Use of herbicides in India
- The Union Agriculture Ministry recently limited the use of the well-known pesticide glyphosate. This issue arises as a result of the Supreme Court’s upcoming hearing on a petition to outlaw all herbicide-tolerant plants, including transgenic hybrid mustard and cotton, on November 10.
About glyphosate:
- Weeds that compete with crops for nutrients, moisture, and sunlight can be removed with the help of herbicides like this one.
- Farmers either aggressively eradicate weeds by hand or use herbicides because they essentially grow at the expense of crops.
- Broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate is effective against both grassland and broadleaf weeds.
- It also kills the majority of plants because it is non-selective. It inhibits the growth of an enzyme called 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase when applied to their leaves (EPSPS).
- Only plants and bacteria can synthesise the EPSPS enzyme, which is essential for growth in both microorganisms and plants.
Glyphosate use in India:
- The Insecticides Act of 1968 permits the use of nine glyphosate-based formulations with various chemical strengths.
- These are typically advised for usage in non-crop areas including playgrounds, train tracks, and tea gardens.
- Farmers often use glyphosate to get rid of weeds from irrigation ditches and bunds to boost water flow and foot traffic. Additionally, weeds that are growing on bunds serve as hosts for fungi that disperse diseases like rice sheath blight.
- However, because glyphosate is non-selective, its use is frequently restricted. The pesticide is designed to destroy all plants that come into touch with it since, in most cases, it cannot tell the difference between crops and weeds.
- As a result, it is suitable for use in tea or rubber plantations but not in fields where the crops and weeds are almost the same height.
What specific actions has the government recently taken?
- The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare released a statement saying that the usage of glyphosate raises issues for both human and animal health.
- However, rather than outright prohibiting its usage, it has just “limited” it. After that, only “pest control operators” may use glyphosate and its derivatives.
Why did this initiative come to an end?
- As a non-selective herbicide, glyphosate’s use in common agricultural crops is already constrained.
- Since the advent of genetic modification (GM) or transgenic technologies, glyphosate use has skyrocketed.
- Agrobacterium tumefaciens, a soil bacterium, was used in this instance to create the “cp4-epsps” gene, which was then inserted into agricultural plants like cotton, maize, and soyabean.
- This foreign gene produces a protein that prevents glyphosate from attaching to the EPSPS enzyme. The aforementioned GM crop may “tolerate” the application of the herbicide because it just eradicates weeds.
- 5 million hectares of HT GM crops were planted globally alone in 2019. GM crops account for almost 45% of the $9.3 billion global market for glyphosate.
- The only GM crop now grown commercially in India is bt cotton. This has the two foreign genes “cry1Ac” and “cry2Ab” that are present in the Bacillus thuringiensis soil bacteria. These genes produce proteins that are lethal to tobacco caterpillars, spotted bollworms, and American bollworms.
- Approximately 39 million Bt cotton packets with 450 g of seeds each were sold during the 2022 kharif planting season at the permitted maximum retail price of Rs 810/packet.
- Five million more packets of “illegal” GM cotton seeds would reportedly be sold for between Rs 1,100 and Rs 1,350 each, according to industry projections.
- Illegal manufacture of HT cotton: These seeds contain the glyphosate-tolerant “cp4-epsps” gene together with two Bt genes that give insect resistance and HT features.
- The illicit HT cotton farming has not been stopped by the federal or state administrations.
- They clearly understand the advantages of using glyphosate and producing HT cotton given the high expense of manual weeding and the scarcity of labour when needed.
- After failing to stop the illegal seed trade, the government is trying to stop it in its tracks by limiting farmers’ access to glyphosate and limiting its usage to pest control professionals.
How well-founded are health worries about glyphosate?
- The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization categorised glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in March 2015.
- However, this was based on evidence of “pure” glyphosate-caused cancer in laboratory animals rather than actual human exposure to diluted formulations (which is how the chemical is actually sold and used).
- The US Environmental Protection Agency, on the other hand, claims that there are “no dangers to human health” and “no proof” that glyphosate causes cancer. A “much larger and more relevant dataset” backs up its conclusions.
- The Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee of the Union Environment Ministry gave its permission for the commercial distribution of the GM hybrid mustard created by Delhi University on October 18. (GEAC). This crop can also withstand being sprayed with the non-selective herbicide glufosinate ammonium, which is similar to glyphosate. The GEAC will also make a decision about the openly acknowledged unlawful growing of glyphosate-tolerant Bt cotton.
