The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

india: the seeds of suicide 303study, we saw the disease in only a few Bt cotton plants. But it spread overtime, and now it can be observed in many Bt cotton fields that are beginningto contaminate non-transgenic fields. Personally, I think there is a bad interactionbetween the receiving plant and the gene introduced into it. It causesweakness in the plant so that it is no longer resistant to rhizoctonia.”“Generally,” Sakkhari went on, “Bt cotton is not resistant to stress conditionssuch as drought or heavy rains.”“But,” I said, “according to Monsanto, sales of transgenic seeds are constantlyrising in India.” 24“That’s what the company claims, and overall it’s true, even if the figuresit presents are hard to verify. But the situation can in large part be explainedby the monopoly it was able to establish in India, where it has become verydifficult to find non-transgenic cotton seeds. And this is very worrying, because,as we found in our second study, the promise that Bt cotton would reducethe use of pesticides has not been kept; quite the reverse.”Insect Resistance to Bt Plants: A Time BombThe agronomist showed me the results of the second study, covering the2005–6 season. While in 2002–3, the year following the introduction of Btseeds, the use of insecticides was slightly lower for transgenic plants thanfor conventional cotton, three years later the “great promise” had been definitivelyburied: pesticide expenditures were on average 1,311 rupees peracre for conventional cotton growers and 1,351 rupees for their Bt counterparts.“This result did not surprise us, and it can only get worse,” Qayum explained,“because any serious agronomist or entomologist knows very wellthat insects develop resistance to chemical products designed to fight them.The fact that Bt plants constantly produce the insecticide toxin is a timebomb that we will pay for one day, and the cost may be very high, both fromthe economic and the environmental point of view.”In fact, the prospect that cotton (or corn) parasites would mutate by developingresistance to the Bt toxin was raised even before Monsanto put itsGMOs on the market. In the mid-1990s, the strategy the company adopted,in agreement with the EPA, was to have growers of Bt plants agree by contractto preserve plots of non-Bt crops, called “refuges,” where normal insectswere supposed to proliferate so that they would crossbreed with their