new delhi

Undeterred by criticism from environmental groups, the Indian government announced last week that it will encourage the use of genetically modified seeds in agriculture, and give high priority to transgenic crop research.

It says high priority is necessary because of the “urgency to enhance food production and develop crops with desired traits”. But government officials assured critics that the 1998 revised recombinant DNA safety guidelines and biosafety protocols would be fully observed during research and field trials and before modified seeds were marketed.

The announcement came in a statement from heads of agricultural research, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and regulatory committees, who held a press conference in New Delhi in the wake of mounting protests against the controversial trials of Btcotton by Monsanto in nine Indian states.

Angry farmers in Karnataka state recently burned experimental fields there (see Nature 396, 397; 1998), and the government of Andhra Pradesh stopped the trials. Earlier this month, the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE), a non-governmental organization in Delhi, issued a lawsuit against DBT in the Delhi high court for authorizing the trial and bypassing the ministry of the environment.

At the press conference, however, the officials claimed the Monsanto trials could lead to an annual saving in the use of pesticides of $375 million, and accused critics of misleading the environmental groups.

“With 60 million acres of transgenic plants under cultivation worldwide, India cannot lag behind others in this technology,” said Manju Sharma, secretary of DBT. She said that DBT is funding transgenic research in tobacco, rice, wheat and potato and has given permission to three other private companies for field trials of mustard, tomato and cauliflower. The $100 million given by the World Bank to the national agricultural technology project would be used for major research in transgenic crops, say the officials.

According to Asis Datta, chairman of the DBT committee that approved the Monsanto trials, Bt cotton was grown in a plot of 25 square metres and then in five plots, each of 200 square metres, before being approved for one-acre fields in 40 locations nationwide.

Vandana Shiva, president of RFSTE, says the trials are illegal because planting started in June last year, before official permission was given in July, and they were not cleared by the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee of the Ministry of the Environment, which has the final say.