A woman works in a field of mustard plants. Photo: Reuters
- Should India remove genetically edited plants from regulatory oversight – or shackle them with the same regulation applied to genetically modified organisms?
- The decision will determine the fate of the country’s gene-editing industry and influence nutritional security. So how do we make sense of the trade-offs?
- A new book, Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India, offers us insights into the nuances that underscore governance of emerging technologies.
Governing emerging technologies is a challenge for policymakers. The uncertainty of potential benefits and risks create hard choices.
What happens if the risks actualise, but the benefits don’t? How to determine the long-term impact of the technology in the real world? Is it then safer to ban a technology, or to let other countries experiment with it before making a decision in the Indian context?
But what if the risks had been exaggerated and the benefits are real? Would banning the technology have damaged India’s chances of benefitting from its applications?
Take, for example, the application of gene-editing: to create plants tailored to one’s needs. Should India go the US way and remove genetically edited plants from regulatory oversight – or the way of the European Union and shackle them with the same regulation applied to genetically modified organisms (GMO)?
The decision will determine the fate of the country’s gene-editing industry and influence nutritional security for the country. So how do we make sense of the trade-offs?
Aniket Aga’s new book, Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India, offers us insights into the nuances that underscore governance of emerging technologies. The book delves deep into the regulatory journey of GMOs in India. En route, Aga meticulously documents the various stakeholders, their motivations and their interactions.
Aniket Aga
Yale University Press, November 2021
GMOs are an excellent case study to scrutinise the inner workings of policymaking in a democracy. Although the development of GMOs falls in the realm of biotechnology, the book shows how their actual adoption is impacted by multiple spheres of policy.
Their underlying science may dictate the characteristics of a GMO. Bt cotton, for example, produces toxins that are harmful to bollworms. This may lead farmers to spend less money on insecticides and still get a higher yield than if they had used non-Bt cotton.
The adoption of GMOs leading to greater cotton yield may seem simple in the confines of a lab – but in the field, the effectiveness of this toxin against bollworms depends on both the toxin and the bollworm. Natural selection can, over time, equip bollworms with resistance to the toxin, and lab studies need to account for this long-term consequence.
Aga’s book also raises questions about the real-world adoption of GMOs, such as: how will GMOs impact India’s biodiversity? And as yields increase, could the price of cotton crash? If so, how will this impact farmers, and what mechanisms can be put in place to protect them? How should GMOs be priced? And would adopting GMOs replace traditional sources of seeds and endanger traditional farm jobs?
Aga rightly argues that we can’t assess the impact of GMOs, and by that measure of any emerging technology, from the realm of science alone. As we navigate the various dimensions of the policy problem, we encounter the various motivations of and the power wielded by different stakeholders.
For GMOs, these stakeholders are government departments (biotechnology and environment), environmental activists, farmer’s groups, political parties and private companies. And Aga expertly lays out the power struggles between these groups and provides an historical account of how these relationships have evolved.
His analysis is based on secondary research as well as on interviews with key stakeholders and field visits. In doing so, he unravels dealers of seeds as a pivotal stakeholder in the GMO ecosystem: dealers have influence not only as controllers of access to seeds but as purveyors of information as well.
Their critical role underlines, in turn, an important aspect of adopting emerging technologies: access to accurate information. Since new information is being continuously generated about the benefits and risks of these technologies, anyone who controls this information also controls the narrative.
This then points to the bigger issue of information asymmetry in governing GMOs: the lack of safety data, opacity about government decision-making, and ambiguity in regulatory oversight. Together with the various stakeholders, we end up with a medley of opinions that can shape policy.
Given so much uncertainty, how do we frame good policy for emerging technologies?
The book analyses this information asymmetry and its role in influencing GMO adoption by farmers, consumers and policymakers. Aga also uses this asymmetry to question the popular narrative that the adoption of Bt cotton by a majority of farmers signals their desire to accept GMOs. And this way, he lays bare the heart of the problem: the question of how we must proceed with evidence-based policymaking if there is little or conflicting evidence.
This is a difficult question to answer.
In a democracy, democratically elected leaders are tasked with making decisions on governance. So perhaps the big question the book should have discussed more is the role of the government – that is, if the government should actively participate in controlling the fate of GMOs or if it should remain a regulator.
The Indian government seems to wish to dabble in everything related to life-science technology: i.e. to be the primary funder, the creator of biotechnology products and services, to regulate and, at times, to even be the primary consumer of these products.
In doing so much, the government perhaps gets away with not doing something it should be: creating and disseminating accurate information to help stakeholders make appropriate decisions, without leaving them at the mercy of conflicting narratives.
The government should release safety data and assess the long-term impact of emerging technologies. Parliamentarians should debate the merits and risks of applications of emerging technologies – topics seldom addressed in the Indian Parliament. But the final choice, to adopt a particular application, should rest with the ultimate stakeholders: farmers and consumers.
The other way to frame this debate is: how do we assess emerging technologies? Not all applications of a particular technology are harmful. Yet the narrative surrounding Bt cotton and Bt mustard have stalled the progression of the GMO industry in India. In a democracy, should the stakeholder dialogue be steered by outcomes that aim to prevent technological applications or to create a safe space for the development and testing of these applications? This dialogue is of utmost importance as India continues on the journey of becoming a technological leader.
This book is an important case study in the governance of emerging technology and provides lessons for the Indian government to improve its governance mechanisms. Not learning from the mistakes of the past will lead to unnecessary risks for Indian citizens and/or the loss of opportunities for incoming technologies. We need to address the three important points that the book raises – transparency of data, inclusive policymaking and informational asymmetry.
Otherwise, the technologies that emerge next, such as gene-editing, could get mired in the same controversies as GMOs.
Shambhavi Naik is a research fellow at the Takshashila Institution. She has a PhD in cancer biology from the University of Leicester.