: Several multinational seed companies in India have grouped to form a new seed association, which marks a split among seed companies engaged in the research and sale of genetically modified seeds in India.
Though the reasons for the split were never made explicit — even at a press conference convened on Friday to announce the newly-registered Federation of Seed Industry of India (FSII) — they stem from differences among seed companies that have come to boil over the past year, on still-evolving government rules on how contracts, royalties and intellectual property agreements ought to be drawn between seed companies that held licenses over certain technology and those who were recipients.
The dispute majorly deals with Bt cotton, the only transgenic crop commercially permitted in India. Since 2002, when Bt cotton became legal, it has benefited 75 lakh farmers and buoyed the cotton industry from Rs. 450 crore in 2002 to Rs. 4,000 crore in 2015, according to independent estimates. This has been amidst reports on pests — which Bt cotton technology targeted — becoming resistant, and a near-dominance of Bt cotton-tech supplied by Monsanto Mahyco Biotech Ltd. (MMBL), even though at least eight other alternative Bt technologies have been developed by other Indian partnerships.
The FSII includes multinational companies such as Monsanto India, Bayer Crop Science, DuPont Pioneer, Dow Agrosciences and Syngenta, and Indian companies such as Mahyco and Namdhari seeds, which are involved in developing hybrid seeds for rice, wheat, jowar, bajra, cotton, maize and several vegetables.
Part of another body onceMany of these companies, including Monsanto India, were once part of the National Seed Association of India (NSAI), another industry group.
Differences emerged after NSAI earlier this year said Monsanto and its technology partner Mahyco ought to be compensating farmers for losses that farmers registered in Punjab due to damage to Bt cotton.
Moreover, NSAI, led by Prabhakar Rao, Managing Director of the Hyderabad-based Nuziveedu seeds and once the most important licensee of the Mahyco-Monsanto combine, has supported a controversial order — passed in May by the agriculture ministry but later withdrawn — that said seed technology companies were bound to license out their know-how to whoever requested it, for a fee that didn’t exceed Rs. 25 lakh.
Reduction of tech feesMoreover, NSAI has said, companies were bound to reduce their tech fees every year and couldn’t charge seed companies if they didn’t meet certain performance parameters. Crucially, NSAI holds that legally genetically-modified seed varieties aren’t patentable in India and so, by extension, MMBL couldn’t enforce a patent on its Bt cotton technology.
The 49 seed companies, who have licensed Bollgard technologies from MMBL, now provide farmers with 95% of the cotton in India. Monsanto is separately fighting court battles with Nuziveedu Seeds, a former licensee, on royalty payments.
FSII, and that includes Monsanto, while proffering comments sought by the agriculture ministry for fresh technology-licensing guidelines, holds that the Indian Patent Act makes recombinant DNA and protein sequences — the essence of MMBL’s technology — patentable, and therefore valid intellectual property.
“If the real time implementation of IP acts is not in harmony with industrial policy…it will lead to discouragement of research,” the organisation told the agriculture ministry.
Monsanto and Mahyco didn’t refer to Nuziveedu Seeds or their differing positions on seed technology laws in India when announcing the creation of FSII but averred that a new body was necessary so that “like-minded seed companies who are committed to the seed business, IP creation, IP protection” had a platform. “A market economy should be prevalent,” said Raju Barwale, Managing Director, Mahyco, “and that should be done through a transparent policy.”
Kalyan Goswami, Executive Director, NSAI, said he couldn’t fathom why a new federation was needed. “There’s already an Association of Biotech-Led Enterprises which has all these companies…we are confident that we’ve got the law right. Monopolies can’t be permitted in Indian agriculture,” he told The Hindu.
