Silent spread

Unauthorised herbicide-tolerant cotton varieties circulate in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh

- AMBIKA SUBASH

THIS MAY, during a visit to a seed and pesticide outlet in Kawathi village of Manawar tehsil, Dhar district, Madhya Pradesh, I saw neatly stacked bottles of herbicide glyphosate. Often used for weed control, glyphosate is infamous for its perceived impacts of human and environmental health—The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies it as “probably carcinogenic to humans”, while studies believe it may contribute to soil microbial imbalances and emergence of herbicide-resistant “superweeds”. A conversation about glyphosate with the shop assistant led to the subject of herbicide-tolerant seeds. He showed me seed packets they had gotten from Gujarat, “Yugam 5G” and “Bahubali 4G”, saying they offer dual resistance to pink bollworm, a major pest of cotton, as well as glyphosate. The seeds were in high demand, he said. Our conversation was quickly interrupted by the shop owner, who admitted that the seeds were technically illegal to sell, and were only for use on his fields.

The “technically illegal” point came up because the fact that the seeds promised resistance against pink bollworm and herbicide tolerance suggested they were genetically modified (GM), although the packets did not mention so. GM herbicide-tolerant cotton is not yet approved for commercial cultivation in India. The Union government has approved only two GM cotton varieties—Bollgard I (BG) I and BG II—developed by US-based Monsanto and marketed through its Indian joint venture, Mahyco-Monsanto Biotech Ltd. These are called Bt cotton varieties, as they are modified to include a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that resists pink bollworm.