A few years ago activists, allegedly belonging to the Karnataka Rytha Sangha, the State farmers’ organization, burned Mahyco’s trial Bt cotton fields in Karnataka, India.

On October 28, 2006, in Rampura village in Karnal, Haryana State, the Bharatiya Kissan Union (BKU), a farmers’ organization, using some 400 local farmers torched Mahyco's Bt rice under field trials. Mahyco suffers a loss of Rupees one million, and needs to restart the process.

A BKU leader threatened to burn all such fields in the country where trials are underway, and said that ‘On Friday (October 27), we got a tip-off from Hyderabad that such tests were underway in Karnal’. In all probability, the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, an active anti-biotech group, could be the source of the tip-off. BKU seems to have also sent a team to Gorakhpur (Uttar Pradesh), where similar trials are going on in a field.

A source considers that ‘it's plain and simple misinformation that led to this’. But this is a case where ignorance is no bliss.

Though the police were informed of the threat to burn the crop an hour in advance, they seem to have reached the field an hour after the damage was done.

The destroyed rice crop was a Bt transgenic with Cry 1Ac gene, to control the shoot-borer disease, where conventional measures have largely failed. The trials are legal for two reasons: a) on July 11, 2006, the Review Committee on Genetic Manipulation (RCGM) permitted Mahyco to conduct multi-location limited field trials of this transgenic, at 12 sites in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh, and b) Mahyco got on lease a two-acre plot of farm land of a Haryana farmer for Rs. 15,000, to conduct these trials.

The activists cited several reasons in defense of their action:

That the farmer who leased the land was not informed of what seeds were sown and for what purpose, but one wonders if Mahyco was obliged to do this. This farmer who joined the arsonists does not lose anything, as he gets his lease money and gains the appreciation of the BKU for joining them.

The Haryana President of BKU said that the ‘tests were being conducted in violation of the rules’. What and whose rules were violated? Under the statutory norms, the RCGM and other expert Committees monitor these trials for compliance of regulations and results. Mahyco maintains that they adhered to all precautions essential for conducting the field tests.

The BKU leader declared that ‘such trials will be disastrous for the farmers as they will not only contaminate the soil, but also adversely affect yield from existing rice varieties’. If he meant that Bt proteins get into the soil, he is ignorant that there is ever so much of Bt proteins in the soil, as Bt is an ubiquitous soil bacterium. The leader certainly cannot explain how the yield from the existing rice varieties would be adversely affected.

Another concern expressed was that ‘on-field GM trials in a region, which is the Centre of Origin, are fraught with risks to the bio-diversity of that crop and can contaminate the rice gene pool’. No part of India is the sole Centre of Origin of rice. Except the north eastern part of India and remotely possibly some districts in Orissa, no Indian region can claim to be the Centre of Diversity. For the past several decades, all rice growing regions in India have been growing different varieties of rice developed in the Green Revolution packages, and the kind of change or ‘damage’ to the diversity feared from GE crops, has already happened.

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