian seed
company partially owned by Monsanto, became suspicious. Mayhco and Monsanto
had been striving for years to get permission to sell genetically modified
Bt cotton in India -- a strain that produces its own anti-bollworm
insecticide -- but the application had been fought at every step by India's
vigorous anti-GM activists and was undergoing lengthy trials. Sure enough,
after testing the cotton, Mayhco determined that it contained the
Monsanto-patented gene Cry1ac.

To this day, no one seems to be quite sure exactly how the Bt gene got into
the seeds sold to the Gujarat farmers under the brand name Navbharat151. D.B.
Desai, the owner of the Navbharat seed
company<http://www.journalismfellowships.org/stories/india/india_biotech.htm>and
a well known breeder, claims it was an accident, the result of
contamination from test plots in another Indian state where the trials of
genetically modified cotton were being conducted. His critics say he is
being criminally disingenuous, that he must have knowingly stolen cotton
seeds from the trials and interbred them with other cotton strains. To
Monsanto, D.B. Desai is a new breed of thief, a biotech pirate.

But to the farmers of Gujarat, he's Robin Hood, the man who took genetic
modification technology from the rich, and gave it to the poor. Because
while the dispute as to the origin of the seeds hasn't been settled, there's
been little doubt as to their effectiveness. Yields are up, pesticide use is
down, a state of affairs that continues to the present; even though Desai
was arrested and Navbharat forbidden from selling the contested seeds.

But it's what has happened *after* the ban on Navbharat151 that is really
intriguing. As farmers are wont to do, they saved their seeds, and
discovered that the second generation was also resistant to bollworm
depredation. Some even experimented with interbreeding the Navbharat151
genetic line with other strains of cotton particularly suited to Gujarat
conditions, and came up with new strains that proved effective. Local seed
companies sprang up to commercialize the descendant breeds. And even though
Mayhco-Monsanto has since been allowed to sell its own cotton seeds, the
local bootlegged versions have proved more popular. And why not? According
to reports, they're much cheaper, and, from the point of view of local
farmers, perform as well or better than the "official" alternatives.

As anthropologist Glenn Davis Stone writes in a forthcoming article, "The
Birth and Death of Traditional Knowledge: Paradoxical Effects of
Biotechnology in India:"

 Indeed, it is now well documented that these orphan seeds became the basis
for a thriving cottage industry of Bt cotton breeding (illegal, because none
of the seeds were approved by [India's Genetic Engineering Approvals
Committee].) Some of the breeding was being carried out by those with
technical training (such as graduate students at Gujarat Agricultural
University) but much was being done by farmers. Rather remarkably, some
farmers were even maintaining inbred lines and producing their own hybrids.
The Gujarat cotton fields turned into what Anil Gupta (a leader in studying
and promoting farmer innovation) termed "the greatest participatory farmer
plant-breeding mela [carnival] in history."

By 2003, Gujarat shops were awash with illicit Bt seeds, many with coy names
alluding to the technology ("BesT Cotton") or to Desai's original product
("Kapas-151"), or underscoring that they were first generation hybrids
("Kavach F-1"). For brand after brand, PCR testing at the Central Inst. of
Cotton Research confirmed the presence of the Cry1ac gene. In 2004,
industry's claims that over half of all the GM cotton growing in India was
from unapproved seeds were generally regarded as realistic. By the 2005
season, Navbharat's own surveys indicated 80 percent of the cotton growing
in Gujarat to be from illicit Bt seeds.

 Professor Stone was kind enough to provide me with advance proofs of his
article. Further detail on Gujarat is available in Ronald J. Herring's
"Stealth seeds: Bioproperty, biosafety, biopolitics," one of many articles
devoted to the implications of crop biotechnology for the developing world
in the January issue of the Journal of Development
Studies.<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7Econtent=g770410759%7Edb=all>A
somewhat more conflicted analysis can also be found in Anil Gupta's
and
Vikas Chandak's "Agricultural Biotechnology in India: Ethics, Business and
Politics."<http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/%7Eanilg/morepub/papers/new/Agricultural%20Biotechnology%20in%20India,%202004.doc>

Conflicted, because the events taking place in Gujarat are confounding to
critics of corporate biotech, and not just to those who have strenuously
argued, in India, that transgenic cotton is *not* an improvement over
non-modified varieties. Farmer advocates are wincing at the sight of a mass
experiment in unauthorized biotechnology, even as they acknowledge the clear
benefits that farmers appear to be enjoying. As Gupta and Chandak write,

 "Undoubtedly, the experience of Gujarat will be recalled in the history of
biotechnology as one of the largest trials (with full public knowledge and
without any responsible monitoring or evaluation by public agencies at
similar scale) of an illegally released technology ever done by people
themselves, oblivious of any environmental or other consequence."

 Gupta and Chandak are dismayed by what the Gujarat cotton episode implies
for government capacity to regulate biotechnology. But yet another twist to
the story is that Monsanto also doesn't have too much reason to cheer. One
might assume that the ratification of Bt cotton by farmers would be an
unambiguous victory for Monsanto. But the popularity of the bootleg Bt
cotton also spells out how difficult it may end up for corporations to
capitalize, in the long term, on their transgenic intellectual property.
Because *they* can't control it either. Gujarat's cotton farmers are an
analog to Napster's file traders. Intellectual property turns out to be easy
to steal, even when it is hard-coded as a gene. Or, as Herring observes in
the Journal of Developmental Studies, "Social institutions will not deal
with stealth seeds very well, as they do not deal with any high-value
product that is movable across permeable state space: software, pornography,
information, drugs, arms."

Herring suggests that a likely solution is real "terminator" technology --
crops designed so their seeds cannot be saved and replanted. But that
creates its own paradox: Even though so-called "terminator technology" has
yet to be deployed *anywhere,* the specter of such seeds is probably the
single most successful rhetorical rallying cry for the anti-GMO movement,
particularly in developing nations with huge farmer populations.

So Monsanto and its brethren are in a position where politically, they
cannot employ a technology (even supposing that they could make it work)
that would enable them to maintain control over their intellectual property,
and anti-GM activists are in a position where their opposition to just such
a technology ensures the uncontrollable spread of transgenic genes. The only
way out of this cul-de-sac would be to politically enforce a complete
worldwide moratorium on all genetic modification research, and that *isn't
going to happen.* It's not just that farmers on the ground in Gujarat are
desperate for cotton strains that allow them to forego expensive (and
environmentally dangerous) applications of pesticide. The very notion that
biotech is primarily under the corporate control of a few multinationals is
also suspect. China, India, and Brazil are all investing substantial public
resources into crop biotechnology, and all have a huge interest in improving
yields, pesticide resistance, drought hardiness, and so on. And that's not
even considering the immense financial and environmental pressures that will
spur research into and deployment of transgenic energy crops.

If what Stone labels the "anarcho-capitalism" of Gujarat is an indication of
what is likely to transpire in the future (and it seems that a somewhat
similar scenario may have played out in Brazil with transgenic soybeans),
then what this all adds up to, frankly, is an incredible mess. Corporations
will be unable to control how their biotech is used. Green activists won't
be able to stop its spread. Governments, no matter how well-meaning, are
unlikely to effectively implement biosafety protocols that are 100 percent
certain to screen out all possible risks. In some cases, as in Gujarat,
farmers will take advantage of new technologies and mix and match with what
they know how to do best: as Stone writes, "the tortured history of Bt
technology in Gujarat has been instrumental in them becoming reinvolved in
experimentation, assessment and even developing their own seeds," in stark
contrast to the situation in another Indian state, Andhra Pradesh, where the
introduction of GM cotton appears to have actively "deskilled"
farmers.<http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/01/31/glenn_davis_stone/>

Should we be dismayed by this profusion of complexity, or heartened? One
encouraging lesson is that while the Monsantos of the world are
extraordinarily powerful, they are not *all powerful.* Another could be the
observation that transgenic biotech can indeed make a positive difference in
the lives of farmers, especially when they are given the freedom to
experiment and adapt. Yet another is that farmers are not automatically
helpless pawns in the face of corporate capital -- they can coopt new
technologies and create new agricultural practices.

Still another is that the situation on the ground is changing, all the time,
and with great speed, and we had better keep paying very close attention.

-- Andrew Leonard