'Socio-economic impact study on Bt brinjal not done'

Though commercial release of genetically modified brinjal has been put on hold, documents made public by the government suggest a proposed study to assess the vegetable's need and possible socio-economic impact on farmers was never done.

The ministry of environment and forests, according to documents available on its website, had set up a Bt brinjal Technical Review Committee early in 2007.

The committee evaluated numerous comments from various stakeholders vis-a-vis the biosafety data generated by Mahyco -- the company which developed the Bt brinjal.

The committee recognised the need of a large scale socio- economic impact assessment study and set up a three-member sub-committee to evaluate whether there was any ground-level requirement for the genetically modified brinjal at all.

In October 2007, the sub-committee met in Varanasi and developed a detailed methodology for the study, which was to be done by institutions of the Indian Council of Social Science Research with government funding.

"But the (socio-economic assessment) study was never commissioned nor done," S Parasuraman, one of the member of the sub committee and the director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, wrote in a communication sent to environment minister Jairam Ramesh.

While announcing the moratorium on the commercial cultivation of Bt brinjal, Ramesh said there was no 'tearing hurry' to make it the country's first GM food crop.

Several state government, NGOs, farmers' associations and scientists have also opposed the crop's commercial introduction, approved by the Genetic Engineering Approvals Committee in October last year.

Bt brinjal is a genetically-modified vegetable which is infused with Cry1Ac gene from a bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis to make the plant resistant to the fruit and shoot borers and certain pests.

Some scientists have been opposing it, arguing that the genes were toxic and would affect the health of the consumers.

In his letter, Parasuraman said that the socio-economic assessment submitted by the developers of the GM brinjal to the ministry was defective in its methodology.

"All the biosafety/other studies conducted by or for Mahyco must be made public in their complete form -- the entire report, and not just the summaries.

"These studies must be peer-reviewed and subject to evaluation by external experts. The regulators, in consultations with NGOs, must appoint a non-interested third party expert to conduct independent studies on Bt brinjal," Parasuram said.

Mahyco had made pubic an abstract of its biosafety studies of Bt brinjal to back that the vegetable is safe to eat and economically viable for farmers.