The extreme recommendations of the technical expert committee (TEC)?appointed by the Supreme Court of India to look into the adoption of biotech-enhanced GM crops?are disturbing to say the least. A halt in the field trials of biotech-enhanced seeds and crops, and even more surprising a recommendation that herbicide-tolerant crops (HTC) are unsuitable for India, suggests a viewpoint that is far divorced from reality.

The issue of HTC deserves a special mention. HTCs allow the farmer to combine the benefits of chemicals to manage weeds while leaving the main crop healthy. Weeds steal nutrients from crops, causing huge losses to productivity, sometimes as high as 40-50%. The importance of effectively managing weeds cannot be understated.

Farmers in India, for the most part, employ labour to clear their fields of weeds and it is a common misconception that this labour is abundant and cheap. Farm labour accounts for about 50% of the total input cost of cultivation. The migration of labour to urban areas, their engagement in non-farm activities, and the government?s employment guarantee schemes have severely affected labour availability for agricultural operations. This has resulted in an exponential increase in the cost of farm labour throughout the country. Some findings indicate a 125% increase in the cost of farm labour in the last eight years. Farmers in Punjab are reported to incur a cost of R2,200 for planting an acre of paddy?up from R1,200 just a year ago.

All this points to one thing: cheap and abundant labour in rural India is a great myth. Farm labour in India is neither cheap nor abundant as it is being made out to be.

Farmers too deserve access to technologies which reduce their excessive reliance on farm labour. Herbicides offer options of better control of weeds at an affordable cost with reduced requirement of labour. The use of herbicides in India is currently low, but it has seen a steady increase over the years.

The TEC has argued that the size of an average farm in India is small, and such technologies are more suited to large acreages?this is totally untrue. Seed-based technologies are scale-neutral. The fear of development of ?super weeds? as a result of potential risk of flow of pollens from HTCs to close relatives in the wild is not applicable in all cases. For instance, such risks in the cultivation of herbicide-tolerant soybean and maize are not anticipated as they have no close relatives in the wild. Also, resistance is natural and evolutionary, and innovation in the sciences continues to keep us ahead of or rise to the challenges of the day. Hence, denying this technology to our farmers is unjust.

The adoption of HTCs is among the fastest-growing agro-technologies in several countries of the world, as the area under cultivation of such varieties is expanding by 15-20% annually. This is also leading to conservation agriculture-based farming systems, resulting in reduced costs and improved soil health. It is unfortunate that the Indian farmers are being deprived of such innovations in modern science due to some unfounded apprehensions. Agricultural scientists in general and weed scientists in particular have no doubt in their mind that adoption of such approaches will definitely contribute to the livelihood security of farmers and help in bringing about a second green revolution in the country.

The TEC?s recommendations are anti-science and anti-farmer. The government should move ahead with full steam, create access and develop biotech products for use by farmers. India?s vast intellectual capital in agriculture, its vibrant private sector and government agencies should all contribute towards spurring research in biotechnology for benefiting farmers.

The author is the president of the Indian Society of Weed Science. He is the also a former director of an ICAR institute on Weed Science Research and is currently working at ICRISAT, Hyderabad. Views are personal