The Bt Cotton Fraud Part Two: Its Performance in the Field

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Part One.

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In Part 2 we’ll survey the real world performance of Bt cotton in India. This is in contrast to the “studies” of Monsanto flacks like Matin Qaim, much touted in the corporate media. Qaim, who barely set foot outside the Mahyco greenhouses and field test sites during his few visits to India (he’s based in Germany), simply propagates corporate-asserted numbers based on secret data from the corporate trials. There’s no reason to trust these numbers in the first place, and even if they were true they’d be valid only for the ivory tower conditions of the trial sites. Either way these figures have zero validity for real world agriculture of any sort, let alone that practiced by small farmers. Yet this person is the go-to guy for the corporate media and Monsanto hacks everywhere. Since we can assume Monsanto provides the best flackery it can, in dismissing Qaim we can dismiss the entire pro-Bt “side of the story” as fraudulent and invalid. Now let’s move on to what reality testifies.

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1. Bt cotton never improved yields. Data compiled by government and trade groups tells a stark story: The great bulk of the yield increase (measured by nationwide average kilograms per hectare) of the commodity cotton era in India occurred from the 2000-01 to the 2004-05 seasons, at which point only 5.6% of cotton acreage was planted to Bt varieties. During the Bt acreage surge from 2005-06 (18% of cotton acreage) to 2008-09 (84%) yield increased only a slight amount, then stagnated and declined. In the ensuing years as Bt acreage crept up above 90%, yields have declined. Overall, yield increased 70% from 00-01 to 04-05 when Bt acreage was negligible, and increased only 2% from 05-06 to 2011-12, with a decline since the 2007-08 peak.

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This proves that the entire increase was from other causes and had nothing to do with the GMO. The real yield surge came from the switch from polyculture Desi-based cotton growing to hybrid monoculture deploying massive, expensive inputs – irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides. (That’s only monocultural yield, not food for people or farmer income. As a rule “yield” by itself is a crackpot measure with no meaning except within some socioeconomic, political, or environmental context.) Almost all the yield increase in fact came from improvements in conventional hybrids and expanded irrigation. As for pesticides, Kehsav Kranthi of the Central Institute of Cotton Research (CICR) scoffs at the notion that Bt crops can hold their own. On the contrary, he attributes the viability of any kind of hybrid cotton, Bt or conventional, vs. a wide range of what from the Bt point of view are secondary pests (Bt cotton’s target pest is the bollworm; secondary pests include jassids/leafhoppers, mealy bugs, mirid bugs, thrips, stink bugs, and many others), to the standard seed treatment with the neonicotinoid imidacloprid. Of course this too is a deadly poison we need to abolish (and jassids are increasingly resistant to it), but the point is that to the extent poisons contribute to yield at all, this non-GM poison is far more important than genetically engineered Bt. The great increase in the years of low Bt acreage and stagnation of the years of Bt domination prove that this GMO offers no yield benefit whatsoever and is actually inferior to conventional cotton hybrids.

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These numbers, damning as they are, actually exaggerate GMO performance, as they’re skewed by the relatively better results from Gujarat state. Gujarat is an outlier in that its agriculture is dominated by fewer, bigger, richer farmers than is typical in other states. Gujarat is far better served by irrigation projects and fertilizer subsidies. Its more capital-rich farmers can better afford the expensive inputs Bt cotton requires. The better Bt cotton production in this state therefore confirms the thesis that GMOs work only for rich growers who can afford lavish outlays for irrigation, fertilizer, and pesticides. Take Gujarat out of the equation and Bt’s performance for small farmers across the cotton belt has been dismal and worsening.

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Besides its poor overall yield, Bt cotton (and Bt crops in general, everywhere on earth) has performed in an extremely variable way. There have been several regional crop failures, most recently in Karnataka in 2014. In general the national and state averages obscure extreme local/regional variability. As a rule, how the GM crop will perform is a crapshoot and will vary from farmer to farmer. Whether on account of the poor quality of seed or variable Bt expression in the crop (caused by the chaotically modified genetics, by agronomic factors like watering levels or soil quality, by environmental factors like temperature? Who knows? No one has ever studied this. Not Monsanto, not the US government, not the Indian government, no one), whatever the cause, at any given time the meager overall numbers conceal a vast number of individual tragedies.

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At the farm level, Bt intrinsically yields less than conventional hybrids. Given high inputs it may have better operational yield for the first few years until the bollworms develop resistance. Given the low inputs which comprise the limit for indebted small farmers, Bt always yields much less, along with many acute failures. Yields have always been far less, often by more than half, than what Monsanto’s advertising promised.

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For the individual farmer, growing Bt cotton is like “playing Russian roulette in order to get out of poverty”, as Nassim Taleb recently put it regarding civilization and GMOs as a whole.

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[There’s a good place to add a critical point. While the individual small farmer crushed by commodity agriculture is often impoverished, the opposite is true of agriculture as a whole. Here we’re talking about cotton, which isn’t directly a food although the seeds are pressed into oil which is used in processed foods. Nevertheless in any discussion of GMO yields we must always stress the fact that industrial agriculture produces far more than enough food for everyone on earth today, and more than enough even for the highest future population projections. The fact is that there’s zero problem with the quantity of food produced, today or at any time in the future for as long as industrial ag persists. (It won’t for much longer, and humanity must transform to decentralized agroecology and food sovereignty if we want to continue eating, but that’s a different matter for another day.) Therefore there’s zero need to increase yields in order to “feed the world”. Feed the World is a classical Big Lie. The world currently produces enough food for 10 billion people, yet of the 7 billion here, one billion go hungry (and another 2 billion suffer from dietary diseases such as malnutrition or obesity, often both at the same time). This is 100% caused by pathological economic and political systems for distributing the cornucopia we have. For example, India has vast food stocks, indeed it allows vast amounts of stockpiled food to rot, yet 250 million go hungry. The problem, today and tomorrow, is 100% from corporate maldistribution, 0% from insufficient production. It’ll be a great leap forward for civilization when we can completely purge the “Feed the World” notion from rational and moral discussion as the criminal Big Lie it is.]

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2. Probably the core lie Monsanto-Mahyco and the Indian government told cotton farmers is that Bt cotton is suitable for rainfed cultivation. In fact Bt cotton requires as much as twice the water needed by conventional hybrids and cannot be effectively grown without expensive artificial irrigation. The vast majority (70%) of India’s farmers depend completely upon rainfall. In Karnataka state where yields collapsed in 2014, most cotton cultivation is rainfed. Gujarat is the exception again, reversing the proportions of irrigated (65%) and rainfed (35%) farms. Here the irrigated area has accounted for 84% of the state’s cotton production, 689 lint kg/ha, while the rainfed area produces only 247 kg/ha. That’s a typical yield difference between Bt cotton grown with irrigation vs. rainfall.

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To try to sell Bt cotton, or any GMO, to a rain-dependent farmer is criminal fraud plain and simple. Investigative journalist PJ Sainath went further – “promoting [Bt cotton] in a dry and unirrigated area like Vidarbha [ground zero for the mass farmer suicide epidemic] was murderous. It was stupid. It was killing.”

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3. Another core lie is that the Bt technology can be a permanent panacea vs. insect pests. In fact Monsanto knew from the start the obvious fact from Evolution 101 that pests would develop resistance to any Bt toxin just as they do with any other pesticide. Monsanto built the planned obsolescence of each GMO variety, and its supercession by stacked and then more stacked varieties (they called it “expanded trait penetration”, referring to market penetration), into its business strategy. But in the early 00s Monsanto was promising the opposite, that single trait Bt cotton would maintain its potency vs. the bollworm indefinitely.

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Farmers who believed the lies were quickly disabused. The official data is garbled and contradictory, but the basic outlines are clear. Overall, there was never a real decline in pesticide use in Indian cotton farming. Indeed, nationally pesticide use went up 10% during the peak years of Bt expansion. This was despite the increased use of lower-volume, higher-toxicity poisons during these years. In some regions Bt may have used less pesticide than conventional hybrids for the first few years, with a difference range from miniscule to significant. It’s a function of how much water and fertilizer the crop gets. (As always, every possible agronomic benefit of a GMO is dependent upon lavish and expensive artificial inputs. To spend less on pesticides you need to spend more on water and fertilizer, for example.) Any temporary relief also depends upon high-quality trait expression. But many varieties are inconsistent, shoddy, or just fraudulent. There’s never a lasting decline. After four years at most the pesticide use and cost equals out. A few more years and Bt needs more applied pesticides than non-GM conventional. Also, in terms of aggregate poison use and environmental and health hazards all the numbers comprise a false accounting because they don’t accoiunt for the Bt endotoxins themselves. But these too are pesticides and must be counted as such in all relevant ways.

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Meanwhile all commodity cotton, even Bt cotton, always needs sprayed and/or seed-treated pesticide since cotton is attacked by the widest array of insect types. In the case of anti-bollworm Bt cotton, secondary pests quickly move in to fill any temporary void left where the Bt toxin has temporarily killed the target pest. As I mentioned above, according the the CICR’s Kranthi without neonic seed treatments Bt cotton would be routed by jassids, mirids, aphids, thrips, and many others. As Monsanto’s own propaganda often emphasized, Bt adoption has to be put in the context of the failure of earlier pesticides. Since the same companies propagate both kinds of poisons, applied and GMO endemic, it’s obviously likely that the poison treadmill culminating in stacked Bt poisons is planned obsolescence, disaster capitalism.

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In some cases the Bt cotton never worked against the target bollworms at all. In every case, bollworms developed resistance within a few years. In 2006 Monsanto introduced Bollgard II containing two Bt toxins, the original Cry1AC plus Cry2AB, thus admitting that the original Bollgard no longer worked. Bollworms have since developed resistance to Cry2AB. This is standard for the GMO pesticide treadmill. The result of all this has been that farmers found any reduced-pesticide dividend to be minimal and temporary at best. While pesticide use and cost may have declined by a small amount at first, within a few years they were back to pre-Bt levels. Today Bt cotton farmers have to spend more on pesticides than farmers growing non-GM conventional hybrids. And to correct the false accounting again, the great expense of Bt seeds has to be entered as a pesticide cost, since farmers are purchasing the Bt endotoxins the crops will allegedly produce.

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As is standard in these superbug cases, Monsanto, government, and the corporate media try to scapegoat the farmers by claiming they didn’t plant sufficient non-Bt “refuges” where non-resistant insects could survive and mate with resistant ones. The refuge concept is a propaganda scam, not a serious policy. Here’s not the place to dissect it, but I wrote more about it here. For the purposes of this post, which emphasizes how Bt cotton is a fraud on small farmers, I’ll point out that the refuge policy, if seriously meant, could be deployed only on large plantations, not on thousands of farms of a few acres each. So there’s another example of how even in principle GMOs could “work” only on vast industrial farms but can never work for small farmers.

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4. Small farmers didn’t count on the fact that GMO cotton requires considerably more synthetic fertilizer than non-GM conventional cotton. Pro-GMO activist CD Mayee (an ISAAA board member and former co-chair of the aptly named Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC)) admits that a doubling of the small amount of Indian acreage planted to GMOs (Bt cotton is the only GMO currently being grown commercially in India and makes up c. 5% of overall agricultural acreage) would double the whole country’s fertilizer use. That’s how ravenous Bt cotton is. A university study found that Bt cotton requires 15% more fertilizer than conventional. Bt cotton’s inherent gluttony for synthetic fertilization is aggravated by the way it denudes the soil and destroys soil microbial communities. This soil destruction in turn requires even greater fertilizer application as well as more irrigation, as the soil becomes unable to hold water. Needless to say this combination generates an awful nitrate runoff problem.

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5. As Monsanto flooded the market with its seeds, it pressured seed growers and sellers to stop producing and offering non-GM seeds. Monsanto calls this tactic “seed replacement”. Once enough farmers had adopted Bt cotton and GM seeds had attained a dominant market position, Monsanto jacked up the price to astronomical levels. Here too there has been great variation over time and across regions, but distilling from many sources tells us that seed prices soared to 2-10 times as much as the price of non-GM hybrids. Prices have run from 700-2000 rupees per packet. For the greatest contrast, the original Desi varieties would cost 5-10 rupees a packet. The bulk of this price explosion is Monsanto’s technology tax. By one estimate, by spring 2014 Monsanto had extracted 5000 crore in taxes (50 billion rupees; c. $810 million) from Indian cotton farmers. Imagine what this wealth could have accomplished if Indian society had invested it in polyculture food production instead of letting it drain down a corporate commodification rathole.

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This extremely high priced seed input and accompanying tax is unique to the GMO varieties, and is therefore a new burden on already beleaguered farmers.

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6. The result of all these escalating input costs has been that Bt cotton is considerably more expensive to grow than non-GM hybrids. At the same time cotton prices have been forcibly depressed and kept low by US dumping of heavily subsidized cotton. The result is that even for the best-equipped farms, Bt’s profit margin is razor-thin, certainly worse than for non-GM conventional. For small farmers, it’s a wipeout. It’s near impossible for them to do anything but lose even more and sink deeper into debt each year.

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7. As all this has been going on, India’s conventional agricultural credit structure, based on nationalized banks and lenient payment terms (obviously the right way for society to handle its food producers, if it’s to force them to incur debt at all, which of course it should not), has been gutted by the same neoliberal process which has driven first monoculture hybrid commodification and then Bt commercialization. As a result farmers have increasingly been forced to turn to usurious “microlenders” and the seed and poison dealers themselves who often double as loansharks. This sinks them even deeper in the quicksand.

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It’s clear that Bt cotton is a product which, where it works at all, works only for a brief period and only where supplemented by an expensive, cumbersome apparatus of artificial inputs. Like all other GMOs, it’s an extremely high maintenance hothouse flower. Industrial agriculture as such is highly destructive, wasteful, and unsustainable. GMOs represent an escalation of all the worst aspects of industrial ag while conferring no benefits. As a whole GMOs are the extreme manifestation of a backward, economically cramping, agronomically destructive, retrograde technology and mindset. They’re collectively a hoax and a fraud, and most of all where touted for small farmers. The goal of marketing GMOs to small farmers is in fact to economically destroy them and drive them off the land so that large-scale corporate industrial plantations can more “efficiently” enclose and monopolize agriculture. In First the Seed Jack Kloppenburg discusses how the corporations faced barriers to the full commodification of farming itself (as opposed to the system of agricultural inputs and processing). Here we see the answer: One of the basic purposes of GMOs is to drive up the costs of farming to the point that it becomes economically impossible for small independent farmers to exist. Bt cotton provides one of the best case studies.

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In Part Three we’ll survey Bt cotton around the world and confirm that the Indian experience, while extreme, is typical.

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