After his off the wall outburst concerning genetically modified crops – and, in particular, the “widespread environmental damage in India caused by the rush to mass produce GM food” – Prince Charles was rightly labelled “the Prince of Counterknowledge.” Now, his royally bad science is gathering a following, led unscrupulously by the Daily Mail newspaper.
The Mail published a feature last week entitled “The GM genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide after using genetically modified crops.” It was written by Andrew Malone, and began as follows:
When Prince Charles claimed thousands of Indian farmers were killing themselves after using GM crops, he was branded a scaremonger. In fact, as this chilling dispatch reveals, it’s even WORSE than he feared.
The “chilling dispatch” opens with a description of an Indian family’s reaction to their father’s suicide. And, like much counterknowledge relating to GM crops, the article is driven by a false concern for those caught up in the problem: “the children were inconsolable,” Malone tells us, and now could end up “landless and homeless… the lowest of the low.”
The dead man, Shankara Mandaukar, had been “a respected farmer, loving husband and father,” but had been forced to take his own life – by drinking chemical insecticide – after “facing the loss of his land due to debt.” Malone continues:
Shankara’s crop had failed - twice. Of course, famine and pestilence are part of India’s ancient story. But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops.
Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead. Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiralling debts - and no income.
So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically modified crops.
Shankara Mandaukar’s story is certainly a tragic one. But the only sinister thing going on here is the Daily Mail’s blatant twisting – and fabricating – of facts to support their diehard anti-GM stance. Andrew Malone, please show me any evidence which suggests 125,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide because of GM crops. The figure, it seems – like the notion of a “genocide” – is entirely spurious. So, what’s really going on?
According to New Scientist, “more than 100,000 people kill themselves each year in India. Many of these deaths are of men who fall into debt, and one-fifth of all the suicides are farmers.” It is nothing new for anti-GM activists, including Prince Charles, to blame GM crops for these deaths: in 2005, Gene Campaign, an anti-GM group based in Delhi, was calling for legal action against India’s Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) for “criminal negligence and willful suppression of facts in the Bt cotton case” [for Bt read GM]. But even they only cited “several instances” of farmer suicides. Significantly though, Gene Campaign made some attempt at a scientific study:
Gene Campaign’s studies starting with the first harvest of Bt cotton in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra in 2002-03, showed that the crop had performed so poorly that 60 % of the farmers could not even recover their investment.
Recent data from a monitoring team set up by twenty grassroots level organizations working on agriculture, have documented the widespread failure of Bt cotton crops in Madhya Pradesh and Andhra.
It’s true. The Bt cotton did not do well in 2002-2003. But a new study shows that was mainly due to the severe drought, and that the GM crops played no significant part in the failed harvests – in other words, the non-GM crops did just as badly in the same period.
The aforementioned new study is by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), an organisation based in Washington DC. Published in October, there’s not a trace of pseudoscience about it. In fact, it’s an exercise in scientific clarity:
As a basis of analysis, we propose two opposed sets of hypotheses. The first, supported at least partially by media reports, personalities, and by a number of civil society organizations, is based on two major assertions:
1a. There has been a significant resurgence of farmer suicides in recent years (2002–2007), particularly in Central and Southern India.
1b. The main reason for these suicides is indebtedness due to negative farm income from failing cash crops. Because Bt cotton is a costly and ineffective technology, it is a major contributor to the resurgence of farmer suicides in these regions of India.
The second set [supported by the paper] stands in opposition to the first one and is based on three assertions:
2a. Farmer suicide is a long-term phenomenon; there is no clear evidence of a “resurgence” of such suicides in the five-year period covered by this study (2002–07).
2b. Bt cotton is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of farmer suicides. In contrast, many other factors (not all related to agriculture) have likely played a prominent role.
2c. In specific regions and years, where Bt cotton may have indirectly contributed to farmer indebtedness (via crop failure), leading to suicides, its failure was mainly the result of the context or environment in which it was introduced or planted; Bt cotton as a technology is not to blame.
Not only does the study convincingly refute “hypothesis 1,” it also highlights other facts ignored by the anti-GM contingent. These include that the adoption of pest-resistant Bt cotton varieties has led a 40% decrease in use of pesticide, that cotton yields have almost doubled and that, as the Guardian recently reported, “India is now the largest cotton producer in Asia and has overtaken the US to become the second largest in the world.”
There is no GM Genocide. Yes, the suicide problem among India’s farmers is extremely serious – but there’s no single cause to it, and certainly no scientific evidence to suggest that GM crops should be indicted. Both Prince Charles and the Daily Mail need to correct their distorted, ill-informed ideas, because, according to scientists, GM farming is rural India’s best hope.
At the beginning of last month, the Prince of Counterknowledge delivered the Sir Albert Howard Memorial Lecture. In it, he claimed that by speaking out about GM crops, he was sticking his “sixty-year-old head above an increasingly dangerous parapet.” Not quite, Your Royal Highness: you’re burying it in the sand.
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