F

or more than a decade controversy has raged in the world’s media about whether genetically engineered crops are dangerous, as many environmentalists have long claimed.

Yet away from the headlines, a quiet revolution has been unfolding in Asia. In Bangladesh, thousands of smallholder farmers are engaged in successfully growing the world’s first GM food crop expressly developed for poorer countries. Indonesia is not far behind.

Bangladesh’s new crop — a genetically modified eggplant, called “Bt brinjal”, which is resistant to insect pests — is the “GMO” that anti-GMO activists don’t want you to know about. Opponents of genetic engineering technology insist that GMO crops are unsafe for human consumption and also result in more pesticide use.

They also claim that GM seeds do not reproduce and that farmers have to go back to seed companies year after year, making them powerless and beholden to multinational corporations.

Yet Bangladesh’s Bt brinjal gives the lie to all these assertions. The Bt gene added to the eggplant comes from a common soil bacterium, already used for decades by organic farmers as a spray. Bt kills caterpillars that otherwise devastate the crop, but is a completely harmless protein as far as humans are concerned. It is also safe for other insects, so protects the wider ecosystem.

Crucially, this biological and natural pest control allows farmers to drastically reduce their use of toxic insecticides — a huge benefit, as Bangladeshi eggplant growers are accustomed to spraying insecticides 80 or more times in a single season.

This has devastating impacts both on farmers’ health and the surrounding environment, with thousands of pesticide poisonings per year, sometimes with fatal consequences.

Environmental groups ought to be strong supporters of Bt brinjal. After all, some of the poorest farmers in the world have had their livelihoods drastically improved, and the application of toxic insecticides has been reduced by 80 to 90 percent.

But so deep has anti-GMO ideology embedded itself in the DNA of today’s green movement, that leading voices are unable to admit to any success for the technology they have vilified for so long.

Instead, Bt brinjal has been subject to a smear campaign in the Bangladeshi press with loud and baseless claims that the crop is poisonous, aimed at scaring farmers away from growing it or consumers from eating it.

As an environmentalist, I found myself despairing that a movement I have believed in for so long could have become so corrupted. The only beneficiaries from the anti-GMO campaign are the pesticide manufacturers, who would otherwise lose markets as farmers spray less insecticide.

Although Bangladesh’s government has so far stood up to the intimidation campaign, neighboring India quickly folded in the face of a fanatical campaign of opposition, banning Bt brinjal in 2010. The ban remains in force today.

In the Philippines, Greenpeace and other groups persuaded the Supreme Court to issue a prohibition order on Bt brinjal in December 2015. The court’s decision has just been reversed, but valuable years have been lost — years in which farmers growing the crop have continued to be dependent on the very insecticides environmentalists claim they are against.

What happens in Bangladesh is especially important because many other developing countries are watching closely. Here in Indonesia GMO crops have been on go-slow because of government inertia, but a genetically-engineered drought-tolerant sugarcane has already been such a success that a high-level Indian team came to visit to assess the potential for Indian cultivation.

A blight-resistant potato, drought-tolerant rice and virus-resistant tomato are also in the pipeline. All technologies have upsides and downsides. It would be foolish to assert that GM crops will always be good whatever the circumstances. But it is equally foolish to insist — as so many activists do — that they will always be bad.

And it seems particularly unjust when the benefits from scientific progress are denied to the very people who could benefit from them most — poor, smallholder farmers. Indonesian farmers can look at those in Bangladesh and push Jakarta to take a more pro-active approach.
______________________________

The writer is an environmental writer and pro-science campaigner. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Cornell Alliance for Science at Cornell University, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.