Bt cotton in India: success may be short-lived

By Jason Major

TechNyou

Big questions are being asked about the longer-term consequences of using BT cotton in India.

To be more precise, the concerns raised are about the longer-term agronomic, cultural and societal consequences that might arise because of how Bt cotton is being used by Indian farmers at the moment.

Research published in World Development (March 2011) highlights a number of socio-cultural issues and lack of farmer education – or lack of infrastructure to acquire such education – that could counteract or reverse any of the advantages experienced with growing the cotton at the moment.  And those advantages, for most anyway, are real: overall yield increases from Bt cotton are about 18% and reduction in pesticide use is nearly 55%. (NB: as mentioned in the Stone et al paper, these figures vary depending on the research and who is choosing to highlight it.)

History repeating

The problems described in India are not new. The problems Stone et al identify are the same ones that became apparent with the introduction of hybrid seeds in the 1970s through to the late 1990s.  Such seeds require the farmer to buy new seed each year and they require a new set of skills to grow them effectively. Indigenous farming knowledge was ill-suited to the agronomic requirements of these high-tech seeds and the knowledge required to exploit the new technology changed as rapidly as technology itself. The knowledge transfer gap just got wider with the years.

For example, during the 1990s, pesticide use was estimated to be growing at 20% per year, with the great majority going to cotton. There was virtually no indigenous knowledge on the use of the organophosphate and synthetic pyrethroid sprays on offer leading to overuse and misuse of insecticides spread alongside the misunderstood and agronomically inappropriate hybrids cotton varieties being used. By the late 1990s, most bollworms and some sucking pests showed strong resistance to pesticides.

In the 1997 season, the Warangal region that was the subject of Stone et al’s research made headlines with farmer suicides that were widely attributed to bollworms. Stone et al suggest several factors intersected to make this disaster inevitable. There had been considerable recent expansion of area planted to cotton, a steep decline in cotton prices, and rising resistance to insecticides. In addition, Warangal rainfall patterns encouraged unusually severe attacks by Spodoptera cutworms. At the field level, the result was that Warangal farmers responded by increasingly spraying decreasingly effective pesticides, ending the season with enormous debts and a meagre crop.

However, Stone et al see this as the result rather than the cause. The cause, they suggest, was a general management failure of which the bollworm damage was merely a symptom.  The failure was the lack of any sort of process of upskilling, or simply educating the farmers how to integrate these technologies into their agronomic practices.

Social learning: don’t know, just follow the crowd

A second, and from my part more interesting, proposed reason behind the system-wide failure was cultural rather than simple education, though I think the two would be linked. Stone et al observed that farmers selected seed not because it is the best one for their farm, but because some dude of high rank, notoriety or prestige in the village chose that seed, so everyone else follows. Farmers also followed fads. That is, they bought a particular seed type simply because that is what everyone else was buying, regardless of the suitability of the seed.

Global perspective

Can the theories in this paper be extrapolated to other developing nations in the throes of attempting to adapt modern agronomics to their environment or having it foisted upon them because some bloke in a suit tells them it will make them money – sorry, cynicism creeping in? I suggest they can. In fact, the author alludes to some of the Indian problems appearing in China.

Should it stack up, to me this research highlights a possible bigger picture problem. I am stepping outside the boundaries of my expertise here and speculating, but are we attempting to inflict modern, commodity-based agriculture onto economies and cultures where it is an ill-fit.

Although there is no doubt that agricultural production has loads of room for improvement, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and there are research groups working closely with governments and communities to create the skills and knowledge alongside the introduction of modern crops and agronomic methods. I suspect, however, that these programs are thinly spread.

Don’t blame Bt cotton

As I have maintained loads of time, it is not the technology we should fear (generally), but how we choose to use it.  And in the context of this story, its appropriate or acceptable use will be different from one culture, region or economy to the next. Bt cotton seems to work for Indian farmers at the moment, but technology doesn’t work in isolation. It should not be viewed as a technological fix to a problem, but developed and integrated within a social and ethical context. And nearly all scientists I talk to or work with are well aware of this. It just doesn’t always seem to translate particularly well to the field.

Reference

Stone, G. D. Field versus Farm in Warangal: Bt Cotton, Higher Yields, and Larger Questions, World Development Volume 39, Issue 3, March 2011, Pages 387-398

Others

Bt Cotton and Farmer Suicides in India: Reviewing the Evidence

Guillaume P. Gruère, Purvi Mehta-Bhatt, Debdatta Sengupta

IFPRI Discussion Paper 00808

October 2008

http://www.ifpri.org/publication/bt-cotton-and-farmer-suicides-india

Image: CSIRO Plant Industry. Cotton boll