NOTE: Mark Lynas who, together with Stewart Brand, fronted the controversial Channel 4 documentary "What the Greens got wrong", recently published an article on his website denying that Bt cotton had anything to do with farmer suicides in India.

Lynas argues that rigorous research shows that "GM cotton has brought immense benefits to Indian farmers", in particular a big drop in pesticides use. And he also argues that a paper from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) shows there is no connection between Bt cotton and Indian farmer suicides, despite the claims that he says have been made by Prince Charles, Vandana Shiva and "Green campaigners around the world".

He concludes, "it seems to me morally questionable for anti-GM activists to manipulate the emotional trauma suffered by bereaved families in the service of their  ideological campaigns. Most of the anti-GM talking points I have come across are little better than urban myths, united by an overarching conspiracy theory about corporate domination of the food chain. The case study of Bt cotton in India is one of the more persistent myths, but it is a myth nonetheless."
http://www.marklynas.org/2011/02/suicide-seeds/

The article attracted the following comments.
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Responses to "GM cotton: suicide seeds?"
http://www.marklynas.org/2011/02/suicide-seeds/#more-7

Sam Mason says:
3 March 2011 at 10:16 am

Your article makes a mistake I think in relying exclusively on the IFPRI's stats rather than looking at informed reports rooted in the ground realities in cotton farmer suicide areas.

Here's an analysis that points up the severe limitations of IFPRI's stats http://db.zs-intern.de/uploads/1226402334-BtCottonAndSuicides.pdf and here's an excellent piece of investigative journalism from the big cotton growing belt of Vidarbha that shows the difference between IFPRI's picture on a macro level and the reality on a micro level, when examined farm to farm: http://www.columbiacitypaper.com/2009/11/10/the-suicide-belt/

The findings of that article are consistent with the accounts of others, for example those of P Sainath the renowned reporter on Indian development issues: that the hyping of expensive Bt cotton seed to poor indebted farmers working rain fed (i.e. non-irrigated) land has often been a disaster.

Your article also makes a mistake in accepting at face value the claims of reduced pesticide use with Bt cotton, given the reports of severe secondary pest problems with Bt cotton that have emerged in both China and India http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100513/full/news.2010.242.html, and with even Monsanto acknowledging that resistance to Bt is starting to develop in India.

The short-term and long-term pictures turn out to be very different. The work of the anthropologist Glenn Stone also shows the dangers for poor Indian cotton farmers of simplistic assumptions about technological interventions like Bt cotton

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Devinder Sharma says:
4 March 2011 at 12:56 pm

Yes, I agree with the previous comment. You are bound to make a mistake if you rely on IFPRI analysis. IFPRI is an agribusiness lobbying firm masquerading as a research institute.

IFPRI paper says, according to the author, that Bt cotton has brought down the use of chemical pesticides. This is completely untrue. The Central Cotton Research Institute (CICR) estimates that in 2006 pesticides worth Rs 6400 million were sprayed on cotton. In 2008, it had increased to over Rs 8000 million.

Secondly, do GM crops increase yield, my answer is a big No. I would draw your attention to one of my previous write-ups on this controversial claim. http://www.indiatogether.org/2003/feb/dsh-scicoverup.htm

Then the legitimate question that follows is that if it does not increase yield than how come the area under Bt cotton has multiplied in India? This is because the seed industry (with help from the government) has ensured that no non-GM cotton seed is available in the market. Non-GM seed has simply disappeared from the market. Since farmers mainly use hybrid cotton (and Bt cotton too is a trait inserted in hybrid cotton varieties) in India, farmers have to buy fresh seed every year. But with no non-GM seed available in the market, they end up buying only bt cotton.

I know a number of instances where seed companies have through their agents (employed on temporary basis) gone into the villages buying back non-Bt seed from the farmers.

And finally, the author may also find it useful to read my response to the flawed analysis that Science journal had published several years back on the potential of Bt cotton. http://devinder-sharma.blogspot.com/2009/03/do-gm-crop-increase-yield-answer-is-no.html

Devinder Sharma
http://devinder-sharma.blogspot.com

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Bella Brown says:
5 March 2011 at 1:30 am

I read this IFPRI paper and came to a very different conclusion from the one Mark Lynas reaches. The paper states bluntly that the data is just not available that would enable conclusions about the numbers of Bt cotton farmers who have committed suicide: "None of the reported data sources on farmer suicide provide information about the concerned farmers’ characteristics”¦ In the absence of such data, we can only provide a second-best assessment of the evidence."

The IFPRI paper goes on to say there are not even numbers on how many of the Indian farmers who committed suicide grew cotton, let alone Bt cotton, or on how many farmers committed suicide after their crops failed. The IFPRI authors say their findings do not allow them to "reject the potential role of Bt cotton varieties in the observed discrete increase in farmer suicides in certain states and years".

However the lack of proper data doesn't stop the authors making a valiant attempt to endorse Bt cotton. In the process, they are forced to do quite a bit of 'creative accounting' for example, blaming drought rather than Bt cotton for farmer suicides, when it is well known that Bt cotton often performs poorly in drought conditions.

This IFPRI paper is hardly a resounding endorsement for the success of Bt cotton. I reached the end of it thinking Prince Charles might have been right.