Talking Biotech 043 - Indian Farmer Suicides

I want to see science serve a useful purpose to improve the standard of living for all people. Hey, why is anyone fighting food advance? A very small percentage of the world's population is fortunate enough to have the luxury of turning down food. We've arranged a society based on science and technology in which Because nobody understands anything about science and technology. You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.

You're listening to Talking Biotech, a weekly podcast illuminating issues in agricultural and medical biotechnology. Your questions and concerns are addressed using a science-based approach with the goal of driving discovery to application with communication.

Now here's your host, Welcome to the Talking Biotech podcast, where innovations become application with communication. I'm your guest host, Kavin Sanapathy. Today on Talking Biotech, I'll be talking to Ronald Herring, Professor of Government and International Professor of Agriculture and Rural Development at Cornell University, about the myths and truths of suicides in India. Now, I have a personal connection to India. I was born in Washington, D.C., where my dad worked at the NIH, and my parents immigrated to the U.S. from South India a few years before I was born. And I grew up traveling there every couple years, and I still go there regularly. Last time I went was 4 years ago, and we got to celebrate my daughter's first birthday there with family. And we're going again this summer, and I hope to meet with a few farmers if time allows and maybe even visit Tamil Nadu Agricultural University. And, uh, and you'll all have to wish me luck because flying that far with a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old, I'm thinking I'll drug them with Benadryl with my doctor's approval. But anyway, uh, enough about me. To help me with the discussion today, we have joining us from Gainesville, Florida, co-host Kevin Folta. Thanks for joining us.

Hey, yeah, great, great to be on. Great to be flying this from the, uh, Copilot seat. Pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah. And thanks for thanks for having me in the pilot seat.

I like this. I I like it a lot because it's kind of fun. Well, it's fun to listen to someone else do it, and then I kind of just sit here and hang out, and you know, this pretty cool. So yeah, sounds great. Thank you very much. Well, we talk about India and Indian suicides. Do you speak Indian?

I speak Tamil. So that's that's funny because um yeah, you might be referring to our our friend. And Vani Hari's reference to the fact that her name means voice in Indian, and there really isn't any such language. There are quite a number of languages in India, and I speak Tamil, one of the South Indian languages.

No, I just had to throw that in there. I thought you'd like that. So very good.

I did. So, um, yeah, so we're going to talk about the Indian suicide, the myths and truths of Indian farmer suicides. And a lot of that, that myth is around Bt and Bt cotton. So can you tell us a little bit about Bt and how it works?

Bt is a protein that's naturally found in certain bacteria. And this bacterium named Bacillus thuringiensis is a soil bacterium you find everywhere that makes this protein when it gets stressed. And this protein is toxic to certain caterpillars. They figured this out a long time ago. It actually is a— was a very popular segment of the podcast here that when you look at, I think it was number 28 with Fred Perlach, discussed how Bt worked and what it was. And it's a fascinating story, but Bt when consumed by a caterpillar kills the caterpillar. And instead of having to broadcast this compound onto your crops like they do in organic production, you can actually have the plant make its own protection. And this is a brilliant idea, especially in places like India where a lot of the insect control measures were old-school chemicals applied frequently by children with no personal protective equipment. So this was a real boon to the Indian economy in many ways. At least as reported by peer-reviewed literature. And Dr. Herring is the expert here. I'm just throwing in my 2 cents. But let me just talk about BT. It's safe. You don't have the mechanisms that make it toxic, just these insects, insect larvae. So it's, it's a wonderful way for plants to protect themselves. And certainly there are limitations and drawbacks like anything, but in general has been a very beneficial thing for Indian farmers.

Yeah, you know, I just saw a graphic going around Yesterday, and it said— and this is pretty common— but it said something to the effect of, BT is in the plant and it makes insect stomachs explode, so imagine what it's doing to us. And you hear that a lot.

Yes, you do. But imagine what it's doing to us? It's doing nothing. It's a protein that's digested and turns into nutrition. So you're, um, it works in the insect stomach because it binds a specific protein like a lock and key in the gut of those insect larvae. And it works really well. The mechanism is very well described. It causes these transmembrane proteins or these proteins that, that work across membranes to cluster together and make a pore where the inside and the outside of the gut can mix. And that causes septicemia in the insect and the insect dies. And, you know, in practical application, we don't use this down here in Florida, sweet corn, or in any of our— at least most of it. And you can tell the fields that have it and the fields that don't. Some are very— get hit pretty hard by insects. And the BT, you require many fewer sprays of insecticide to manage those insects. So it's been a really good thing for farmers in general. There is resistance that's occurring. You can find that there's some very strong resistance that's coming up in places down here that's, that it's almost useless in some cases. But in general, it is a very good, very good product.

Alright, well, let's go over to Dr. Herring and, and hear from him about this. Today on Talking Biotech, we'll be talking about the myths and truths of farmer suicide in India. And with us today, we have Ron Herring, professor of government and international professor of agriculture and rural development at Cornell University, and faculty for the interdisciplinary major biology and society. So welcome, Ron, and thanks for being here.

Thank you.

So tell us a little about yourself. You're a social scientist. So how did you get interested in genetic engineering, Bt cotton, and farmers in India?

Like many things in life, it's purely serendipity. I was going to a conference for memorializing an agrarian activist in Palakkad district in Kerala. And I worked in that district. And so we were all supposed to speak on a podium. And I asked my good friend Vasudevan, what are you going to talk about? And he said, I will describe the Terminator technology and the threat to India. And I said, Oh, Vasudevan, don't embarrass yourself. This is a hoax off a Canadian website, and there are no Terminators. There are no Terminator genes. And this is all a kind of a social movement narrative. So don't embarrass yourself. He talked for 45 minutes about this. And he's a friend, and he's an economist. So I became fascinated with the question, how does a fraudulent story begin to have enormous impact? It was actually a news story. New agriculturalist movement in the district organized around protection from the Terminator technology. This was the Karsaka Samrakshana Samiti, to protect the farmers from this Terminator technology. So I got interested, and then I started discovering that actually farmers were already using the technology. They were already creating their own stealth seeds underground. So that's how I got kind of dragged into it. A social scientist is always interested in what kinds of forces move society and what kinds of forces— ideas as opposed to material forces. So that's how I got in.

Well, I'm thinking considering he was a friend that he took that well, I hope.

Yeah, yeah. But it is true that This is one of those issues that bitterly divides people. It's like in the United States now, increasing polarization of politics. I've lost a lot of friends in India who have decided that I've become a shill for Monsanto because I've reported that yields on Bt cotton farms are pretty good and farmers appreciate the technology. But saying that has made me a lot of enemies in India, which is It's a little strange if you think about it.

Right. It's almost like a fundamentalist belief. So why is biotechnology associated in common media reports, films, and NGO press conferences with suicide? How can that happen?

Well, it's— there's a tight narrative, and it's a plausible narrative if you don't know a lot about agriculture. or a lot about rural India. It starts with the globalization, widespread anxiety about globalization, in which multinational firms controlling intellectual property dominate people in other parts of the world. And for India, this has meant that Monsanto came in with a terminator technology that forced farmers to buy their seeds every season instead of saving their seeds in the natural pattern, or what was perceived to be a natural pattern Right. Of seed saving, they had to buy seeds every year. And through that Monsanto could charge whatever price they wanted to. It was a monopoly. As the seed prices went up, farmers needed more and more credit. As they needed credit, they accumulated debt. The debt became worse because the technology failed. There were lots of reports of bolt, sort of the bulbs wilting, seed rot, Failed Harvest. Lots of published material on the failure of Bt cotton, which meant that a technology that was very expensive, run by a monopoly outfit, was failing the farmers. They accumulated debt and they had no exit but suicide. It was a very persuasive narrative. I mean, it was so persuasive that there are a number of films that have won international awards with titles like Cotton for My Shroud. You know? And in fact, India entered in the Academy Award sweepstakes as best foreign film a thing called Peeply Live, which was a film about farmer suicides. And it was— the film was a comedy. When I asked people to get it to play on campus, they said, Ron, are you out of your mind? You can't have a comedy about farmer suicides. I said, watch it. It's great. And, you know, it's nominated for an Academy Award. But it's about 2 brothers who are deeply in debt, and they hear that the government will give them 2 lakhs of rupees— that's 200,000 rupees— if anyone commits suicide in the family. So the 2 brothers have to decide who's going to commit the suicide, so then they can solve their problem of debt for the family. And this, of course, gets involved with NGOs, with the media, with people from New Delhi coming down to solve the farmers' problem, the local development people. It's a truly great film. But it centers this question of how one incident of threatened farmer suicide causes a huge national media fest.

I guess the— there is, at least from my understanding, a little bit of truth in this, in that you can't control certain factors that inspire cotton to grow well, so that when you had crop failures, you could frequently tie it to a lack of monsoon monsoonal rain or predictable rain patterns where you don't have irrigation. And that, that was part of the problem with the debt.

Well, you know, this is a pretty complicated story. But it certainly makes sense that people in debt commit suicide. And indeed, a lot of the public policy responses have been, well, if farmers commit suicide because of debt, we have to either write off the debts or Punch more credit into rural areas on easier terms. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think farmers need more credit because it helps them assuage risk. But at the same time, the debt narrative doesn't have a lot of evidence behind it. In some work at Brookings, Shamika Ravi has recently shown that only 5% of the suicides that she counts So debt is not a major factor in the suicides that we have evidence for. Here's a critical methodological point, though. We know that the numbers at the national level can't be very good. People aren't going to report all the suicides unless there's some incentive to. And you don't want to get mixed up with the government unless you have to. So we don't know how good the numbers are nationally.

But we And do know that in Ontario, then the numbers are very high.

secondly, how do you attribute causality to a suicide? So the debt argument, when we raised this question with farmers in Varengal, they first said, you really shouldn't be asking this. It's not nice, it's not right. How dare you come here and ask us a question like that? We said, well, it's in the newspapers. People talk about it in the cities. People talk about it in London and in America. So we're curious. And they said, so what do these urban people think our character is, that when we get in trouble we would commit suicide and abandon our family, that we would desert our family for the easy way out? What do they think of us? I mean, it was a— they were angry about this. And so I think that narrative is equally plausible, that most people would not leave their family with huge debts by committing suicide. So it's a lot of complexity around the fact that we don't know why people commit suicide almost by definition, because they're gone. So there have been studies in Indian states. Why have farmers committed suicide? Because this became a kind of a national issue. And studies in Karnataka and Punjab found that the reasons for farmer suicide were not agrarian crisis or debt. Or if debt, they were often debts from gambling or dowry. So there's a— again, it's hard to attribute causality. But a lot of the deaths seem to be a result of depression, alcoholism, gambling debts, family problems. And those kinds of tragedies that all over the world cause people to take their own lives. So it's a tragic story. But it's not clearly that farmers are always in debt when they do this. As a farmer said to us, we're always in debt. We don't always kill ourselves.

Well, it's a really interesting point. There's a lot of— I heard a farmer recently up here say, it's the only job where you work 400 hours a month and lose money every year and hear that people think you're trying to poison them. But, but I wish I had that quote exactly Right. But could you give us a little bit of a sense of what the industry looks like in India? What are these farms like? Big farms, little farms?

Well, it's a, it's a mix. The average, the average size of cotton farm in India is well under 1 hectare. So we're talking about very small farms, sort of 2.5 football fields, but somewhat less than that. There are larger cotton farms, but not all that many. You wouldn't find many cotton farms over 10 hectares in India, if you'd find any. And farmers typically have mixed production patterns, so cotton is one of their crops, and they often follow it with some other crop in the other seasons. So, mostly small farms, a lot of it using draft power and plows of the very traditional sort, like you see on National Geographic films. Some tractor power in some areas. Tractors are often rented rather than owned because it's an expensive piece of equipment. So it's not highly mechanized. All of the picking is done by hand— almost all of the picking is done by hand, unlike, say, the United States. And that has one very important consequence. The genetic variation of your cotton seeds doesn't matter nearly as much. If you have a 1,000-acre field You want all of your cotton to mature at exactly the same time, because you're going to run a cotton picker through the fields mechanically. In India, farmers don't mind so much if they've got a staggered yield, because they're picking it by hand anyway, and it sometimes alleviates a certain amount of labor pressure. So a lot of hand labor, a lot of animal power. And before the Bt period, in 2000, India had the lowest yields in the world in cotton, but they had the largest acreage in the world. So this was a massive investment in cotton, but extremely low yields. When the first Bt cotton came to India illegally— I mean, I mean, nobody knew that it was there. This was the stealth Bt cotton that came in Gujarat in 1999. And nobody knew about it for about 3 years. 2001, there was a bollworm rampage that just wiped out the hybrid cotton in Gujarat. But if you looked around, you'd see sort of an acre and a half of green and white, or half an acre of green and white. And, of course, the—

Right.

The government didn't know what to do about this. The NGOs didn't know about it. But Maico, which is the partner of Monsanto, PCR'd this cotton and said, wait a minute, this is transgenic cotton. Not only is it transgenic, it's our gene. So— Yeah, right. So they got Delhi to come down hard on the firm that had created this stealth cotton. This is, this is Nafbarat Seeds. Now, what's interesting about that is that even though Vandana Shiva and everyone else says that there are patents, that that's how Monsanto crushes farmers with patents, actually patents of course are national, not international. And there was no patent on Bt cotton. Not for Monsanto, not for anybody. And the crackdown on Nafbarat Seeds was because they violated the national biosafety regulations. That is, they didn't go through the testing to have their Bt cotton certified through the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee in New Delhi. And I asked, I asked D.B. Desai, the CEO of this tiny firm, so why didn't you just have your stuff approved by the guys in Delhi? And he said, Ron, look at our office. We don't have labs. We don't have lots of scientists. We don't have lots of money. It took Maico Monsanto nine years to get approval for their crop. How how could we possibly do that? He said, so what we did, we registered it as a hybrid in the state of Gujarat. States control agriculture in India, so it's registered as a hybrid that is especially resistant to bollworms, and we started selling it. And it sold well and everybody liked it.

Aww.

Yeah. But it wouldn't have been discovered. It would not have been discovered had that bollworm rampage not wiped out all of the non-Bt cotton. I mean, usually bollworm rampages, they're sort of localized, and sometimes they have tremendous devastation, sometimes not so much. But this was just a year of tremendous devastation, so the Bt cotton stood out as being healthy when everything else was dead. So New Delhi cracked down on D.B. Desai. They took his passport. They registered a case against him. And so naturally, now that Navbharat 151 was off the market, the only stealth Bt cotton, farmers started creating local versions of this. And these became— these were the kind of They— it was called in Gujarati variants. So these were the variants from Navarrete 151. And unlike the Mahiko Monsanto varieties, of which there are only 3, they were— they had these, these really boring names like Mech 162 and Mech 184, Mech 12, you know. And the underground seeds, when the local farmers were breeding from taking sort of a male plant that had the transgene, crossing it with a local female plant that was a good yielder in that particular agroecological zone. They crossed these things and they had wonderful names like Agni for fire or Lakshmi for wealth or Rakshak for protection or Maha Rakshak for great protection. So they had these fantastic underground varieties that had better names. They were cheaper than the official seeds. And they did very, very well. So for the first 4 or 5 years, the illegal seeds in many areas were much more common than the government-approved seeds from Mayekel Monsanto.

That is, that's really interesting. And I've been hearing some similar stories now about BT, illegal BT Brinjal being smuggled in. And I guess that's a whole other story, but I'm following that with I'd love to have somebody nail down some information about this.

I know a former member of the GEAC who's told me, of course it crossed the border. Because, I mean, Bangladesh, neighbouring Bangladesh has this. And these are varieties. These are not hybrids. So they should breed true. You get the seeds across the border from Bangladesh. It's not hard to get things across the border from Bangladesh to Bengal, which is India's largest Brinjal-producing state. So it shouldn't be difficult to do that. And we know that this stealth seed business globally is huge. So when Pakistan was claiming to be GMO-free, there were 5 different events with Bt cotton growing in Pakistan in about 40% of the area. Some from India, some from Australia, some from the United States. They just came from various places. But they weren't Same thing with Chinese Bt cotton and so on. So one would guess this is a single gene, Cry1Ac, in varieties should breed true, and there should be no problem either with creating hybrids or just using the varieties that grow in sort of East Bengal in West Bengal. But do you have evidence for this? I'd love to hear about this.

Yeah, no, I'm looking into it, but I've heard stories of farmers talking to each other and trying to get a hold of the stuff. So, we'll talk about that offline later.

I'd love to, because we all hear the stories. I just don't know of any evidence, and I've asked lots of scientists that were breeding the varieties, and they disagree about how easy it was to take the seeds out of the Sure.

So, you know, going back to suicide, is there any evidence for the charge that Bt cotton is responsible for an epidemic of suicide? And I mean, the word epidemic, is there an epidemic of farmer suicides, I guess, as opposed to suicide in the general population? And then what's the evidence linking Bt cotton to whatever farmer suicides there are?

Before I answer that, you asked me about the structure of the industry. We got diverted by the fact that this stealth seed was discovered, Navarat 151 was shut down, Navarat as a company was shut down. Let me just finish that story really quickly. The early expansion of Bt cotton in India was underground. Lots of illegal varieties, dozens of illegal varieties across the whole country, but especially in Gujarat and in Andhra Pradesh. Over time, by 2006, seed prices dropped dramatically through state action. The second gene was added, so there's a stacked seed technology to guard against 2 different varieties of bollworms. The new Bt hybrids with herbicide tolerance then became the stealth seeds, and they are being expanded as fast as the farmers can make them. They're all illegal, but it's the same guys that were making the illegal Bt cotton now making what's called Flex Bt, which is the stacked Bt genes with the herbicide-tolerant gene. So this early expansion was largely illegal. Seed prices fell. By now, between 94 and 98% of the cotton in India is Bt. So there's tremendous expansion of acreage. Just between 2009 and 2012, 3 million hectares of cotton was added, almost all of it Bt. And over the last 15 years we've had a huge increase with Bt of production, yields, exports, farmer income. India has gone from being a net importer of cotton for its large textile industry, to being a net exporter on a very large scale. 2012, 2013, it was the second-largest exporter of cotton in the world next to China. It is now, 2015, the largest cotton producer in the world. So the whole sector has been transformed from import dependence to export strength, with increases in yields, exports, farmer income. And second, I should mention, too, while we're on the subject, there is an organic cotton sector in India. It can be very profitable, because there are niche markets for organic cotton in Europe especially. But one should be a little bit careful, because the only study done of organic cotton exports suggested that about half of the farmers who were growing organic cotton were using Bt seeds.

Wow.

They just weren't applying chemical fertilizers or synthetic pesticides. So— and in fact, I've heard the logic of these farmers, and their logic is, no, no, no, no, the plant protects itself. We are not doing violence to the bollworm. If the bollworm leaves us alone, we leave the bollworm alone. If he bites my plant, he dies. But I wouldn't spray him with an insecticide and kill him. It's only if he attacks my plant. He bites it, he dies, and everybody's happy. I grow my plants, the bollworm pays for his sins, you know, and the great cycle of reincarnation, he comes back as something worse than a bollworm, whatever that is.

That, that's fascinating.

It is, it is interesting.

Well, it's heartwarming that somewhere on this Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

And I mean, I think that the critical distinction here that is missing from the whole GMO debate is most farmers and most consumers have never thought about how does a trait get into a seed, you know? How does that happen? And so this construction of a GMO is a very complicated process. Is sort of a macro-level thing with no mechanisms in it. So for farmers, they're not asking about how the trait is induced in the plant. They want to know, does it have long staple or short staple, early flowering, late flowering, you know, strong stalks, weak stalks, drought-resistant, not drought-resistant, the things that matter for their production technology. And the Bt gene, by providing a lot of insect resistance, is tremendously useful to them. And that's why, you know, well over 90% of the cotton in India is Bt. But it's that particular trait. It's just one trait, which makes it remarkable that there's so much international brouhaha about adding one trait to hybrid cotton, since all hybrid cottons have some mix of different traits.

All right. Well, that's a good place to leave off. We'll take a break here, and when we come back on the other side, we'll talk about more about the, the suicide myths and facts and how cotton and Bt cotton have impacted or not impacted that.

Grandma, don't touch that radio! Hi, Talking Biotechers, this is Vern Blazek, the Vern Blazek Science Power Hour, and booth announcer for the Talking Biotech podcast. We're moving into our 40-somethingth episode, and we get lots of requests for an interview with Dr. Folta himself. What makes that dude tick? How is that cat wired? We'll explore the deep crevasses of his soul in Talking Biotech episode 40. Episode number 50. So, you might recall that I interviewed him on my podcast, the Vern Blaytheck Science Power Hour, with your host, Vern Blaytheck. It was considered by some a raging case of non-transparency, by those who wanted to cash a check with a manufactured scandal. It was so much not a story that we're going to Let's do it again, only using your questions! If you have a question you'd like me to ask Dr. Folta, send it to my attention at talkingbiotechpodcast@gmail.com. I'll assemble all of the questions and grill that turkey with my interview for episode 50. He's a scientist, he's a thespian, and I'm a I'm the hard-hitting booth announcer that's glad to ask the hard questions. Let me know what you'd like to know. And now back to the Talking Biotech Podcast.

And we're back on the Talking Biotech Podcast where we're talking about the Indian farmer suicide myths and facts and Bt cotton. And we're talking to Professor Ron Herring from Cornell University. So Ron, is there any evidence for the charge that Bt cotton itself is responsible for an epidemic of suicides? And is there an epidemic of farmer suicides in India as opposed to suicides in the general population?

No. Actually, there isn't. By international standards, suicides in India are relatively low and relatively stable. There's been a slight decline in recent years according to the National Crime Record Bureau, which is the only aggregate data we have. And I said before, no one's totally happy with the level of accuracy of the data, but it's the only data available. And in recent years, farmer suicides are about 9 per 100,000. That's how we measure The propensity of people to commit suicide. So the suicide rate is what's critical, because that tells us whether or not groups are especially prone to commit suicide or not. And the farmer rate is now about 9 for every 100,000. That's lower than most groups in India. Think about it this way. The farmers represent a very small percentage of the population— I mean, a very large percentage So the larger groups are things like housewives. They've also been declining a bit in recent years, but they are much more responsible for suicides than are people in rural areas. Also, independent businessmen tend to have higher suicide rates than farmers. The lowest suicide rates in India are those of urban workers. Government servants, not surprisingly, and retired people. Government servants presumably because they face no anxiety and crisis in their lives. They've got an iron rice bowl. So the idea of a farmer suicide epidemic is really not based on anything empirical. So the kind of immediate reaction to the BT cotton causes farmer suicides was work in the Journal of Development Studies and also work by IFPRI, which showed pretty clearly that even though the incidence of BT cotton adoption was increasing at a very steep rate, the actual numbers of suicides were not increasing at a massive rate. So there was simply no correlation between farmer suicides and the adoption of Bt cotton. And indeed the very highest suicide rate is in Kerala, where essentially no cotton is grown. There's no relationship between the states that have the highest suicide rates, statistically. There's just no relationship between states with high suicide rates and those that are growing any particular crop, whether it's cotton or anything The only person that doubts farmer suicides, Vandana Shiva, has said that before the Green Revolution there had been no farmer suicides. Like, that we had this kind of long-term stable relationship to the soil in which farmers never had crises and never committed suicide. Indeed, it was the Green Revolution that caused farmer suicides.

Right.

1998 that the first farmer suicides became of international importance before Bt. And these were hybrids, hybrid cotton in the areas where there was some kind of contagion, small-scale contagion of farmer suicides. And so it became kind of a mantra from 1998. 2000, Vandana Shiva and her colleagues wrote a book called Seeds of Suicide. And the seeds of suicide were those brought in by globalization, multinational corporations, modern technologies in agriculture which were causing the suicides. So there was, that link was started before there was actually Bt cotton. But of course when Bt cotton came there was a kind of a mixture of hybrids, Bts, all kind of mushed together in one concept which was defined by modern agriculture. And that was held to be responsible for Now, the easiest way to— you can look at the peer-reviewed literature, it's very clear. But also if you just take a look, the only 2 states that have higher-than-average suicide rates are Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. And yet they are not particularly distinctive in terms of their cotton, either their farmers or their yields. Most cotton farmers in places like Gujarat. You never see anything about suicides in Gujarat. So there's a kind of disjuncture between, at the macro level, between where are the suicides in India and where is the cotton grown, and where is the cotton grown at what level. And in Maharashtra we find that it's actually the richer farmers. So if the narrative about farmers desperate, in debt, failing, committing suicide were true, You wouldn't find it being the larger farmers who had a higher rate of suicide than the poorer farmers. But that's what the facts are. And then at the micro level, I just want to say something about going from macro, which is very complicated— these ecological analyses are always kind of problematic. The micro level, the debt story just doesn't wash. The seed prices are a relatively small percentage of the cost of production in India. And the cost of production per 100 kgs of cotton, sort of what does it cost you to produce 100 kgs of cotton, is much lower with Bt than with alternatives. The alternatives, of course, are spraying pesticides continuously throughout the season, which is very expensive. And the bugs have adapted to the pesticides, so you're spending a lot of money on chemicals that are harmful to people and to birds and toads and everything else. But are not particularly useful for killing off bollworms. So there are numerous studies showing that by lowering the cost of production of a given quantity of Bt cotton, farmers are better off whatever is happening to cotton prices. It's a cash crop, always risky. Whatever's happening to cotton prices, or droughts, or floods, any confounding factor you can think of that would make cotton yields go up or down, or total production go up or down, you're better off growing Bt cotton, according to these studies, than you would be if you didn't have Bt cotton, 'cause your cost of production is lower per unit of output.

You mentioned Vandana Shiva. She's probably the most popular vector for the whole GMOs are killing Indian farmers story. And interestingly enough, she happened to write a Rather fact-scarce hit piece about me a few months ago, which I didn't know whether to be upset or entertained about that. But anyway, people adore her. When she gives talks calling GE crops suicide seeds and modern ag techniques, quote, structural violence, audiences latch on to every word.

So can you talk a Yeah, it's a really interesting question. We talk about this all the time, those of us who are interested in India and politics and biotech. It's a great question. I've sort of been enlightened by the phenomenon of Donald Trump in the United States. He's utterly untethered to facts. He's unconstrained by any facts. He can say anything he wants to and his followers stand steadfast behind him, contrary to all of the elites within his own party and contrary to all the news coverage and the social media coverage showing that he's making absolutely outrageous claims. Now, Vandana Shiva is exactly like that. And so the question is, I think, first of all, I think there are kind of authenticity rents, this kind of indigeneity. I don't know how many people have told me, well, you can say that, but you're not an Indian. Well, that's true. I mean, that's true. I mean, George Bush was an American. That doesn't mean he knows a lot about American agriculture. So this kind of indigeneity, you wear a sari, you're sort of associated with the soil, with her Navdanya organization. Also being feminist has a huge role in this. a talk in Sri Lanka where these young women came up to me afterwards. They were upset that I'd said something about Vandana Shiva had missed some point or the other. And they said, sir, you must realize she is as a goddess to us.

Right?

Wow.

And so she does have this kind of larger-than-life celebrity status. And this is not a completely uncommon phenomenon. You think about the spread of Scientology, which had a lot of Hollywood with stars attached to it. Or I think about the anti-vaxxer movement in the United States where people claim that vaccines cause autism and actually has public health consequences. These things were also led by celebrities. And the celebrity status of some of the people involved in this allowed them to disseminate. Robert De Niro now I think is at the centre of a controversy about this. So there is a phenomenon. Of celebrity, authenticity, and there is deep discontent about globalization and modernization of agriculture. The organic food phenomenon, for example. People want a simpler life in which they're not at the mercy of large forces and technology that they find unsettling, partly because they don't understand it, but partly because technology has in fact often created unexpected disasters. So it's very difficult to produce a counter-narrative to the kind of authenticity and indigeneity and the reaction to globalization discontent and anxiety that Vandana Shiva represents. And she's very good at it. She's very, very good at it.

She is really good at it. I once wrote a piece discussing why I think, especially as an Indian woman, and I also consider myself a feminist, how she has essentially succeeded at appropriating her own culture and got some backlash about that, about how I should talk about the science and not accuse her of something as bad as cultural appropriation.

I completely understand what you're saying.

you're saying.

And it's— but I don't think we have anything specifically about— but it would be a great article to write. I guess you've seen Michael Specter's piece in The New Yorker about it. I did.

I wrote an article essentially talking about how she has appropriated her own culture, or Indian culture.

I'd be really interested to see that because everybody asks me this question and I don't have a good answer except that in most spheres there are these kind of cultural brokers or what I call epistemic brokers. That is, Vandana Shiva tells us that people are committing suicide and it becomes part of a global network transferred through these transnational advocacy networks. And it becomes— it gets picked up by media all over the world. So this is— in fact, the reason we were in Varengal was asking questions about this report that the sheep were dying of the Cry1Ac. They ate the leaves of Bt cotton and then they died. And so there was this international uproar about the dead sheep. So we went to find out what was going on with these dead sheep, and of course it It turned out to be a hoax. The body disappeared. The autopsy results disappeared. Nobody could find the shepherds that had the dead sheep. I mean, it was one of these mythologies that became an international myth. But these things do crop up in almost all fields. So we have people who deny the landing on the moon. We have people who think that the Israelis caused 9/11. There's a tremendous amount of this kind of myth and rumor-making in the international social sphere. And of course it's become worse with the internet, because we have these cocoons, these information cocoons. And once you're in a network that has the cocoon, you don't hear the other side of stories. So those people listening to Kevin's podcast may well be in an information cocoon in which they hear my take, but not Vandana Shiva's take. So I think, and I think that has segregated all of us into networks that make a common understanding of the world very, very difficult.

Well, thank you, Dr. Herring. This has been a great discussion. We've covered so much great stuff, but it's going a bit long. Why don't we stop here for today and we'll pick up on the next installment of Talking Biotech.

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