Genetic rules

The conditional permission granted for the import of genetically modified foods in the new foreign trade policy, unveiled by the commerce ministry in the first week of April, has created more problems than it sought to address on this controversial issue. Such imports will need the approval of the environment ministry's genetic engineering approval committee (GEAC), after going through cumbersome procedures and conducting time-consuming tests, besides furnishing a whole lot of information. To confound matters further, the health ministry has come out with another notification under the Prevention of Food Adulteration (PFA) Act, making it mandatory to suitably label all products, whether imported or indigenous, that are either produced through genetic modification or contain any ingredient or additive made from GM crops.

Together, these two moves have created a good deal of avoidable confusion in the processed foods and edible oil sectors. The first to get hit by these half-baked decisions has been the import of soyabean oil. Of nearly 5 million tonnes of edible oils imported annually to cover the domestic shortfall in supply, about 2 million tonnes are usually soya oil, sourced from countries like Argentina, Brazil and the US""where much of the soyabean crop happens to be genetically modified. As such, it is very difficult to get totally GM-free soya oil in the market. Ironically, even if GM soya oil is imported under a false declaration that it has no genetically modified content, it would be almost impossible to establish such a misdeclaration. That is because oil does not contain any protein, notably DNA, which alone can show whether it contains any GM inheritance or not. In any case, the damage has already been done as the uncertainty created over these imports has sent domestic soyabean oil prices soaring, especially in the futures market, where circuit breakers have had to be imposed in some cases on May soya oil contracts.

In fact, the implications of mandatory labelling of GM (and GM-derived) foods are even more far-reaching than the fairly simply matter of soya oil. Prima facie, it would seem like a good idea to most people that the consumer should be informed when something in the market is a GM product. But the sway of what has been announced by the government's different ministries, in that these are applicable even to food additives, is so extensive that it would apply to almost all processed foods. The range here would be from wines and cheese to breads using GM yeast, and extending to traditional Indian milk products, including ghee, butter and sweets like barfi and rasagulla, if these are made from milk produced by cattle fed on GM cotton seeds and de-oiled cottonseed meal. Since GM cotton is now cultivated extensively in India, and its seeds are widely used as cattlefeed, it would be practically impossible to segregate those products requiring GM labelling from the rest.

It is also worth bearing in mind that if GM labelling is reduced to a meaningless routine""like the statutory health warning that has been on cigarette packets for decades""it would serve little purpose. Thus, the government needs to re-visit this complicated, yet significant, issue keeping in view all the problems that have cropped up. Especially because the decisions that have been taken so far are confined basically to the import and consumption of edible products and do not address the broader issue of import of non-food GMOs, including genetically modified living organisms (LMOs). What is clear is that this whole question needs to be viewed from the perspective of the Cartagena Protocol on the trans-boundary movement of GMOs. Only then will local practices on this subject conform to global norms, as required under international trade treaties.