Biotech firms, biotech politics: negotiating GMOs in India

This paper explores the different corporate strategies of firms in the biotech and seed sectors and looks at how they have organised themselves to influence the policy process.

The paper suggests the importance of looking at divisions within capital and the political alliances that firms form as a basis for understanding the ways in which policy choices are framed and decisions taken. It is argued that the public positions of larger biotech and agro chemical companies, seed enterprises and newer start up firms and the associations they belong to relate to differences in their underlying corporate strategies.

Some of the main findings include:

• the extent to which firms are involved in primary research, export their products or require protection for their products helps to determine their political affiliations to the leading industry bodies that are active on biotechnology issues
• associations have distinct patterns of interaction with particular government agencies involved in the regulation of biotechnology products, as well as differing degrees of contact with global industry coalitions
• individual firms, especially larger companies have adopted their own unique and changing approach to policy engagement
• through a combination of material influence, in most cases high levels of institutional access, and in a context in which claims about the benefits of biotechnology are echoed and repeated in influential media, firms have played an important role in the evolving regulatory regime
• smaller actors in the seed sector in India are, as yet, barely involved directly in the current debate about India’s gene revolution: they are not at the frontline of debates about the role of biotechnology in Indian agriculture
• currently the policy agenda appears to be far more influenced by a close knit policy network of biotech entrepreneurs from larger multinationals and successful start up firms with good national and global connections
• whose influence runs furthest will depend on the respective priority that the government attaches to biotechnology promotion as opposed to biosafety protection, or to patent protection as opposed to looser systems of crop protection. It will rest on the perceived role of biotechnology in India’s development trajectory, decisions about which forms of biotechnology development are considered to be most consistent with the national interest, and choices about the appropriate role in this development of foreign investors as opposed to domestic enterprises

[Adapted from author]