India's War on Vegetables

Government officials often craft policies that benefit themselves at the expense of society as a whole. This seems a particular specialty at India's Department of Biotechnology, which has just announced that it will spend $500,000 on creating two facilities to screen crops and other food products for "transgenic" gene sequences -- the use of genetic modification techniques to move material between species.

This is rather like creating an elaborate government mechanism to detect which vehicles are fitted with a modern braking system. In both cases, the characteristic in question is a clear improvement over previous technologies and the information gained is of no use whatever.

This project by the Department of Biotechnology is reminiscent of its previous bumbling. Several years ago, the same government regulators used the threat of fines and imprisonment to force scientists at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi to destroy their small field trial of a variety of brinjal (eggplant) that had been genetically improved so it was resistant to insect pests. Not that there was anything even remotely dangerous about the field trial, it was simply that the investigators had not fully complied with all the paperwork required before testing a genetically modified plant

Such initiatives are reminiscent of the foibles of the fictional government department immortalized in the BBC sitcom, "Yes, Minister," in which bureaucratic logic operates in a world of its own. India is, after all, a country with little effective regulation of many high-risk activities, such as public transport and occupational hazards; and its expenditures on public health are woefully inadequate. It is not unusual, for example, to observe pre-teens performing welding or using dangerous machinery with no protective gear and wearing only a loincloth. Malaria, filariasis and other viral diseases, which have been all but eradicated from industrialized countries, are epidemic there.

However, rather than address those problems, Indian bureaucrats reckon that what the nation really needs is a public-health apparatus for detecting those crops and foods made with a new and superior technology. It's "like offering swimming lessons to people in the Sahara," according to Calestous Juma, director of the Science, Technology and Innovation Program at Harvard University, referring to a conceptually similar United Nations-based initiative.

The wrong-headed approach of Indian officials turns on its head a basic tenet of regulation -- that the amount of oversight a product or activity receives should be commensurate with the level of risk that it poses. Instead India has adopted the opposite approach. Only the more precisely crafted and more predictable genetically modified crops are subjected to extensive and expensive testing and monitoring regimes, while plants crafted using less precise and predictable techniques such as wide crosses (hybridizations in which genes are moved between unrelated plants) and intensive mutagenesis are exempt from this scrutiny.

Consider, for example, the relatively new man-made "species" of Triticum agropyrotriticum, which is grown by combining the genomes of bread wheat and a grass sometimes called quackgrass or couchgrass. Possessing all the chromosomes of wheat and one extra whole genome from quackgrass, T. agropyrotriticum could, at least in theory, pose several kinds of problems, since it takes an established plant variety and introduces tens of thousands of foreign genes into it. These concerns include the potential for increased invasiveness of the plant in the field, and the possibility that quackgrass-derived proteins could be toxic or allergenic.

But Indian regulators evince no concern about these possibilities, and such plant varieties -- which are certainly "genetically modified" and harbor "transgenes" according to any reasonable definition -- are subject to no review prior to field testing or to entering the food chain. However, if a gene from couchgrass (or any other organism) was instead added into wheat using modern genetic modification techniques the resulting variety would be subject to extraordinary and hugely expensive regulatory regimes.

India's discriminatory rules restricting products made with the new biotechnology conflicts with the broad consensus that the newest techniques are no more than a refinement of earlier ones, and that transfer of a gene by molecular techniques does not, per se, confer risk. Instead the use of the newest and most precise techniques of biotechnology make the final product even safer, as it is now possible to introduce pieces of DNA that contain one or a few well-characterized genes. In contrast, the older genetic techniques transferred a variable number of genes haphazardly, making it more difficult to be certain about the traits introduced into the plants.

The irony is that the discriminatory regulatory burdens imposed by Indian bureaucrats are making it more difficult to produce pest resistant crops, which could not only increase crop yields but also replace many chemical pesticides. That makes little sense, since improving crops through genetic modification is surely less environmentally hazardous and more publicly acceptable than manufacturing and spraying hazardous chemicals. (Remember the Bhopal disaster in 1984, when a gas leak from a pesticide factory killed 3,000 and injured more than 50,000.)

By implementing wrong-headed policies that discourage the testing and use of important new products and misallocating public resources, Indian bureaucrats are no less culpable than if they were to permit the building of an unsafe dam or the administration of contaminated blood products. They should be held accountable.