In the lush forested uplands of Koraput, Domu Matpadia, a Paraja tribeswoman, is coming face to face with modern farm technology. A representative of Charoen Pokphand, a Thai agribusiness multinational, is telling her how to grow its hybrid maize seeds that the state government has given her free along with a kit of fertiliser and pesticide. The seeds that she cradles in her palm with wonder are the key to a plan that Odisha has drawn up to get its farmers to give up their traditional rice cultivation in the uplands and take to hybrid maize instead to boost income.
Matpadia grows traditional varieties of white maize which, with rice, is one of the staple foods of her community. But the promise of windfall profits from yellow maize tickles her fancy. “We don’t eat this yellow stuff but I know it fetches a good price in the market. So I will give it a try.”
Odisha has used a special stratagem to kick off this scheme. It has deployed part of the Second Green Revolution funds announced by the Centre in 2010 to put together a public private partnership (PPP) to promote hybrid maize. In collaboration with Monsanto, Mahyco, Charoen Pokphand and four other companies, the state managed to cover 30,000 hectares (ha) with hybrid seeds last year by offering marginal and small cultivators, mostly tribal folk, seed kits that are adequate for an acre (0.4 ha). This year another 40,000 ha are coming under the wonder cereal.
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For Moga, the fertilizer and pesticide that he has been given along with the seed is a novel concept. He has never used these before. And so is the attention and advice he is getting from extension workers. He has never encountered such people before. These are young men who have been hired by Monsanto to ensure that its seeds are sown right and treated right. In Odisha, it is an army of well-paid non-governmental organisations that are assisting the agriculture extension officers to hand-hold first-time maize growers. Cost: Rs 1 crore to monitor 40,000 ha.
Maize cultivators have traditionally trusted nature to bring in the harvest for them. For the most part, they simply scatter the maize seeds, whether in the arid cracked plains of Rajasthan, the forest belt of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat or in the higher altitudes of Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, and leave it to the rain gods to do the rest. Hybrid maize, however, comes with its own demands: line sowing, neat spacing and application of right amounts of fertiliser and pesticide at the appropriate times. Says Girija Bhusan Mohanty, deputy director of agriculture in Jeypore block of Koraput: “From time immemorial these people have grown rice and maize in their own way, so it is difficult for them to make the transition to modern methods without supervision.”
What explains this massive mobilisation, this attention to detail that is reminiscent in some ways of the Green Revolution? The answer is that another revolution is in the making, but one formulated and directed by the private sector. Maize is the fastest growing cereal in India today, but scientists believe its true potential is yet to be realised. Productivity is among the lowest in the world, although in terms of output it ranks sixth in the world (excluding the 27 EU countries). The increasing production has come on the back of expanding acreage and not on any gains in productivity. Since 2001, yield has remained in the two-tonnes-per-ha groove, give or take a few decimal points. By global standards this is dismal. Jordan has notched 20 tonnes/ha and Chile 11 tonnes, but these are insignificant players in terms of production. The world’s largest producer and exporter, the US, weighs in at 10 tonnes per ha and that remains the benchmark.
Ask the scientists why yields have not budged in the last decade, and they say the reason is poor seed replacement rate. “Just 20-30 per cent of the maize area is under hybrids. The rest of the farming is with open pollinated varieties (OPVs),” says R Sai Kumar, chief of Directorate of Maize Research (DMR), the country’s top maize research institution. OPVs are naturally occurring plants whose seeds can be reused unlike hybrids which need to be bought for every fresh planting. Interestingly, it is mostly in the non-traditional maize areas such as the southern states that hybrids have thrived.
This is where the first wave of the golden invasion washed up over a decade ago. “Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh knew nothing of maize,” points out Sai Kumar. “Yet it is these states, primarily Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, which have the highest average productivity in the country.” Hybrids found ready acceptance here without any nudge from the administration, in all probability because the huge demand for the cereal allowed farmers to invest in high-cost seed and other inputs. The poultry industry and the livestock feed units are concentrated to a high degree in the south and about half the maize output disappears into the maws of chicken feed industry.
In many ways the story of maize has reflected the pushes and pulls of India’s fast developing economy: the astronomical growth of the poultry industry and in a lesser degree the starch industry, the notching up of global records in production while research in agriculture lagged woefully, the slow assimilation of tribal communities into the mainstream, changing dietary habits of a burgeoning middle class that is eating more eggs and chicken, and above all, a lack of direction in agricultural programmes that has allowed agro-biotech multinationals to influence policy.
The major push for the maize fields to keep expanding is the poultry industry. India is among the top five egg producers in the world (57 billion annually) and the ninth largest producer of poultry meat. With the assembly lines for broilers revving up ever more every year and turning out 42 million birds a week, the pressure from this industry, which contributes an estimated Rs 45,000 crore to the national income, is fuelling investment in maize cultivation.
Such pressures will accelerate in the wake of campaigns by the National Egg Coordination Committee to raise egg consumption of Indians from the current 53 per person annually to 180 by 2015.
The problem is that neither research nor incentives to improve the performance of maize have kept pace. In the Ninth Five Year Plan there was the Accelerated Maize Development Programme to transfer modern crop production technology to maize-growing states (26 in all) and later, ISOPOM (Integrated Scheme of Oilseeds, Pulses, Oilpalm and Maize). But with outlay of just Rs 36.36 crore for the entire Tenth Plan (2002-2007), it hardly made any impression. Allocations have risen slowly—it is Rs 65.6 crore for the current year—but the spread is thin and states complain that not much headway can be made. Now some states spend as much as Rs 39 crore on a single PPP and claim the diffusion is far more effective.
The most significant turn in maize development, though, came in 2006 when a noted crop developer with the Haryana Agriculture University (HAU) took over as the DMR head. Sain Dass made a drastic change at this institute under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research as soon as he took over. He stopped all research on OPVs—such as those still used in many tribal belts and can be reused unlike hybrids —and shifted the focus to single-minded research on single cross hybrids (SCHs) at DMR and its 30 affiliated research centres.
“There was no real research going on. I just gave it a new thrust,” says Dass who now heads the powerful industry body, the Indian Maize Development Association that brings together research scientists, maize growers and user industries to promote maize.
The problem with OPVs is that the yields are pretty low, around three tonnes per ha, whereas SCHs post an average five tonnes. “Can you imagine what our production would be if we can get all of India under hybrids?” demands Dass. Under his encouragement HAU has entered into agreements with a domestic company to produce the hybrid seeds developed by the research institute on payment of a nominal royalty. DMR is expected to follow suit soon.
Dass believes such seed production deals would enable the public sector to make a dent in the hybrids market. which, he says, is majority controlled by Monsanto, Syngenta and Pioneer. In the long run, though, he says, there is no option but to plump for genetically modified seeds.
Dass’s maize obsession is what industry, particularly the poultry sector, would like to encourage. With demand growing at an estimated eight-10 per cent annually, the chicken breeders find themselves pitted against starch makers and exports.
R Ramakrishnan, head of grain procurement at the Rs 3,200-crore Suguna Poultry Farms, complains that maize prices have been surging in Tamil Nadu because of exports (minor so far). The company is one of the largest poultries in India and needs 100,000 tonnes every month and says it has been hit by price spikes since December 2010.
On the other hand, Sakthi Feeds, a livestock feed manufacturer in Vennandur, Tamil Nadu, grumbles that maize has been hard to come by for two years because industrial starch manufacturers are using more maize and less of tapioca.
As for the starch industry, it feels that it is being forced to cough up more because of competition from the big hatcheries. With a corn grinding facility of 2,000 tonnes annually, the industry would have to import maize if the price spiral continues, according to the All India Starch Manufacturers’ Association. But this has in no way affected revenues of starch units because, association president Vishal Majithia says, there has been surging demand from their own customers.
The economics of this crop are such that governments pay little attention to its growing appetite for land—and the crops it replaces. In the past decade, maize has overrun 1.65 million ha that belonged to other crops, according to DMR. Among these are winter pulses, kharif cotton, rabi rice, specially in Andhra Pradesh, and spring wheat in the north. Maize, because of its versatility and resilience, is seen as the crop of the future when climate change will increase the abiotic stresses. To food sovereignty campaigners, however, maize is a serious concern (see ‘Killing millets’).
It has been swallowing up millet fields, and the acreage under hardier cereals such as jowar and bajra, and undermining the food security of the poor, warns P V Satheesh, national convenor of the Millet Network of India. Small and marginal farmers, “lured by the aggressive support of the state are likely to switch more and more to maize cultivation, abandoning their traditional millet-based biodiverse farming systems”, he worries. In June, out of the blue, Andhra announced an input subsidy of Rs 5,000 per acre for maize farmers although they had not sought it. Clearly, maize mania is only increasing.
When representatives of the world’s largest seed company, Monsanto, began to make discreet visits to the second floor offices of the inconspicuous Van Bandhu Kalyaan Yojana in the Gandhinagar headquarters of the Gujarat government in 2007, it set in motion a process that would transform Indian agriculture in unexpected and significant ways. Maize farming in the most backward recesses of the country would change forever, with tribal populations giving up their traditional seeds for the world’s best-known Dekalb brand of hybrid maize (corn) and age-old methods of pesticide-free cultivation giving way to the industrial model of farming.
The key to Monsanto’s ability to win governments and influence policy is simple. It looks at key entry points in a given situation and offers a solution that promises something larger than just seeds: it talks of “commitments on sustainable agriculture to produce more, conserve resources and improve farmers’ lives”, as an official spokesperson puts it. Take the Gujarat example. Van Bandhu Kalyaan Yojana is the Tribal Development Department (TDD) of the state and it was with this unlikely department that Monsanto, the American giant with profits of US $1 billion last year, inaugurated a private partnership (PPP) that is now being replicated across the country. Monsanto gave away free its Prabal and Hishell seeds to farmers in two districts—and thus captured a larger share of the Indian market than its rivals. It was a brilliant move when Monsanto told TDD that it shared the department’s vision of improving the lives of tribal people; the 10-point agenda included doubling of farmers’ incomes in five years, and the seed giant promised it would foster these objectives through Dekalb hybrids.
It was not seeds alone that Monsanto gave away. It also provided fertiliser (in a tie-up with Gujarat State Fertiliser Corporation), threshers and other inputs along with market linkages by getting the poultry feed and starch manufacturers to explore the possibility of sourcing from these areas. This, in fact, is a hallmark of the way Monsanto operates, arranging partnership—with private agriculture service companies, industry and NGOs—and offering a complete package to farmers.
The genesis of its maize partnerships with government is instructive. It started in 2007 as a pilot study named Project Rainbow—a similarly named exercise has just been completed in Jammu and Kashmir—that saw Monsanto give away free seeds to farmers in 300 villages of 13 talukas in Dahod and Panchmahal districts of Gujarat. Monsanto had the full backing of TDD and the department of agriculture, which speedily approved its hybrids as appropriate for this area of poor rainfall, and the district administrations. Result: it showed that farmers had doubled their income to Rs 6,500 from using their hybrids, whereas they got just Rs 3,300 per acre (0.4 ha) from the open pollinated varieties (OPVs). Indian farmers use OPVs for the most part and the seed replacement is extremely low.
Once Rainbow had shown the potential and promise of hybrids, Monsanto upgraded it to a full-scale PPP called Project Sunshine, which has spread substantially, covering five districts and over 200,000 farmers.
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The usual way can involve some pretty interesting methods. In Himachal Pradesh, a senior agriculture official revealed that Monsanto officials had taken a tractor trolley in Dolla village in Solan district’s Nalagarh block to sell their hybrid maize seeds without informing the agriculture department. Says an outraged D R Thakur, an official with the state agriculture department, working in Nalagarh block: “According to the Essential Commodities Act, seeds are to be sold through licensed shops. But today you can see hybrid seeds being sold everywhere—in a local general store in a village or a chemist shop, all without a licence.”
Thakur says the Nalagarh office had complained to the higher-ups in the agriculture department about the Monsanto incident. But inquiries revealed that this has become a common practice in Himachal Pradesh in the past year with seed companies offering home deliveries. In Bihar, it is learned that some multinationals are actually paying farmers to use their seed. “If the farmer gets a good yield then he will start buying from the company,” explains an extension worker.
The PPPs appear unstoppable as farmers report increasing yields. But food sovereignty activists and others campaigning for sustainable agriculture warn of the pitfalls that lie ahead. Kavitha Kuruganti, convenor of Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture (ASHA), says a fundamental problem is that maize continues to be classified as a food crop in official statistics even though it is an industrial crop (only 25 per cent goes for human consumption). ASHA is an informal national network of more than 400 organisations, which has undertaken fact-finding visits to the tribal belts of Gujarat, Odisha and Rajasthan.
The visits revealed at least three factors come in the way of hybrid maize enhancing food security of poor tribal farmers. One, they do not like consuming hybrid maize and are gradually moving away from maize consumption—this has been borne out by surveys conducted by the National Institution of Nutrition at Hyderabad and field visits by DTE—once hybrids enter the picture. Farming households report that the taste is not good and that they cannot digest it easily (even their animals do not like hybrid maize fodder, they report). The bigger worry is that hybrid maize is grown as a mono-crop which eliminates many other nutritious crops, such as vegetables, that were part of the earlier pattern of farming when people were growing their own maize varieties.
“If one must absolutely promote maize, due to reasons like water crisis in rice-wheat pockets, there is no reason why OPVs cannot be encouraged. The Directorate of Maize Research has released more than hundred OPVs. If the same kind of investment is used here as in the PPPs, productivity is bound to increase,” says Kuruganti.
This is the point that Thakur also makes. The seed companies, says the official, have cashed in on the deficiencies of the agriculture departments in almost every state. “It is not very difficult to get yields of 1.2 tonnes per acre (0.4 ha) even with OPVs. All that’s needed is an understanding of how to pick the best seeds and the same set of good management practices,” agrees Thakur, warning that “hybrids may give better yields initially but soon enough their yields will stagnate as everyone knows.”
The irony is that for all the crores of rupees that are being pumped into hybrids, desi or traditional white maize is fetching a higher price in several parts of the country. In Nalagarh, farmers declare they will not easily switch to hybrids despite the blandishments of seed companies. For one, the new seeds are expensive, and for another, they need inputs which are even more costly.
Budh Ram, a farmer in his seventies, who is struggling with the contradictions and confusion brought in by the new technology, points out, “The hybrid maize seed is far costlier than the seeds we use. Yet, traders pay much higher prices for our traditional varieties. We have just sold our makka (corn) at Rs 1,200 per quintal (100 kg) but hybrid maize fetched only Rs 1,000.”
All that Ram is certain of in these perplexing times is that maize is the right crop for him to grow rather than rice—“the water table is declining sharply and makka requires very little labour.” Besides, marketing is no problem since traders come to his doorstep and save him as much as Rs 1,800 on trips to the market yard. The hybrids obviously have not won the war yet.
Are hybrids always a precursor to a genetically modified (GM) version of the crop? In the case of maize, both the champions of GM and the opposition believe GM maize is round the corner.
Currently, four multinationals are conducting field trials of GM maize in India. Monsanto India Ltd is way ahead with its insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant maize (a hybrid with two stacked genes) in the final lap of biosafety tests. This is BRL-II, or biosafety research level trial II, which calls for tests in eight to nine locations in different agro-climatic zones.
Three other companies, Pioneer Overseas Corporation, Dow Agrosciences and Syngenta Biosciences, all top multinationals, are also in the race. They are in BRL-I which are limited— fewer locations—trials conducted over a two-year period. Pioneer’s is a stacked event similar to Monsanto’s, while the other two are just insect-resistant.
Maize scientist Sain Dass, who is president of the maize lobby, the Indian Maize Development Association (IMDA), is pretty clear that GM maize is absolutely necessary to “increase production and productivity and to save marginal farmers from the high cost of agriculture”. Dass, who was earlier director of the public sector, Directorate of Maize Research in Delhi, was in the news when he attacked the government for withdrawing Monsanto’s BRL-II trials in Samastipur, Bihar. That rule was made by then minister of environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh after Chief Minister Nitish Kumar complained about the trial taking place without his knowledge.
“The spread of GM maize has always been preceded by the aggressive promotion of maize itself so that farmers once trapped in maize cultivation can be easily moved to GM maize. This is exactly what happened with cotton,” says P V Satheesh, director of the Hyderabad-based Deccan Development Society, who has been in the forefront of the fight against GM crops. Globally, maize is the largest GM food crop and occupies more than 25 per cent of the area under biotech crops.
Kavitha Kuruganti, convenor of ASHA, strikes a similar note. “When the shift to hybrid seed happens in this crop, the demand for pesticides and fertilisers goes up. What’s more, companies like Monsanto are waiting in the wings to bring in herbicide-tolerant GM maize which would ensure two markets for them—that for herbicides and seeds.”
But unlike Satheesh who views the GM cotton episode as a nightmare, IMDA believes that repeating the Bt cotton story with maize would “rightfully put India on the world map”. As the two camps slug it out, Monsanto is finding little to comfort itself with at the moment. Of its five trials for rabi in 2010-11, only one has taken place while there has been no movement on the nine kharif trials approved by regulator, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee. Under the new rule, Monsanto has to get clearance from the states before trials can be conducted in their jurisdiction. This is a setback for Monsanto, which, according to a 2009 presentation, had hoped to release its insect-resistant hybrid in 2012, followed by one for drought tolerance in 2014-15, nitrogen use efficiency in 2017 and yield booster in 2018-19.
But in the wake of the new March rule, mandating state clearance, these targets have gone for a toss. GM maize, it seems, will be a while coming.