The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), India’s biotech regulator, has cleared Bt brinjal, the country’s first genetically modified (GM) food, for commercial use. Now it is up to the Government of India to put its political stamp of approval for the floodgates to open.India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, said, "The GEAC, after considering reports of two review committees, has given approval to Bt brinjal. But the government will decide on whether we can allow commercial growing of the genetically engineered crop.”
Bt Brinjal has been developed by Mahyco-Monsanto Biotech, a joint venture between US firm Monsanto and Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company.
Greenpeace has campaigned hard against the move to approve Bt Brinjal in India. The environment minister said, “I condemn the actions of Greenpeace, which are not based on facts. They are spreading wrong information.”
Greenpeace has protested the decision, demanding that no approval of GE food crops be given as it is a threat to the health of the citizens and the environment.
Molecular biologist and Supreme Court-appointed GEAC observer P.M. Bhargava called Wednesday’s decision as ‘pre-decided’ and ‘farcical’.
Risk for human and animal health
The Institute of Science in Society in a report in February this year made it abundantly clear that Bt Brinjal is unfit for human consumption.
According to the report, release of Bt brinjal into the environment for food, feed and cultivation may present a serious risk for human and animal health; the GM aubergine is unfit for consumption. That’s the verdict of French scientist Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini of the Committee for Independent Research and Information on Genetic Engineering (CRIIGEN), who carried out the first ever independent assessment of Monsanto-Mahyco’s dossier on toxicity tests submitted to the Indian regulatory authorities.
Professor Seralini, commissioned by Greenpeace India to undertake the assessment, said his key findings were statistically significant differences between groups of animals fed GM and non-GM brinjal in the raw data, which were discounted rather than used to raise food safety concerns and to call for further investigation. Although the differences were not reported in the dossier summaries, they remained visible in the raw experimental data. These differences, seen by Monsanto-Mahyco, were deemed biologically irrelevant, and disregarded on the grounds that they were within a wide ‘reference’ group of brinjal types.
Health impacts
On health effects, Seralini found that:
Bt brinjal produces a protein in the vegetable cells that induce antibiotic resistance. This is recognised as a major health problem and is inappropriate for commercialised use. It may also indicate that old GM technology is being used as the technology has already moved on from antibiotic resistance marker genes.
Bt brinjal appears to have 15 per cent less calories and different alkaloid content compared to non-GM brinjal. It contains 16-17 mg/kg Bt insecticide toxin. When fed to animals, effects were observed on blood chemistry with significant differences according to the sex of the animal or period of measurement. Other effects were on blood clotting time (prothrombin), total bilirubin (liver health), and alkaline phosphate in goats and rabbits. Changes in lactating cows were observed in increased weight gain, intake of more dry roughage matter and milk production up by 10-14 per cent as if they were treated by a hormone. Rats fed Bt brinjal had diarrhoea, increased water consumption; decrease in liver weight, and liver to body weight. Feed intake was modified in broiler chickens.
According to Seralini, “This makes for a very coherent picture of Bt brinjal that is potentially unsafe for human consumption. The GM brinjal cannot be considered as safe as its non-GM counterpart.” In addition, he says the longest toxicity test were only for 90 days, which does not assess long-term effects such as the development of cancers or tumours. Furthermore, he considers it potentially unsafe to eat animals with the health problems that had been fed Bt brinjal.
Environmental impacts
Seralini criticises the lack of studies directed at non-target organisms such as butterflies and moths. He believes it is almost impossible through measurements of toxicity in a few species of non-target organisms to get a sufficient view of the possible harm to complicated ecosystems, which may vary from place to place in India. He says extant studies give no assurances that growing Bt brinjal will be safe for the environment, as they lack information on the indirect effect on the food chain as a whole, particularly with regard to gene flow, and the possibility of GM contamination of neighbouring brinjal crops.
Bt toxins unsafe
Bt toxins are derived from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringenesis ; natural Bt toxins have never been authorised for mammalian consumption and are known to be harmful to health. Seralini’s appraisal also cautions against synthetic and genetically modified Bt toxins such as the hybrid toxin contained in Bt brinjal that mixes two toxins, the Cry 1 Ab and Cry1Ac engineered sequences together. Another flaw in the Monsanto-Mayhco toxicity tests on non-target insects was that the single toxin Cry1Ac was used because this was easier than the hybrid.
Debjeet Sarangi of GM-Free India said he was surprised that the regulatory bodies did not consider it appropriate to consult the Health Minister, as well as doctors’ groups and vetinary associations before pushing this highly toxic food down the gullets of an uninformed public. “This is not science,” he said. If regulators such as the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) had been doing long term research to assess the claims of GM crop companies and taken up the analysis of the company’s data itself then the two year large scale trials of Bt brinjal approved in 2007 would not have been allowed to go ahead. In fact, the results only came to light when a Supreme Court battle forced GEAC to put the Monsanto-Mahyco test dossier on Bt brinjal into the public domain.
Brinjal (Solanum melongena) also known as aubergine or egg plant is an important vegetable in India’s food culture and consumed every day by rich and poor alike. India is the home of brinjal, where it has been cultivated for four thousand years without the help of fertilisers or pesticides. So far, over 70,000 Indians have signed the “I am No Lab Rat” anti-GM protest in India that is also battling large scale cultivation of Bt cotton. GM-Free India says that alternative strategies for pest management exist and pests only became a problem after the introduction of the Green Revolution. Agriculture is a culture that should receive holistic treatment and not the piecemeal introduction of highly toxic inputs that poison a regions daily food.
