India's cotton crops pay the price as gains of technology get squandered

Raw cotton imports in the first six months of 2024-25 were more than exports. This is happening for the third time in six years, and occurring with increasing frequency.

From being a net exporter of cotton for 18 of the past 20 years, there is a strong likelihood of India becoming a net importer again.

Crop production in 2024-25 is projected at about 29.5 lakh bales of 170 kg, a low level touched twice in the past 10 years. The latest three-year average also shows a decline in output of about 3 lakh bales from the peak seen in the three-year-period ended 2013-14.

What led to this

Variations in crop output among other things occur due to changes in weather patterns, denigration of a technology that was effective in checking the menace of cotton boll borers, poor regulation, judicial skepticism, vilifying technology providers and whimsical price and royalty controls.

Cotton yield per hectare is about 100 kg less than it was 10 years ago, and the cost of cultivation is rising.

Much of this can be attributed to the resurgence of pink bollworm, which bores and lodges inside cotton bolls, beyond the reach of pesticides, and destroys and discolours them.

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Farmers have tried novel methods like female sex scent dispensers which confuse male moths and reduce egg production and the insect population. An acre of cotton with 6,000 plants would require 160 dispensers. The farmers do not fancy them because they are time- and labour-intensive.

Making cotton plant tissue lethal to bollworms with bacterial toxins implanted in their cells through genetic modification is far more effective. The larvae are killed at the incipient stage before they can cause any harm.

The controversies

Seeds with two versions of these toxic traits were approved in 2002 and 2006 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, respectively, were the Prime Minister.

Thereafter genetic modification (GM) technology ran into controversies as environmental activists, a prominent agriculture scientist and Manmohan Singh’s environment ministers opposed it in his second term. The pattern continued during the Narendra Modi regime.

As the pink bollworm rampaged, there was pressure on the government to bring in effective technology. The company that had withdrawn the application in 2016 resubmitted it in 2022, but the deal fell through.

Price controls were imposed on the seeds that contained the toxic traits. Initially, they were necessary to check price gouging, but eventually, it got distorted as Indian franchisees draped in the cloak of nationalism sought to fix the American multinational that licensed the traits.

Pink bollworm attack

The government slashed the trait fee or royalty in 2016. As a result, the company that had the technology and was on the verge of commercialising it withdrew its application from regulatory authority, fearing its business could turn unviable.

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So, when there was a resurgence of pink bollworm due to the bugs developing resistance to the genetic toxins, there was no commercially available technology to check them.

The technology would have made cotton plants toxic to the American and pink bollworms and also tolerant to a widely used herbicide. This would have brought down the cost of cultivation and also increased output by averting pest-induced losses.

Supreme Court intervention

As the pink bollworm rampaged, there was pressure on the government to bring in effective technology. The company that had withdrawn the application in 2016, resubmitted it in 2022, following feelers from the government.

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But it has not received the necessary permissions and will miss the cotton planting season this year, too. Four other companies are also in the fray.

The split Supreme Court judgement on GM crops, specifically the approval given for the cultivation of GM mustard, delivered in July last year, was not helpful either. While one of the judges found no legal infirmity in the approval process, the other held the decision hasty, lacking in transparency, in violation of public trust and arbitrary, therefore vitiated.

Ignoring farmers’ interests

Some of the judge’s reasons impinge on policy, which is the domain of the executive, but others reveal how a decision that should be strictly scientific was caught in the ebb and flow of ideological and political currents, inviting the judge’s censure.

Lawmakers, as people’s representatives, are supposed to listen to various shades of opinion and arrive at decisions that are in the national interest.

In this case, activists with little at stake have got the better of farmers, who have been forcefully agitating for the elusive pink bollworm and weed control technology.