GM crops
India is importing approximately 55 to 60 percent of edible oil.
a total of 272.2 lakh hectares of area was under cultivation of oilseeds in 2010-11.
This increased to 302.3 lakh hectares in 2022-23.
However, the average per capita oil consumption has risen from 2.9 kg per year in 1950-60 to 19.50 kg per year in 2022.
The use of new technology would increase farm productivity and income of farmers through development of low-input, high-output agriculture.
This will make the country self-sufficient in edible oil and grain legumes
the total edible oil demand of India in 2020-21 was 24.6 million tonnes, with domestic availability of 11.1 million tonnes. The remaining 13.45 million tonnes, about 54 percent of the total demand, was met through imports worth Rs 1,15,000 crore, which includes palm oil (57 percent), soybean oil (22 percent), sunflower oil (15 percent) and a small quantity of canola-quality mustard oil.
India is importing and consuming a large quantity of edible oil from GM oilseeds. India imports about 55,000 MT (metric tonnes) of canola oil largely from GM canola seeds. Similarly, nearly 2.8 lakh tonnes of soybean oil is being imported annually largely comprising GM soybean oil. Most exporting countries such as Argentina, USA, Brazil and Canada cultivate GM soybeans. Globally around 80 percent of soybean growing is GM soybean
the country’s annual economic losses of crops due to weeds were $11 billion, that is Rs 1 lakh crore and that the annual value of herbicide currently used in India was Rs 4,500 crore even without HT (Herbicide Tolerant) crops.
HT crops provided effective weed control and it would be detrimental to ban development of HT crops for Indian agriculture as labour was expensive and not available.
21.11.2024 - The Hindu
The world’s population is growing and more people need more food.
But indiscriminately expanding agricultural land and practice is not desirable.
Cutting forests to plant more crops will only push already-fragile ecosystems over the edge.
Dousing fields with pesticides is similarly toxic and depletes soils and groundwater.
In 1990s, a way was found out to modify a plant's genome and make specific changes that prevented insects from eating them.
Bt cotton and Bt brinjal, a gene from bacterium Bacillus Thuringiensis was added, making them produce a toxin that kills some insects.
Weeds threaten farms but spraying herbicides to kill them may kill the crops as well.
Now there are herbicide-tolerant (HT) GM crops immune to some weed-killing substances, helping farmers kill the weeds alone.
Researchers can also modify crops to have higher yield and/or more nutrients, reducing the need to plant more crops.
What’s complicated about GMs is you’re not just adding a new genetic organism, you’re also adding a whole suite of management changes that come along with it.
Use of insecticide resistant crops like Bt oxin trait, resulted in farmers spraying less insecticides
But pests can develop resistance to the Bt toxin over time, leading to increased pesticide use.
This can be countered by diversifying the kinds of Bt crops being planted, including areas where non-Bt crops are planted side-by-side, or by adding more genes to bolster the plant’s resistance to pests.
The farmers benefit because they don’t need to expend more labour and money to mechanically remove the weeds: they can just use the herbicide and not worry about their crops dying.
This also reduces tilling, where farmers turn the soil over to kill some weeds before planting crops.
Tilling can release carbon trapped in the soil, so no-till agriculture reduces carbon emissions to some extent.
But only a few major companies are developing most of these HT crops in the U.S., so farmers don’t have much say in which herbicide to use.
“The benefit of HT crops for the company is that they a lso sell the herbicide. You can only use that specific herbicide.”
The most prominent herbicide sold is glyphosate
“Initially, people thought glyphosate would be less toxic because it decays pretty fast if it gets into the environment, but its really harmful for human health"
Scientists ascertain a pesticide’s toxicity by testing its short-term effects on rats, although that doesn’t reveal the full extent of its effect.
" If it’s causing cancer, we won’t see that in the rat population because the rats won’t live long enough to show that.”
The problem is that a lot of the regulations, including in India, are based on ‘is it a GM or is it not a GM’.
It’s not about whether it’s herbicide, insecticide or nutrition”
“They don’t care about the trait, they care only about the method, which is a very black and white way of doing things.”
“You can think of it as a war between agriculture and nature, where we’re trying to feed eight billion people,” he said.
“We’re using the same amount of land that we were using for feeding six billion, which means we must increase production efficiencies by 30%.”
