Bt crops- vague thoughts

I haven't had a chance to think deeply about GM crops or GM microbes and their effects on economy and environment. But I came across this note written by Jairam Ramesh, the Minister of Environment and Forests in India, in The Hindu: http://beta.thehindu.com/news/national/article103839.ece

and was struck by many things: the transparency of the process, the chance for all stakeholders to participate in the decision making process, and the detailed communications that Ramesh seems to have had with many scientists and policy makers all over the world and the very pertinent points brought forth by various people- for and against the Bt strain of GM brinjal.

Many similar points had been brought up about a decade ago in the debate about Bt cotton (Bt stands for Bacillus thuringenesis.... had learned that up for quiz competitions in school and feel proud that I still remember it!)- that particular genetic modification reduces the need for chemical pesticides on cotton plants. Permission for commercial cultivation of Bt cotton was given about 6-7 years ago and Bt cotton apparently is the crop of choice in Maharashtra and Gujarat, among other states, nowadays.

Many people from India moan that nothing is transparent, everything is corruptible and corrupted and the politicians hog all the money- a complaint that never grows old and which I recall people saying even a quarter century ago (this puts me in mind of something from Bill Bryson's Shakesphere: John Stow in his "Survey of London", published in the 1500s, complains that the traffic in the city had grown impossible and the young never walked). Regardless of the pessimistic attitudes taken by these people, I still feel such a sense of optimism and pride when I read reports like this in the newspaper. We have definitely come a long way in improving transparency of the policy making process in India.

My first responses to Bt-brinjal are of instant rejection. We have the ability to produce food enough for all our teeming masses. Our problems with starvation comes from a lack of infrastructure in storage and fair distribution. Producing more brinjal may put us among the top producers and exporters in the world, but it won't solve the starvation problem within India.

Also, homegrown technologies in non pesticide management are slowly gaining the capacity not just to reduce use of chemical pesticides, but to do away with pesticides altogether. Surely more encouragement ought to be given to these industries?

What rankles me most about huge corporations like Monsanto is their insistence that every farmer keep buying seeds from them every year to sow. It is the most unfair thing I've ever heard of and goes against every grain of decency. I would love to stick my nose up at these buggers and say, get lost, just to deny them those extra billion dollars... but then again, I am not an impoverished farmer trying to grow brinjal.