The Hindu Business Line : `Exploit the feel-good factor of GM crops'

THE issue of Bt cotton has had only two extremes — with NGOs at one end vehemently opposing it and the company (Monsanto) and its associates at the other aggressively promoting is. But Dr Manu Kulkarni, founder of HOPE Foundation, wishes to offer `` a middle path''.

Unlike the NGOs, Dr Kulkarni is not anti-technology. In his practical way he believes that ``globalisation will definitely come. We just have to see that efficiency is increased and the adverse effects of technology are minimised.''

However, for every technology that is introduced, there needs to be ``adaptive research trials'', the kind that were done during the green revolution, he told Business Line.

Today, in all the controversy over Bt cotton, nobody is thinking of the farmer's interest, he feels. Dr Kulkarni has proposed to the Karnataka vision group on biotechnology to help him undertake such a study. ``We need to make at least two to three visits to the fields where Bt has been sown to monitor the crop,'' he said.

Farmers are interested in Bt and the ``good feeling'' had to be exploited to increase efficiency, he said.

Lashing out at activists who went around burning Bt fields, he said ``it is an experiment that the farmer is trying out. Who am I to burn his field?''

However, he felt that Monsanto and Mahyco, the companies behind the technology and the seeds were ``not open fellows''. When the trials were on, it was the company kept a record of the growth of the crop and not of the farmers, he said.

Dr Kulkarni has offered to record farmers' reactions, track the progress of the crop during various seasons.

Ideally, the Departments of Agriculture should have been doing this on behalf of the Government, he believes. But nothing is forthcoming from that direction. NGOs were "not capable of putting in this money. Private companies too have no interest in the matter,'' he said. Dr Kulkarni, who is focussed on the farmers, also dismissed the recent Chinese Nijing University report as being based on ``aberrations''. Every experiment has its failures and it is wrong to highlight only those, he felt. The USFDA's website was more balanced with a listing of the pluses and minuses of biotech. ``Unfortunately, we have no such regulatory body at the State level,'' he said. Dr Kulkarni suggested discussions of the technology at the gram sabha level.

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