Global capitalism is predatory system whereby finance capitalists (IMF and Worldbank) bribe low and middle income countries, mainly in the global south, with loans and sometimes direct investments in return for neoliberal economic policies (i.e. privatization, austerity, and deregulation) that provide multinational conglomerates like Bayer-Monsanto a captive market to exploit. During the pandemic the IMF encouraged 33 African countries to pursue austerity, the opposite of what they told European countries, including cuts to agricultural spending. 13 of the 15 loan programs they negotiated during the second year of the pandemic required new austerity measures (i.e. spending cuts). 14 of 16 West African countries were pressured to cut their budgets by a combined $70 billion, the largest of which was Nigeria by $30 billion, and 9 countries were pressured to levy VATs on essential items like food and hygiene products. Oxfam further relates that the deepest cuts have been made not only to fuel subsidies and social welfare payments but agriculture expenditure as well. Three-quarters of African Union governments cut agriculture spending to 3.8% of their budget while spending 6.4% of their budget on weapons. This has had the perhaps intended effect of pushing 20 million more Africans into extreme poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition. It also gives multinational conglomerates like Bayer-Monsanto an opportunity to waltz in as would be saviors offering their GM seed-Glyphosate Herbicide combo as a panacea to world hunger and the demands of global population growth.
As I mentioned in The Plandemic is A Convenient Cover for Overt Wealth Consolidation 100 million more people have been thrown into extreme poverty in the last three years while billionaires and multinationals reaped record profits. In the global south, corporate land grabs, agricultural dumping, and indebtedness to the global banking cabal (i.e. IMF and World Bank) used as leverage to push neoliberal prescriptions (i.e. privatization, austerity, and deregulation), all keep the global south poor while allowing multinationals to consolidate and exploit their resources, but perhaps the most overlooked one is the GM consolidation of farming through proprietary terminator seeds that must be bought at higher prices every planting and used in combination with proprietary pesticides that pose untold hazards to human health and the environment. India presents an interesting case study because its past experience under the brutal repression of British imperialism has made it wary of western capitalists, but everyone has a price. In return for $120 billion in World Bank loans, India was pressured to cut agricultural subsidies and funding to public agriculture institutions, dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, allow global capitalists into its agriculture market and grow a handful of cash crops (like cotton) for export.
Cotton harvests did not triple because of the introduction of BT Cotton.
In India, five high-level reports have advised against the adoption of GM crops: the Jairam Ramesh Report (2010); the Sopory Committee Report (2012); the Parliamentary Standing Committee Report (2012); the Technical Expert Committee Final Report (2013); and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science & Technology, Environment and Forests (2017). India has only legally allowed GM cotton to proliferate and only on the condition that it can protect itself from pests. Glyphosate based herbicides use has been severely restricted to licensed pest control operators and can only legally be sprayed on tea plantations and non-crop lands. However, India being India, enforcement has been lax and illegal Herbicide Tolerant BT cotton has proliferated accompanied by a higher pesticide use. India's dependence on BT Cotton seeds and heavy pesticide use is several decades in the making starting with the replacement of Desi cotton with Gossypium hirsutum and coming to fruition with the widespread adoption of BT cotton in 2005-06. BT cotton entered the Indian cotton market in 1998 through a joint venture between Monsanto and Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company, which became the Monsanto Mahyco Biotech (India) Pvt. Ltd. (MMBT). MMBT illegally conducted open field experiments, without the approval of India's Review Committee of Genetic Manipulation, in the first few years of their existence hand selecting 40 fields across 9 states to grow BT Cotton which has a CRY gene that is expressed through a protein created by a soil bacterium that in theory is toxic to cotton eating pests and requires little to no additional pesticide. It was not until two years later that Mahyco Biotech sought approval for their large-scale field experiments. In 2002 they received approval for 3 out of 4 commercially available transgenic hybrid cottons from the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee.
Since then, GMO shills have routinely claimed that the widespread adoption of BT Cotton is a miracle that has doubled cotton yields in India. However, relative to cotton acreage, which has substantially increased since the early 2000s, cotton yields rose a meager 2.5% from 472 kg/ha in 2006 to 484 kg/ha in 2016. In 2017, the cotton yield per hectare rose 484 kg/ha to 540 kg/ha (a 12% increase) even as the proportion of BT Cotton fell from 92% of all cotton to 83% of all cotton. The largest YTD increases were between 2003-04 and 2004-05 when cotton yields per hectare increased 32% and 18% respectively while BT cotton only constituted 1.2% and 5.7% of all cotton grown. India ranks only 32nd in cotton yield despite having 36-38% of the global area for cotton growing with 90%+ of their cotton being bt cotton; only 10 of the countries ranked ahead of India grow GM cotton.
Greater Resource Constraints of BT Cotton
Between 2006-2016, while yields only increased a measly 2.5%, water, insecticide and fertilizer use increased 2x while the total cost of inputs increased 2.7x.
The widespread adoption of BT Cotton in India has made growing the crop more water intensive. Producing 1 kg of cotton in India requires 22,500 liters of water; in the rest of the world it requires an average of 10,000 liters, while in the US it requires only 8,000 liters of water per kg.
Despite supposedly being genetically engineered to be pest resistant, insecticide use for cotton increased 140% in the decade between 2006-2016 from 0.5 kg/ha to 1.2 kg/ha. Insecticide use had previously declined in the beginning of the century dropping from 0.8 kg/ha in 2002 to 0.5 kg/ha when the proportion of BT cotton had only risen to 37% of the cotton area. Cotton constitutes 55% of pesticide expenditure in the country despite only being grown on 5% of India’s cropland.
Fertilizer use has dramatically increased with the introduction of BT cotton. Between 2006-13, total fertilizer use increased from 1.2 metric tonnes to 2.6 metric tonnes and from 131 kg/ha to 224 kg/ha; this rose to 270 kg/ha in 2015-16. Prior to 2003, fertilizer use had never exceeded 100 kg/ha. Increased fertilizer use does increase yields and predicts most of the variance in yields, but at higher costs; between 2003 and 2013 the cost of fertilizer increased 4.7x while the proportion of bt cotton rose from 1.2% to 93%.
The Pink Bollworm Evolveth
An even larger study, than the one provided by Dr. K.R. Kranthi alone, conducted by Dr. Glenn Davis Stone and Kranthi, collected and analyzed data from 20 years of cotton production and found what has been repeatedly been observed for using past pesticides: industry eventually loses the arms race to natural selection. BT cotton initially proved resistant to both the American bollworm and pink bollworm but the latter evolved resistance to it as the GM crop became more widely adopted. The study also notes that the displacement of native Desi cotton with American Gossypium hirsutum cotton made cotton production more susceptible to Asian pests and made cotton farming more pesticide intensify, which after several years created pesticide resistant pests such as the Australian black worm and white flies. The adoption of Bt cotton initially controlled the proliferation of these specific pests but like every other pest control product brought diminishing returns and required an increasingly higher dose of pesticide, mainly glyphosate based, to control their spread. By 2009, the pink bollworm had evolved resistance to the toxins in bt cotton and the near unanimous adoption of bt cotton in India allowed it to proliferate. BT cotton also had little effect culling cotton leaf worms or sucking pests which also surged with widespread adoption. Perhaps this explains the 140% increase in pesticide used between 2006-2016 from 0.5 kg/ha to 1.2 kg/ha. By 2018, cotton farmers were spending 37% more on pesticides than they had spent during the previous pesticide use peak prior to the introduction of bt cotton in the country.
Kranthi and Stone also note four forms of bias in studies that credit Bt cotton for most or all of the increase in cotton production in both India and globally: 1) selection bias of early adopters being unrepresentative of a group of high producers 2) studies focused on short term outcomes of a few years after adoption rather than long term trends of a decade or more 3) farmers adopt cultivation bias practices placing the more expensive BT seeds in preferential location and allocating more water and fertilizer for these plants and 4) the pro-bt cotton studies ignore other advances in agricultural tech that contributed to higher yields. The pro-BT cotton studies also ignore the drought that had plagued India for three years between 1999-2002 and the fact that sharpest increases in cotton yields occurred before BT cotton had taken over the majority of Indian cotton fields. By 2003 cotton yields had risen 61% yet BT cotton only made up 3.4% of the country’s cotton areas and in 2005 cotton yields rose 90% over their 2002 baseline yet BT cotton was still only 15.7% of the cotton area. The 2007 yields rose 41% relative to the 2004 yields after the majority (81%) of cotton area was Bt cotton, but yields have since stagnated. Estimates of both illegal and legal bt plantings show that the cotton yield curve started before the introduction and widespread adoption of bt seeds and stagnated thereafter on both the state-wide and countrywide level. The only other long-term study of BT cotton found that it contributed to 19% of the yield growth.
BT Cotton Favors Large Corporate Farms over Smallholders
In the decade following the widespread adoption of bt cotton from 2005-06 to 2015-16, the cost of inputs rose dramatically, despite industry claims that it reduced costs, and cotton farming became more capital intensive, which made it more difficult for smallholder farmers to remain in business and compete with conglomerates. Per hectare costs for cotton seeds rose 78%; per hectare costs of pesticides rose 158%; per hectare costs of fertilizer rose 245% and overall production costs rose 143%. Globally, pesticide/herbicide use has increased at almost twice the rate as food production in the last fifteen years than any previous period and most of this growth in demand has occurred in the global south. India in particular has experienced a 250% increase in herbicides since 2005 while China, which unlike India allows GM food crops, has increased herbicide use 2500% over the same period.
Environmental Fallout of Higher Pesticide Use
Higher pesticide not only comes with higher financial costs but higher environmental costs as well. As I noted in (part 5) there is an indisputable spillover effect where pesticides leach into the surrounding ecosystem and even the groundwater. It not only leaches into the surrounding ecosystems, adversely impacting non-target plants, animals and microorganisms but also into their food chain creating nutritional deficiencies and chronic diseases. For glyphosate in particular, the main metabolite AMPA can cause chromosomal aberrations in fish and affect human red blood cells. Glyphosate has also been found to reduce the rate of reproduction and biomass of earthworms as well as the egg laying capacity and hatching process of aquatic animals such as snails and sea urchins. Pollinating insects, which are responsible for maintaining 35% of the global food supply, are particularly vulnerable to glyphosate based herbicides and neonicotinoid pesticides; the former has been found to disrupt the gut biome of bees reducing their ability to stave off infections of parasitic mites while the latter has also been found to reduce the body mass of bees, which also makes them more susceptible to parasites as well as impairing their ability to navigate and remember food sources. A 2013 study conducted by Navdanya found that the time at which pesticides are usually sprayed, in the early morning hours, forces pollinating insects to forage in the afternoon when temperatures are higher, and their motion is less energy efficient forcing them to expend more energy looking for food. The proliferation of BT cotton in particular has also been found to reduce the number of symbiotic microbes in the soil and the enzymes they create, logically reducing soil fertility. A 2012 study published in the Journal of Applied Biological Research found that soils where BT cotton is grown supported fewer microorganisms than soil where non-transgenic cotton is grown. The study found a statically significant decline in both actinobacteria (-17%) and bacteria (-14%) as well as steep drops in acid phosphatases (-27%), phytase (-18%), nitrogenase (-23%) and dehydrogenase (-12%) activities in Bt cotton compared to non-transgenic counterparts. This may explain the 2x increase in fertilizer use per hectare between 2005-06 and 2015-16.