Genetically modified (GM) seeds have emerged as a powerful new technology promising high productivity and lower use of fertilizers, weedicides and pesticides in the last one to two decades and have gained increasing acceptance among farmers around the world.
They are likely to play increasingly important role in addressing many of the current problems in agriculture. The most important and so far the only example of this technology in India has been Bt cotton.
Adoption of Bt cotton in India started in year 2002 and the area under it expanded rapidly reaching 11.6 million hectares or 95% of the total cotton acreage by 2014. The peak yield prior to the introduction of Bt cotton, reached in 1996-97, was 265 kg/ha. But the yields declined steadily thereafter, reaching 186 kg/ha in 2001-02.
After Bt cottonseeds were introduced in 2002, yields rose continuously and touched a new peak of 532 kg/ha in 2013-14. Cotton farmers in the three largest cotton-growing states, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat in that order, experienced large gains. It is a fair assertion that the success in cotton has made an important contribution to the success of agriculture in general in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat.
Between 2001 and 2010, Bt cotton helped reduce the use of insecticides by more than fifty per cent.
It has been argued that credit for the rise in the yields cannot be given to Bt cottonseeds since increases in yields predate their spread. Until 2005-06, Bt cotton had come to cover only a little more than one-tenth of the total cotton acreage. This is too small to account for the rise in yield from 186 kg/ha in 2001-02 to 362 kg/ha in 2005-06.
While partially valid, this argument misses two points.
First, when Bt cotton was introduced, cotton yields had been rapidly declining. Even if it may not account for the bulk of the rise in yields to 362 kg/ha by 2005-06, Bt cotton played a critical role in reversing the trend and surely contributed to the rise in the yield on the margin.
Second, Bt cotton spread rapidly from 2006-07 onwards. In 2006-07, nearly two-fifths of cotton acreage had come under Bt cotton and the share rose to 95% in 2014. This spread demonstrates that farmers saw a significant opportunity in Bt cotton even as the productivity of the existing varieties may have been simultaneously rising.
More importantly, with the trend growth rate under the conventional varieties in the prior decades being much lower, it is inconceivable that yields under those varieties could have reached as high as 499 kg/ha.
The success of Bt cotton in India and many more GM seeds elsewhere in the world testifies to the potential of GM technology in giving a major boost to productivity in agriculture. Nevertheless, GM seeds and technologies have remained controversial in India and other countries.
Thirteen years have passed since the introduction of Bt cotton and no scientific evidence of detrimental effects on either Bt cotton users or other crops located in the vicinity of Bt cotton farmers has been produced. But India has not introduced any new GM seeds.
In 2010, after all of the relevant official bodies had cleared Bt brinjal, the environment ministry blocked its introduction. Many traditional varieties of brinjal require the application of pesticides every third or fourth day, which results in significant pesticide residue on it when it reaches the consumer. Bt Brinjal would have considerably alleviated this problem by mitigating the need for pesticide use.
A serious adverse effect of the publicity and actions against GM technology has been the loss of interest on the part of students and researchers to opt for biotechnology. The success of Bt cotton had given new impetus to the study of this field at postgraduate and doctoral levels in the State Agricultural Universities and ICAR institutions. But the Supreme Court decision to implement a moratorium on field trials for 10 years on all GM research has had a chilling effect on the study of biotechnology. This too needs to be rectified.
Objections to GM technologies are based on the twin fears that they may harm humans consuming the resulting produce and they may have adverse effects on biodiversity. But no compelling evidence supporting either of these fears has emerged more than two decades after the original introduction of GM foods in 1994.
On the contrary, GM technology has proven useful in curtailing the use of pesticide and insecticide in combating pests and diseases.
In the Indian context, it also offers the prospects of making crops tolerant to drought, salinity and other abiotic stresses. The fortification of grains and edible oils with vitamin A and modified fatty acid profile are some examples of upstream benefits to consumers.
The United States has reaped these benefited for at least one and half decades. Recently, even India has been importing and consuming canola oil made from GM rapeseed with no adverse health effects reported to-date. A consultation was held with scientists, farmers and a journalist.
Scientists uniformly argued that with proper regulation GM technologies were safe and promised to significantly raise productivity in a variety of crops. Farmers uniformly protested being deprived of a technology that promised to give them higher yields and therefore better lives to their children. They specifically noted the necessity of frequent doses of pesticides to preserve the conventional brinjal varieties from catching insects.
The journalist offered arguments against the technologies but they did not persuade the scientists and farmers present during the consultation. A public letter by two scientists addressed to Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog also noted, “World’s leading scientific bodies like the US National Academy of Sciences, the UK’s Royal Society, the German Risk Assessment Agency, the European Academy of Science, the Canadian Royal Society, the New Zealand Royal Society, and India’s seven science academies have declared GM crops safe. Innumerable scientific associations and regulatory bodies have all concluded that GM crops are safe and economically beneficial, based on hundreds of independent economic assessment studies published in the best scientific publications that undergo rigorous peer review.”
As a part of its strategy to bring a Second Green Revolution, India must return to permitting proven and well-tested GM technologies with adequate safeguards. Additionally, India urgently needs technological breakthrough in oilseeds and pulses. Our dependence on imports for meeting domestic demand for edible oils has risen to 70 per cent.
Even if India doubles its current level of oilseed production, the import dependence will remain at 40 per cent level. The situation is worse in pulses. Per capita intake and availability of pulses in the country has declined to two third since early 1960s. During the 50 years between 1964-65 and 2014-15, per capita production of pulses declined from 25 kg to 13.6 kg. Even imports, which constitute about one fifth of domestic demand, have failed to arrest decline in the availability of pulses in the country.
It will be worthwhile to explore the possibility of GM technology in raising oilseeds and pulses output as conventional technologies have not helped in raising output to keep pace with country’s requirements. It should not be forgotten that high yielding varieties of seeds had been the key to the first Green Revolution.
Recognizing the general sensitivity to permitting multinationals to sell GM seeds, it may be prudent for the government to proceed with domestically sourced GM seeds only.
Luckily, Indian scientists and institutions have been active and successful in this area. A large number of India sourced candidates for field trials and eventual commercialization already exist.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.