GM Watch's vote for the most interesting piece of research to be published in 2006 goes to:

Shenghui Wang et al, Tarnishing Silver Bullets: Bt Technology Adoption, Bounded Rationality and the Outbreak of Secondary Pest Infestations in China, July 2006

This research looks at Bt cotton growing in China. Bt cotton has been hyped as biotech's big success story and the saviour of poor cotton farmers in the developing world.

Below is the transcript of a GM Watch podcast which looked not only at the findings of the research on what was happening in China but at a whole series of recent studies.

This new research evidence suggests Bt Cotton provides no benefits for biodiversity, no yield increases, no reductions in herbicide use, and that any initial reductions in pesticide use are now being undermined by growing problems with secondary pests. The evidence from these studies also shows that GM cotton is particularly unsuited to the needs of small famers in the developing world.

If you wish, you can listen to the podcast on your computer (with QuickTime) via indymedia or on your computer or MP3 player via iTunes

Transcript

Peter Brown: [In this GM Watch] podcast we're returning to the subject of GM cotton - something we looked at in detail in the second of our podcasts and something we've returned to since then. So, Jonathan, why are we looking at GM cotton again?

Jonathan Matthews: Well, there's 2 reasons for this. One is that GM cotton is particularly important in the whole GM debate because it's always been promoted as an outstandingly good example of what genetic engineering supposedly can do to help farmers but also to help the environment. But the other reason is that since we last spoke about this a whole series of studies have come out that show that GM cotton is not doing what is claimed for it - that's on both fronts, in relation to farmers and in relation to the environment. And the research shows that it's failing and that it is particularly suspect in the context of the developing world

Peter: Perhaps we could just clarify what's supposed to be so special about GM cotton. How, for instance, is it supposed to help the environment?

Jonathan: Well, GM cotton's been grown for about a decade now and from the start it's been claimed that because Bt cotton - a genetically engineered cotton where a soil bacterium has been engineered into the cotton to act as a kind of pesticide within the plant - because it's got it's own built in pesticide in this way, that its use will lead to major reductions in the amount of pesticides farmers use and that this will consequently be very good for biodiversity, for wildlife. That it will lead to an increase in insect life and then in the small mammals and birds that feed on the insects, and so on. So there've been some quite extravagant claims about the impact of GM cotton along these lines.

Peter: And what about the farmers? How is GM cotton supposed to help them?

Jonathan: There's two issues there. One is if farmers aren't spraying so many pesticides then that's good for farmers' health, and agricultural workers, and it's also been claimed that GM cotton can significantly increase cotton yields. So if you can get this increase in productivity and you can make savings on pesticides, then hard pressed farmers can make better profits out of GM cotton. That's the claim. So it's been pushed as a fantastic crop for cotton farmers, particularly in the developing world, and Monsanto and other pro-GM lobbyists and supporters have made a lot of big claims about there being huge increases in yields and profits for poor farmers in these countries, and so on.

Peter: So those are the claims. What can you tell us about this new research you've mentioned?

Jonathan: Well, the most important of the new studies has come out of China.[1] And China was one of the first countries in the world to adopt Bt cotton. And it's worth mentioning that GM cotton in China has been hyped almost more than anything else in the GM debate. It's repeatedly been claimed that GM cotton has been - quotes - "a miracle crop". I mean, that's been said repeatedly - "a miracle" for Chinese farmers. And that idea of "a miracle crop" has been used to promote GM crops in China itself, to encourage China to grow more GM crops, and it's been used to egg on China's neighbours in Asia who've been told that China's forging ahead thanks to GM cotton and they'd better jump on the GM bandwagon or they're going to get left behind. And China's also been used as a sort of GM showcase to say to the rest of the world, "Look, in China there are millions of small farmers who've adopted GM cotton in a not very developed agricultural system and they're really benefiting and this shows why it's so important not to stand in the way of GMOs."

Peter: And what does the new research tell us about what's actually been happening in China?

Jonathan: OK. Well, this was the first study to look at the longer-term economic impact of Bt cotton. And the researchers from Cornell in the States working with Chinese agricultural scientists looked at data from nearly 500 farmers, and that's across five major cotton producing provinces in China, so they got a very broad picture of farmers who'd been involved in growing (Bt) cotton over a period of seven years.

And they found that in the early years these farmers were reducing their use of pesticides and were saving money because of the resistance that Bt cotton gave them to bollworms, which are a major pest. So that seemed to bear out the type of story that had been coming out of China. But what the researchers found was that longer term that pattern didn't hold up, and by 2004 the gains had disappeared and this was because secondary pests had emerged - pests other than the bollworms - and this was forcing the farmers to use lots of pesticides. In fact, they found that by 2004 they were spraying more or less as much pesticide as the farmers who weren't growing Bt cotton. So the whole supposed advantage in terms of pesticide reduction seemed to have disappeared.

But the problem - the economic problem - is that Bt farmers pay an awful lot more for Bt cotton seeds. In fact, the Bt seeds cost about 3 times as much as the conventional cotton seeds. So if they're not saving money on pesticides and they're paying an awful lot more for the seeds, then obviously they're losing money. And that's just what they found - that, relative to the non-Bt cotton farmers, they were getting less income. So the supposed reductions in pesticides weren't there and the increases in profits weren't there either.

Peter: So the study showed that what was actually happening was the exact opposite of what was claimed.

Jonathan: Yes, absolutely. As we said, Bt cotton has been called "a miracle crop" in China, but this study suggested it would actually be a miracle if the farmers there went on using it because it's hitting them in their pockets.

Peter: And the problem in China is not due to the bollworm developing resistance to Bt cotton, which is a concern that many researchers have raised, but due to the secondary pests that are not targeted by Bt cotton. The secondary pests seem to be at the heart of what's been going wrong in China. Can you explain a bit more about that?

Jonathan: Yes, sometimes when Bt cotton is hyped, it's made to appear that because it can supposedly control bollworms, which are a major cotton pest, that that's the end of the story. But there are other pests that can cause problems for cotton growers. This was seen in Indonesia, for example, where Bt cotton growing had to be abandoned after the Bt cotton crop succumbed to infestation by other pests, and there have been reports of this kind of thing happening in other parts of the world too - in India, for instance.

What seems to have happened in China is that the changes in the bollworm population possibly or perhaps more likely the reduction in spraying of the bollworms seems to have enabled some kind of population explosion of other pests which previously hadn't been such a problem. And it's the emergence of these so-called secondary pests that's been forcing the farmers in China to spray so much more. And the Cornell researchers say that they think these secondary pest problems could become a major threat in other countries where Bt cotton has been widely planted.

Peter: So that's what the research tells us about what's happening in China. What about the other studies you referred to? What do they tell us and which countries were they done in?

Jonathan: One of the other major studies was done in North America - in Arizona[2], where farmers have also been growing GM cotton for many years, almost a decade now. So this is another part of the world where GM cotton is well established. And this was the first large-scale study that simultaneously looked at Bt cotton in terms of yield - what it was doing in terms of actual production, pesticide use, but also they looked at biodiversity - you know, the amount of wildlife where GM cotton was being used.

And the results have again - like with the Chinese study - the results have been very damaging to the claims made for GM cotton. The researchers from the University of Arizona found Bt cotton gave farmers no advantage at all in terms of yield, so they weren't getting more cotton, despite all the claims made to that effect by the companies. We'll come to pesticide use in a minute, if that's ok, but the really damaging finding was in relation to biodiversity. They randomly selected 81 cotton fields - split between non-GM and GM cotton breeds - and they looked at them over the course of two growing seasons and they found that Bt cotton appeared to offer no benefits at all to wildlife.

Peter: So there was no yield increase and no benefits to biodiversity. What about agrochemicals - did the use of these reduce, as it's supposed to do with GM cotton?

Jonathan: It was a mixed picture. They did find pesticide use was down but in the second year of the study it rose. And it looks like secondary pests could be the factor that accounts for the rise that was seen in the second year of the study. One of the researchers who was asked about this said, you know, " if you control some pests with GM cotton, other pests become more of a problem." And that, of course, is exactly the pattern found in the Cornell study of the long-term effects of Bt cotton cultivation in China. There, as you remember, after seven years of Bt cotton production, pesticide use was basically equivalent to what had existed before - any gains had been lost - and that was down to secondary pests.

The other interesting thing in relation to agrochemicals that comes out of the Arizona study is that they found there was no reduction in herbicide use with GM cotton. And this was the case even where it was a variety of GM cotton that had herbicide resistance built into it, so this is the type of cotton that's promoted as helping farmers reduce their use of weed killers, but it just wasn't doing it.

Peter: So the study showed no benefits for biodiversity, no yield increases, no reductions in herbicide use, and although there was some pesticide reduction there were increased problems with secondary pests.

Jonathan: Yes.

Peter: What were the other studies you referred to?

Jonathan: There are a couple of new studies looking at Bt cotton economics and environmental effects and pesticide use that are coming out soon. This is the way that scientific publication is going now. These papers aren't going to appear in print until September or October but they're already available online even though they are not available yet in print. They're both brand new papers - one's from South Africa and the other's from the United States.

Peter: From the information available what do these two new studies tell us?

Jonathan: The first study, which is going to be published soon in the journal Crop Protection[3], looks at insecticide use in fields cropped with conventional - non-GM - or Bt cotton varieties in a smallholder farming area of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa. This area is known as Makhathini Flats.

And after China, Makhathini has probably been the biggest source of hype for the biotech industry and its lobbyists. It's been another area where there have been extravagant claims about big reductions in pesticide use and savings in terms of labour, and these savings helping to increase farmer incomes for these small farmers by large amounts.

So there's been a lot of hype about Makhatini. A lot of the claims have been contested and this study certainly throws cold water on the hype. If I can quote from the abstract for this paper, it says, "cropping Bt cotton in Makhathini Flats did not generate sufficient income to expect a tangible and sustainable socioeconomic improvement due to the way the crop is currently managed..." Now, in other words, what that's saying is that it's not really increasing profitability - certainly not in any way that looks like it could sustainably improve the economic position of those farmers.

And then it goes on to say something else that's particularly significant. It says, "Adoption of an innovation like Bt cotton seems to pay only in an agro-system with a sufficient level of intensification."

That's significant because we're talking about poor smallholder farmers. These are people who are not going to have intensified agricultural systems. That's the one thing that isn't going to be easy for them to have.

And so this completely demolishes the promotion of GM cotton as a technology that's particularly suited to the needs of poor farmers. There've been these claims, which we've talked about before in these podcasts, of saying that with something like GM cotton "the technology is in the seed" and the implication is that for the farmer his other resources don't matter you just give him this magical seed and it will do the rest. Well, what's clear from this study is that doesn't work. You need certain conditions in order to get a return on this cotton and small farmers - poorer farmers - just haven't got those kind of conditions.

Peter: What about the other new study?

Jonathan: The other study is going to come out in the journal Agricultural Systems[4], and this is a North American study. It's based on data from a survey of cotton growers in North Carolina. And what it confirms is that GM cotton is popular with North American, capital-intensive farmers, so the opposite kind of farmers to the ones we've been talking about. These richer farmers like Bt because it gives them a kind of convenience of management, but it's not actually cost-savings, it's not actually the economics that's driving their interest. They're prepared to pay for expensive seeds because it suits their convenience in terms of the way that they farm. We can see from this again that the technology doesn't have much to offer to poor farmers in the developing world.

And even for capital-intensive farmers in the US, who may be going for convenience rather than income, there are also signs that GM cotton may not be without its problems. According to Glenn Studebaker[5], an entomologist at the University of Arkansas, farmers are finding much more damage in GM cotton this year than they've previously been finding. So this is separate from the new study which is just looking at the issue of economics. Studebaker's looking at what's actually happening on the cotton plants this year in Arkansas. And what he's saying is that farmers are having to spray a lot more because of bollworm damage on Bt cotton. Now you'll remember Bt cotton is supposed to protect from bollworms. That's one of the principal claims made for Bt cotton, and yet Studebaker says that not only are the bollworms damaging the Bt cotton plants in Arkansas but that the insects are successfully feeding on the upper part of the Bt cotton plants, which is an area where they would not usually be able to survive, so clearly something unusual is happening.

Peter: So why isn't GM cotton giving them some degree of protection?

Jonathan: Well, it seems that it's too early to say yet. But Studebaker says, "it could be growing tolerance for Bt in these insects." And if that's the case, then GM cotton would be failing to do one of the main things that it's supposed to do and then alarm bells should really start to ring because GM cotton in that case is not providing any kind of sustainable solution to the pest problems faced by US cotton farmers. And, of course, that's the same kind of conclusion that's emerged out of the long-term study on the impact of GM cotton in China. And if it's failing to do that core task even in North America then the biotech industry is in very, very serious problems.

Research

[1] Shenghui Wang et al, Tarnishing Silver Bullets: Bt Technology Adoption, Bounded Rationality and the Outbreak of Secondary Pest Infestations in China, July 2006

[2] GM cotton fails to improve biodiversity or yield

[3] Hofs, J.-L., M. Fok, et al, Impact of Bt cotton adoption on pesticide use by smallholders: A 2-year survey in Makhatini Flats, South Africa, Crop Protection 25(9): 984-988, 2006

[4] Wossink, A. and Z. S. Denaux, Environmental and cost efficiency of pesticide use in transgenic and conventional cotton production, Agricultural Systems 90(1-3): 312-328, 2006

[5] Lamar James, Arkansas Extension Communications Specialist, Bollworms feeding on Bt cotton in Arkansas, Delta Farm Press, July 28 2006