Grey Market: When nearly a million Indian farmers plant ‘unapproved’ GM cotton | The Indian Express

If market and industry estimates are true, Indian farmers have, in the current kharif season, bought and planted about 35 lakh packets of genetically modified (GM) cotton seeds incorporating unapproved “herbicide tolerance” or HT technology.

Right now, the only GM cotton permitted to be grown in India are hybrids/varieties that contain ‘cry1Ac’ and ‘cry2Ab’ genes, isolated from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) and coding for proteins toxic to bollworm insect pests. The government hasn’t so far approved cultivation of cotton harbouring other GM traits, including resistance to specific herbicides. In normal cotton, spraying of herbicide is not possible once the plant has emerged out of the soil, as the chemical cannot distinguish between weeds and the crop itself. But with cotton that is genetically engineered to ‘tolerate’ herbicide application – through introduction of another alien gene, this time coding for a protein inhibiting the action of that chemical – only the weeds, not the crop, get killed.

The fact that Indian farmers are now growing HT cotton, albeit illegally, has been officially proved by tests reports from at least two government research institutions...

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