I attended the Gujarat consultation. Here is a brief note I wrote the same evening:

The J.B. Auditorium belonging to the Ahmedabad Management Association has 500 fixed seats. There are two additional halls with video displays, each of 100 seats each. The third consultation saw 600 people in the main hall and the two video rooms full. Outside the auditorium more than 200 farmers, students, anti-GM activists held forth with placards and banners, shouting slogans against Bt brinjal. The Gujarat consultation therefore had more than 1,000 participants.

The astonishing attendance at the consultation owes largely to the efforts of a mass mobilization carried out by Kapil Shah of Jatan, Devender Sharma (who camped in the city for three days), and several civil society organizations. Streets and kiosks in the city had anti-GM posters put up by Greenpeace activists.

Jairam Ramesh was his debonair self, never losing his cool (unlike his first outburst at Kolkata), admonishing participants at times on use of undiplomatic language, open to all views, taking notes, representations and ending the session with a display of his email id (jairam54@vsnl.com) for any person who wanted to send him either more information or studies. Most of the discussion took place either in Gujarati or Hindi.

Of the hundreds who came, 66 spoke. Of these 51 opposed the introduction of Bt Brinjal and 15 spoke in support. Some of those who spoke in support were imported to the consultation in vehicles by Mahyco and paid Rs.500 each for the day, besides a hotel room. In fact, one sponsored lot came from Ganganagar in Rajasthan. Minister asked them pointedly if they had all come in a bus.

The pro-Bt farmers claimed that income had increased from Rs.5,000 to 20,000 due to Bt cotton and they had been saved from pesticides use (@Rs.10,000 per litre). One farmer claimed his yields had increased four times. He said though they consumed the seeds, they were not affected in any manner.

Another pro-Bt speaker was Dr P. Balasubramaniam who made the outrageous claim that the work at TNAU was being bankrolled by the Government of India. He ended his brief speech by declaring that since the Bt Brinjal could be grown from seed by farmers (once they had purchased it, of course), it in fact merited the label of “organic Bt Brinjal”. (Though Balasubramaniam came all the way from Tamilnadu, he was allowed to speak, whereas Claude Alvares was not permitted ostensibly because he was from Goa though he had come to speak as a representative of an all-India organic farmers association).

The anti-GM outpouring clearly carried the day. After the first hour, most of the sponsored pro-GM speakers had given up leaving the floor open to the anti-GM groups. The Minister made it a point to spend another half hour with the protesters outside the auditorium after the consultation. If the sponsorship had been absent, the entire auditorium would have resounded to anti-Bt brinjal slogans and speeches.

The organic farmers of Gujarat were out in a sizeable group and impressed upon the Minister that some of them whose farms were located in the immediate vicinity of Bt cotton farms were already losing their certification status.

Vijaya Venkat, Sudarshan Iyengar (Vice-Chancellor of Gujarat Vidya peeth), Rajendra Kimani (GV registrar), Vinubhai Gandhi, Kapil Shah and other spoke. Older Gandhians like Chunibhai Vaidya who could not attend sent written representations against Bt brinjal’s introduction.

Vinubhai who is 82 years old told the Minister that he had not contracted a single illness in the last fifty years simply because he ate organically grown food. He said Government was involved in so many frauds, there was no need to one more. The Constitution did not give any right to the government to allow foods that would affect our lives. Government simply had no right to impose foods on us like this.

Dr Sudarshan stood up to say that because GM food was hazardous was the reason why the GEAC had been set up in the first place. Being in that position, those in charge of deciding these matters had a very special responsibility to take absolute care. Since Bt Brinjal was an item destined for consumption (sometimes barely cooked, sometimes even eaten raw), the ICMR norms must not be violated and no Bt Brinjal should be introduced without studies that indicate it meets the norms. It is true that Bt Cotton had led to high yields in the beginning, but there were ready signs that these yields were evening out and beginning to decline. Looking at the issue as an economist, he remarked that the paid out costs of agriculture, risks and uncertainties associated with agriculture were not going down. He called for a 5-7 year moratorium and insisted firmly that all issued raised must be cleared before Bt Brinjal was allowed for cultivation.

Kapil Shah suggested that we should no longer opt for strategies in agriculture that keep changing every decade because the company had a new product. We need a strategy for agriculture that is based on permanence. The ecological approach is the most permanent. He pointed out that the faculty of Anand University were doing work on Bt cotton as well as on IPM. However its good work on IPM was not being supported or pushed. He countered the statement of Dr Balasubramaniam that the Bt-trials were funded by the Government of India and said they were in fact funded by the Ford Foundation and USAID.

A pastoralist, Laljee, decried the fact that 60% of the ownership of cotton seed had already into the hands of Monsanto. He asked what will happen when brinjal and other vegetable crops are genetically modified with private genes?

Scientists were invited to speak. Surprisingly, they were not supportive of the move to introduce Bt brinjal. One scientist (Dr Manjrekar from M.S. University Biotechnology Centre) criticised the GEAC for what he called was a “shoddy report”. He said the GEAC had offhandedly dismissed antibiotic resistance. He said horizontal gene transfer was a reality that could not be denied.

A medical practitioner said that the six amino acids inserted into the principal gene could induce situations including cancers as the composition was not found in nature. Others denied that pesticides use had come down with Bt cotton cultivation as farmers were still using pesticides in their fields. Most speakers strongly criticised the objectivity of the GEAC. Medical expert Chinu Srinivasan insisted that Bt food be placed on par with pharma products and should be subjected to the same trials and procedures of testing including human trials. Medical practitioner Bharat Shah summarised the medical literature on impact of Bt products on animals which included allergies, liver and other organ damage.

One lawyer categorically stated that the GEAC procedure was profoundly undemocratic and could never be tolerated in a functioning democracy. One organic farmer observed that when scientists wanted to introduce chemicals, they painted a rosy picture of them. Now the same scientists and companies were criticising chemicals because they wanted desperately to introduce GMOs.

A woman activist told the Minister that engineered products are only allowed as animal feed in countries like the US. This meant that the status of people in India was the same as animals in the US.

From time to time, Jairam Ramesh attempted to correct public misinformation. He said very clearly that the Andhra Pradesh government had not banned Bt brinjal. That was a wrong report. However, he did not correct Dr Balasubramaniam’s patently false statement that the entire work on Bt brinjal in India was financed by the Government of India.