Making a meal of Bt cotton

By Bhaskar Goswami

''Scientists at Punjab Agriculture University (PAU) are yet to figure
out an effective way of tackling the pest, or, for that matter, what
is causing it to assume such epidemic proportions. On July 9, Dr N S
Butter, head of the department of entomology told the press that the
attack was mainly due to a reduction in pesticide sprays on Bt cotton,
and also the proliferation of weeds like Congress grass (Parthenium
hysterophorus), which is a major host of the pest.''

http://www.infochangeindia.org/features441.jsp


FULL STORY


In the Malwa belt of rural Punjab, mile after mile of Bt cotton fields
are under attack by the mealy bug pest. Bathinda, Muktsar, Faridkot
and Ferozepur, Punjab’s four major cotton-growing districts, have been
badly affected. The so-called ‘magic bullet’, Bt cotton has turned
into a bitter pill for farmers who were promised profits but who are
now faced with huge losses



mealy bug pest

Anyone overhearing Hartej Singh on his cell phone would find the
conversation strange. “Dho ditta ji Bt nu safed chichra ne,” (“mealy
bugs have devastated the Bt cotton”) he bellows at the caller.
Standing in his field in the mid-July sun, Hartej is busy fielding
numerous calls of a similar nature. He is an exception -- the sole
cotton farmer in Mehtawali village in Bathinda whose crop has not been
affected by the dreaded mealy bug.

These days, travelling across the Malwa belt of rural Punjab is a
revelation. Mile after mile of unending Bt cotton fields, which appear
healthy from a distance, are facing unprecedented attack by the mealy
bug. Bathinda, Muktsar, Faridkot and Ferozepur, Punjab’s four major
cotton-growing districts, have all been badly affected.

The crisis

While Bt cotton made an official entry into Punjab in 2005,
enterprising farmers here began cultivating bootlegged varieties from
Gujarat a year earlier. According to official statistics, around 60%
of farmers in the state are growing Bt cotton this year. In the four
cotton-producing districts, Bt cotton coverage is almost 100%.

Unlike in Andhra Pradesh, Bt cotton in Punjab lived up to its promise
of protecting against the dreaded American bollworm, and the number of
sprays needed dropped from a high 30 to less than five. This is the
main reason why farmers switched to these varieties.

However, Bt cotton protects the crop only against one pest; cotton is
attacked by no less than 165 pests. This raises the chances of a
resurgence of secondary pests and farmers end up spraying the same
quantity of pesticide (if not more) on their crop as they did earlier.
In Andhra Pradesh, the number of attacks by aphids, thrips, jassids,
etc, has risen since the introduction of Bt cotton in 2002. Tobacco
leaf streak virus, tobacco caterpillars, etc, have emerged as new
diseases and pests of Bt cotton in the state. This year, reports of
fungal root rot in Bt cotton are beginning to pour in from Warangal
district in Andhra Pradesh. The emergence of the mealy bug as a Bt
cotton pest in Punjab also appears to be a case of secondary pest
resurgence, and no amount or type of pesticide has been able to
control it.

Scientists at Punjab Agriculture University (PAU) are yet to figure
out an effective way of tackling the pest, or, for that matter, what
is causing it to assume such epidemic proportions. On July 9, Dr N S
Butter, head of the department of entomology told the press that the
attack was mainly due to a reduction in pesticide sprays on Bt cotton,
and also the proliferation of weeds like Congress grass (Parthenium
hysterophorus), which is a major host of the pest.

This is bizarre, considering the fact that Congress grass has been
growing in the state for decades. What’s more, the reduced number of
sprays was against American bollworm, not the mealy bug, and the type
of pesticide used against the two is quite different. Also, American
bollworm attacks during the monsoon while the mealy bug is mostly
active during summer.

The mealy bug feeds on around 300 crops on the subcontinent. Attacks
are generally intense during summer; they subside when the temperature
drops. Bt cotton crop in Punjab was attacked by the mealy bug last
year as well, but the damage was not substantial as the crop was close
to maturity. This year, however, the attack was intense during the
second month of sowing.

The devastation

Unlike the Doaba and Majha regions of Punjab, the four cotton-growing
districts in the Malwa belt have poorer soil and fewer irrigation
canals. Cotton is the major cash crop, while wheat is the staple crop
that meets the food requirements of relatively less well-off farmers
in this belt. Bathinda district alone accounts for a quarter of the
cotton produced in Punjab. Destruction of the cotton crop in this
district therefore affects thousands of farmers.

According to the state agriculture department, over 2,000 acres of
cotton crop were destroyed by the mealy bug by July 10. This appears
to be a conservative estimate. During my trip to the region in
mid-July, every village reported having uprooted at least five acres
of Bt cotton crop every day. In the village of Raike-Kalan, in
Bathinda, over 100 acres of mealy bug-infested Bt cotton had already
been uprooted when I visited the area. It’s the same story across
hundreds of neighbouring villages.

That pesticides are not working against this pest is evident from the
farmers’ accounts. Balwant Singh, a farmer in Mehtawali village in
Bathinda, consulted scientists at both the PAU and the state
agriculture department. He was advised to rotate sprays of the
carbamate and organophosphate pesticide groups. Balwant understands
how this is done, for he is the insecticide retailer in the village.
Four rounds of sprays later, he has given up.

The same story is being repeated in Badal village in Muktsar district,
the birthplace of Punjab Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal. During my
visit, pesticides were being feverishly sprayed on Bt cotton fields in
the village, but to no avail. The bug subsides and re-emerges within a
week of spraying.

Damaged Bt cotton plant“We used to cuff our children if they touched
even one sapling of cotton. Now we use our own hands to uproot what we
planted,” says Nachhatar Singh of Raike-Kalan. Nachhatar owns two
acres of land and has leased-in five more to grow Bt cotton. Each
leased acre of land costs him Rs 16,000, while the cost of cultivating
Bt cotton on the land is around Rs 5,000. All this is now lost. Since
his land is irrigated and he could also source some paddy seedlings,
Nachhatar uprooted the damaged Bt cotton crop and replaced it with
paddy, thereby incurring an additional expenditure of Rs 5,000 per
acre. As a result his total expenditure has now shot up to Rs 26,000
per acre -- for paddy! This is a far cry from the Rs 4,000 per acre
profits promised by Mahyco-Monsanto while marketing Bt cotton seed!

Sharecropping is practised quite routinely all over the Malwa belt.
Since the introduction of Bt cotton in Punjab, the practice of
leasing-in land to cultivate cotton has increased among marginal and
small farmers. Due to the mealy bug attack, these sharecroppers are
now uprooting Bt cotton and replacing it with paddy. This is being
done to somehow reduce the huge losses arising out of Bt cotton
cultivation.
But unless farmers sell their paddy at a minimum of Rs 1,600 per
quintal, they will not recover even their cultivation costs this year.
The minimum support price was a mere Rs 650 per quintal last year.

The writing on the wall is therefore quite clear for small farmers.
Like neighbouring Sangrur, the four cotton-growing districts of Punjab
may soon begin reporting increasing numbers of farmer suicides.

The response

While the state agriculture department and PAU are groping in the dark
for a solution, the response from the Centre is a not-so-surprising
dead silence. According to the International Seed Federation, this
year the estimated size of India’s seed market is around $ 1.3 billion
(approximately Rs 5,200 crore) -- the sixth highest in the world. By
opening up the seed sector to biotech seed manufacturers, the Centre
had signalled, a long time ago, that profits to these corporations
weigh higher than the concerns of farmers.

When asked by local journalists about the steps being taken to stem
the mealy bug epidemic in Punjab, the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA)
passed the buck back saying that agriculture was a state subject.

This is ironical. After all, it wasn’t the Punjab government that
approved 135 varieties of Bt cotton in the last five years but the
Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) of the Union government,
of which the MoA is a member. The fact remains that the GEAC has
permitted cultivation of Bt cotton varieties without carrying out
adequate testing for the resurgence of secondary pests and diseases.
As has now become the established norm with respect to genetically
modified crops, farmers are being made to pay a steep price for the
incompetence of the regulatory body and the greed of biotech companies.

Not only has the introduction of Bt cotton brought disaster in the
form of the mealy bug, it is also affecting yields of the subsequent
crop -- wheat. Farmers reported an up to 30% drop in wheat
productivity on land that had previously been cultivated with Bt
cotton. This is similar to reports from Andhra Pradesh where the Kisan
Call Centre in Hyderabad received a number of complaints from farmers
about declining yields of subsequent crops.

According to Vyavsaya Panchangam -- a farmers’ almanac -- published by
the Acharya N G Ranga Agriculture University, Hyderabad, Bt cotton
uses more fertiliser than its non-Bt counterparts. If adequate amounts
of fertiliser are not applied, the subsequent crop receives fewer
nutrients. Further, the Bt toxin also expresses itself in the root
zone of the plant and can affect soil biodiversity and ecosystem
function, as reported in a research study by the Australian
government. These may partly explain why yields of subsequent crops
are declining, although nobody is paying much attention to this aspect.

The alternative

This brings the story back to Hartej Singh, an organic farmer
associated with the Kheti Virasat Mission. Singh grows cotton
intercropped with rows of pigeon pea, sorghum, maize, soybean, cluster
bean, etc. Some of these are leguminous crops that are uprooted and
used as green manure. He grows F-1378, an early-maturing American
cotton variety and LD 327, a high-yielding desi variety that is also
tolerant to Fusarium wilt. His yields are slightly lower than those of
the Bt cotton in neighbouring fields.

healthy non-Bt cotton intercroppedBut while the neighbouring fields
are heavily infested by the mealy bug, Singh’s cotton crop is
completely unaffected. Likewise for the 100-odd farmers of the Malwa
belt who, as part of the Kheti Virasat Mission, are growing non-Bt
cotton following the principles of organic farming. Intercropping with
several different crops stops pests from migrating to the next row of
cotton, and since these crops have never been sprayed with pesticide,
predators like beetle larvae can be seen feeding on the mealy bugs.
Whenever the pest concentration goes up, a combination of neemleaves
and pods, along with Datura, etc, mixed with cow urine, is sprayed on
the crop. The attack subsides and damage to the cotton crop is negligible.

Umendra Dutt, Executive Director of the Kheti Virasat Mission, sums it
up thus: “Farmers were promised a magic bullet in the form of Bt
cotton which has turned into a bitter pill.” Meanwhile, the PAU and
state agriculture department are now consulting Dutt to work out a way
to tackle the mealy bug. Speaking to the media on August 9, the head
of the department of entomology recommended using traditional methods
to destroy the mealy bug -- remove the weed hosts and use neem-based
insecticides…

(Bhaskar Goswami is with the New Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology
and Food Security)

InfoChange News & Features, September 2007