Jalees Hazir

The hypocrisy of democracy knows no bounds. The surreal Seed Amendment Bill 2014 is ready to be tabled in the Senate for its final stamp of approval. The National Assembly passed it last year on the sly and last week, none other than the Senate Standing Committee on National Food Security & Research approved it. With so many pressing problems of the public that deserve their attention unaddressed, why are our parliamentarians so pushed about facilitating the import and commercialization of harmful Genetically Modified Organisms through this Bill? Who, after all, are they working for?

For whose benefit is this devious piece of legislation being pushed through the houses of parliament without public debate? Why is our government, and the parliament, so eager to open the door wide open for GMO companies, welcoming their seeds of death to pollute what’s left of our fertile fields? Why would they push down our throats something that is being rejected the world over? Don’t they know about the suicides committed by hundreds of thousand small Indian farmers who switched to GMO crops? Are they really ignorant about the lethal impact of these death-filled seeds and the chemicals that come hand in hand with them? How many of them were only misinformed and how many of them bought?

It was reported that the only member of the Senate Standing Committee who objected to the Bill was Senator Mohsin Khan Leghari. He raised most of the points that needed to be raised in the committee that approved it. So why did other members of the committee choose to ignore the valid concerns of their colleague? They didn’t even heed his common-sense appeal not to pass the Bill in haste without creating a mechanism to regulate the introduction and use of GM seeds. There’s no such mechanism in place. So why would our parliament wish to give the GMO companies a free hand to do as they please with our lives, our land and our farmers? Why didn’t Opposition benches bring forth all the damning evidence against GMOs and present the growing list of countries banishing its various essentially harmful crops from their territories?

It would be a gross understatement to term the mega business of Genetically Modified Organisms or GM seeds as controversial. It is downright evil in its impact as well as its intent. It wages a multi-front war; on the meager livelihood of small farmers, on the health of end-consumers, on food security and almost every aspect of our natural environment. The chemicals that are used to grow GMO crops, the fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, poison the earth and the water underneath. A rich diversity of plants, insects and birds are mass murdered on every GMO field. In the long run, the chemicals eventually kill the earth and every living thing that makes it fertile.

If it is allowed to exist at all, GMO-agriculture belongs within the confines of a well-insulated research lab, preferably somewhere in outer space to rule out the possibility of its frankensteins ever contaminating our natural environment. I’d put it in the dustbin of history but don’t wish go through the hassle of convincing the champions of a value-free scientific progress of its folly. Who could argue with their free-floating logic? Interestingly, if they apply their scientific minds to dissect the propaganda of GMO companies, they’d realize that it relies on pseudo-science? Obviously, you can’t call something built upon selective facts as science. You can’t bury all the harmful evidence against GMO-agriculture, quite a bit of it found in the research conducted by GMO companies themselves, and call it science. You can’t bandy about manipulated research and baseless propaganda as proof of the usefulness, harmlessness and even the need of GMO-agriculture, and call it science. If anything, GMO companies have subverted science to invade our markets and our homes.

GMO-agriculture is actually a long way from being safe enough to be taken out of the lab and introduced in our fields. Even GMO companies agree that their seeds need to go through long trial-periods in local environments before they are introduced in the market. Shouldn’t it bother us that the GMO companies have managed to illegally spread their seeds of death in our fields without conducting credible trials? Should we blame the unethical conduct of GMO companies? Or should we blame our parliamentarians who are least concerned about the existing illegal GMO-contamination of our agriculture, and who would now like to legally welcome these killer-seeds without putting in place any safeguards to protect us against their harmful onslaught?

Mouthpieces of these companies in the parliament and bureaucracy, agricultural research institutes and the media, are rewarded in myriad ways for spreading rosy lies about the GMOs and glossing over the dangers they pose. They don’t want to talk about the fallout of cultivating GMO crops on the environment, the damage caused to our health by their consumption or the security repercussions of allowing unethical multinational corporations to take over our agriculture. They don’t want to discuss the pitfalls of creating unholy monopolies that control something as essential as food and the ramifications of destroying our farmers.

GMO-agriculture would reduce the self-sufficient traditional farmer who needs only his labor, his land, and nature’s kindness to grow a variety of wholesome food, to a crippled mono-cropping consumer of GMO seeds and a range of hazardous inputs that come with the package. For the small farmers, highly-priced inputs mean heavy loans. And in the case of a bad harvest or crop failure, not rare when it comes to GMOs, it means losing the land, starvation and suicides.

Is the profit of GMO companies more important to those who claim to represent us than the safety of our food and the livelihood of millions who produce it with their toil and sweat? Are the birds and the bees dispensable to them? Do they think there’d be no price to pay for poisoning this precious land and wiping off the wealth of its many different weeds? Is this what democracy boils down to?

 The writer is a freelance columnist. He can be contacted at hazirjalees@hotmail.com

http://nation.com.pk/columns/18-Jun-2015/gmos-are-seeds-of-war

EDITORIAL

AN amendment to the Seed Act of 1976, working its way through the legislative process, could have far-reaching consequences for Pakistan’s agriculture.

The amendment will essentially open the door to genetically modified seeds, particularly in cotton which is the country’s largest crop.

It does this by providing legal cover for intellectual property rights in seeds. It is important that the legislation be enacted because Pakistan’s per acre yield in cotton has been stagnant for many years now, while India and other countries that have embraced BT cotton, have doubled their yields over a decade.

Pakistan’s cotton crop still enjoys higher yields per acre than India, but lags far behind countries like Egypt and Mexico. Stagnant yields in food and cotton will strain the country’s food self-sufficiency as well as industrial growth.

Further improvements in yields can only come from opening the door to genetically modified varieties, which is a technological innovation akin to the green revolution.

But prospects for the passage of the amendment have been dimmed by a loud chorus of protests. Successive governments have struggled with this amendment, which has been in the works since 2007, and was last brought before the National Assembly in 2010.

Of the arguments that the protesting farmer associations are advancing, there is one that is very potent and should receive high-level consideration. That argument points towards the disruptive impact that the new legislation, particularly its stress on intellectual property rights, will have on the farmers’ right to conserve, sell and exchange seeds amongst themselves.

Many of our small farmers rely on informal exchanges of seeds at sowing time, and opening the door to large private-sector seed companies must not be allowed to shut down these local markets or inhibit their operation.

Pakistan needs to avail itself of the benefits of new seed technologies to keep pace with domestic growing requirements as well as the output of its main competitors.

But it is also important that the new markets that need to be created to make use of these benefits do not shut down existing ones on which the small farmers have become very dependent.

Any disruptive impact that the amendment to the Seed Act can have on livelihoods of small farmers needs to be debated in the Senate as well, and institutional reforms should accompany the new legislation to ensure customary practices are not harmed in the course of ushering in the new technology.

Published in Dawn, April 7th, 2015

http://www.dawn.com/news/1174330