Ballari District, India
How is it produced?
95% percent of cotton grown in India is genetically modified Bt cotton. It is significantly more resource-intensive to produce than conventional cotton, requiring comparatively large inputs of water, artificial fertilizers, and chemical pesticides.
Describe the supply chain to the store shelf in Canada:
Canadians primarily interact with cotton in the form of finished goods. In making these finished goods cotton is transferred overland to domestic textile manufacturing centers. India’s transportation capacity is still insufficient, primarily in rural cotton-producing areas.
What is the power balance between the producer and seller?
Bt cotton is the legal patented property of the Monsanto corporation under the WTO’s TRIPS. This gives Monsanto an effective monopoly over Indian cotton production, and Monsanto thus uses this ability to charge fees and commissions on it’s sale. This means that small – Indian producers are now forced to pay if they wish to acquire cotton seed. Seed acquisition was previously cheap or free.
Can you recommend changes to the system to improve the balance?
Barring the total abolition of World Trade Organization, India should move to extract itself from its obligations to the TRIPs regime. Perhaps this can be done by challenging the constitutionality of these laws in the courts. At the local level, community leaders can encourage civil resistance; refusing to pay the exorbitant fees for Bt cotton seed, and seizing the means of production through control over seed distribution centres.
References/Resources:
Aga, Aniket. 2021. Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary
India. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Nizamuddin, Ali M. 2015. “India.” In The Patenting of Life, Limiting Liberty, and the
Corporate Pursuit of Seeds, by Ali M. Nizamuddin, 111-130. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Shiva, Vandana. 2016. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Berkeley:
North Atlantic Books.
Statista. 2023. Leading cotton producing countries worldwide in 2022/2023. August.
Accessed November 6, 2023. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263055/cotton-productionworldwide-by-topcountries/#:~:text=The%20top%20cotton%20producing%20countries,the%20largest%20quantiti
es%20of%20cotton.
Subramanian, Arjunan. 2023. “Sustainable agriculture and GM crops: the case of Bt
cotton impact in Ballari district of India.” Frontiers in Plant Science 1-10.