The diversity of soils, climates, and plants has contributed to a diversity of food cultures across the world. The maize-based food systems of Central America, the rice-based Asian systems, the teff-based Ethiopian diet, and the millet-based foods of Africa are not just a part of agriculture; they are central to cultural diversity. Food security is not just having access to adequate food. It is also having access to culturally appropriate food. Vegetarians can starve if asked to live on meat diets. I have watched Asians feel totally deprived on bread, potato, and meat diets in Europe.
India is a country rich in biological diversity and cultural diversity of food systems. In the high Himalayan mountains, people eat pseudo-cereals such as amaranth, buckwheat, and chenopods. The people of the arid areas of Western India and semiarid tracts of the Deccan live on millets. Eastern India is home to rice and fish cultures, as are the states of Goa and Kerala. Each region also has its culturally specific edible oil used as a cooking medium. In the North and East it is mustard, in the West it is groundnut, in the Deccan it is sesame, and in Kerala it is coconut.
The diversity of oilseeds has also contributed to diversity of cropping systems. In the fields, oilseeds have always been mixed with cereals. Wheat is intercropped with mustard and sesame is intercropped with millets. A typical home garden could have up to 100 different species growing in cooperation.
The story of how the soybean displaced mustard in India within a few months of open imports is a story being repeated with different foods, crops, and cultures across the world, as subsidized exports from industrialized countries are dumped on agricultural societies, destroying livelihoods, biodiversity, and cultural diversity of food. The flooding of domestic markets with artificially cheap imports is stealing local markets and livelihoods from local farmers and local food processors. The expansion of global markets is taking place by extinguishing local economies and cultures.
For Bengalis, Hilsa fish fried in mustard oil is the ultimate delight, and North Indians like their pakoras fried in it because of the unique taste and aroma. In the South, mustard seeds are the preferred seasoning for many dishes. Mustard oil is used as the cooking medium in the entire North Indian belt—the standard oil of Bihar, Bengal, Orissa and East Uttar Pradesh, used for flavoring and cooking.
Mustard, which was developed as a crop in India, is not just useful as an edible oil. It is an important medicine in the indigenous system of health care. It is used for therapeutic massages and for muscular and joint problems. Mustard oil with garlic and turmeric is used for rheumatism and joint pains. Mustard oil is also used as a mosquito repellent, a significant contribution in a region where the resurgence of malaria is responsible for the death of thousands.
There are many other personal and health care uses for mustard seeds and oil, and diverse varieties and species of mustard are grown and used for different purposes.1 During the Deepavali celebration, mustard oil is used to light diya lamps. This is not just a celebratory tradition, but an ecological method of pest control at a time when the change in seasons causes an outbreak of disease and pests. The smoke from the mustard oil used to light the deepavali lamp acts as an environmental purifier and pest-control agent, reducing the spread of diseases that destroy stored grains and cleaning the atmosphere of homes and villages. As these mustard-oil lamps have been replaced by candles made of paraffin wax, an environmentally cleansing festival is transformed into an environmentally polluting one.
Indigenous oilseeds, being high in oil content, are easy to process at small-scale, decentralized levels with eco-friendly and health-friendly technologies. These oils are thus available to the poor at low cost. Hundreds and thousands of artisans are self-employed in rural India by extracting oil from locally produced crops for oil edible by humans and oil cake edible by cattle. The bulk of oilseed processing is done by over 1 million ghanis (expellers) and 20,000 small and tiny crushers that account for 68 percent of edible oils processed.2 The oil extracted through these cold-pressing indigenous technologies is fresh, nutritious, unadulterated, and contains natural flavor.3
Women in the bastis, or slums, usually buy small quantities of mustard oil extracted on their local ghani in front of their eyes. This direct, community supervision over processing is the best guarantee for food safety. Yet these community-based systems of food and health safety were quickly dismantled in the name of food safety in 1998, when local processing of mustard oil was banned and free imports of soybean oil were installed in response to a mysterious contamination of Delhi’s edible-oil supply.
The sudden lack of availability of mustard oil posed serious problems for poor women. Their children would not eat food cooked in imported palm oil or soybean oil, and were going to bed hungry. Being poor, they could not afford to buy the packaged oil that was the only form in which oil was available after the ban on local processors. For although the Chinese and Japanese eat soybean products as fermented foods, in most cultures outside East Asia, soybean products are not eaten. In spite of decades of promotion through free distribution in schools, soybean has not been adopted in India as a preferred choice for either oil or protein.
During August 1998, a tragedy unfolded in Delhi due to a massive adulteration of mustard oil with seeds of the weed Argemone mexicana, as well as other adulterants such as diesel, waste oil, and industrial oil.
Consumption of the adulterated oil had led to an epidemic of what was called “dropsy” and referred to a range of signs and symptoms affecting multiple organs and systems. These included nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal swelling, liver toxicity, kidney damage, cardio-toxicity, breathlessness due to retention of fluids in the lungs, and death due to heart failure. The link between dropsy and adulterated edible oil was first established by an Indian doctor in Bengal in 1926. By early September 1998, the official death toll was 41, and 2,300 people had been affected.
Mustard-oil sales were banned in Delhi, Assam, Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkum, Tripura, and Karnataka. In July, India announced that it would import 1 million tons of soybeans for use as oilseeds, over the protests of citizen groups and the Agriculture Ministry, which challenged the necessity and safety of the imports. Later, free imports of soybeans were instituted. Not only was there no guarantee that these soybeans would not be contaminated with genetically engineered soybeans, the moves profoundly jeopardized the local oil-processing industry and with it the food culture and economy that depended on it.
On September 4, the government banned the sale of all unpackaged edible oils, thus ensuring that all household and community-level processing of edible oils stopped, and edible oil became fully industrialized. The food economy of the poor, who depend on unpackaged oil since it is cheaper and they can buy it in small quantities, was completely destroyed.
The adulteration that triggered these dire effects remains mysterious in origin. First, in the past local traders had adulterated particular brands of oils in remote and marginalized regions to cheat consumers in a way that would go unnoticed; however, the mustard-oil adulteration affected nearly all brands, and India’s capital, Delhi, was the worst-affected region. Such an adulteration triggered an immediate response and could not have been initiated by an individual local trader.
Second, while corrupt traders had adulterated mustard oil with argemone in the past, before the 1998 tragedy, the adulterating agent was never found to be more than 1 percent of the oil. This time, contaminated oil contained up to 30 percent argemone and other agents. The high level of adulteration with argemone and other toxic substances such as diesel and waste oil clearly indicated that the tragedy was not the result of the normal business of adulteration.
According to the health minister of Delhi, the adulteration was not possible without an organized conspiracy. It was done in such a way that it could kill people quickly and conspicuously, and an immediate ban on mustard oil and free import of soybeans and other oilseeds for oil became inevitable. The Rajasthan Oil Industries Association claimed that a “conspiracy” was being hatched to undermine the mustard-oil trade, and felt that “invisible hands of the multinationals” were involved.
During the oil crisis, the Indian soybean lobby organized a major conference, “Globoil India 98,” to promote the globalization and monoculturization of India’s edible-oil economy. The U.S. Soybean Association was present at this conference to push for soybean imports.4 According to Business Line, “U.S. farmers need big new export markets. . . . India is a perfect match.”5
Multinational companies (MNCs) did gain from the mustard-oil tragedy. The ban on local processing has destroyed the domestic, small-scale edible-oil economy. It has criminalized the small-scale oil processor. It has criminalized the small trader. And it has destroyed the local market for farmers. Mustard prices have crashed from Rs. 2,200 to Rs. 600-800 per 100 kilograms.
The dangers of this destruction are tremendous. If traders cannot sell mustard oil, they will not buy mustard from farmers, and farmers will stop growing mustard. This will lead to the extinction of a crop that is the very symbol of Spring. Once mustard oil has gone out of cultivation, even after the ban is lifted on mustard oil, we will be forced to continue an enforced dependence on soybeans for edible oil.
Calgene, now owned by Monsanto, has patented the Indian mustard plant, the India brassica. If India wanted to reintroduce mustard later, it would have to depend on genetically engineered, patented mustard varieties. Farmers and consumers would be dependent on Monsanto for patented seeds of both soybean and mustard.
Such a reliance on imported oilseeds can easily trigger violence and instability. The food riots in Indonesia in the late 1990s were largely based on the fact that Indonesia had been made cripplingly dependent on imported soybeans for oil. When the Indonesian currency collapsed, the price of cooking oils shot up, and violence was the result.
Nor does the destruction of the domestic oil industry ensure greater food safety, as is argued by the government. It is an established fact that U.S. exports are heavily adulterated through what has been called purposeful contamination, or “blending.” The toxic weed parthenium, which has spread across India, has been traced to wheat shipments from the United States.
More significantly, the adulteration of genetic engineering takes place at the genetic level and is hence invisible. Instead of toxic seeds like those of argemone being added externally, genetic engineering in effect allows food adulteration to be done internally by introducing genes for toxins from bacteria, viruses, and animals into crops. Genetic engineering is adulterating foods with toxins from rats and scorpions.
It is estimated that over 18 million acres were planted with genetically engineered Roundup Ready soybeans in 1998. The soybeans are engineered by Monsanto to contain a bacterial gene that confers tolerance to the herbicide Roundup, also manufactured by Monsanto. This soybean has been genetically engineered not in order to improve its yield or healthfulness. The sole purpose of Roundup Ready soybeans is to sell more chemicals for seeds tailored to these chemicals.
The United States has been unable to sell its genetically engineered soybeans to Europe because of European consumers’ demands that such foods be labeled, something that is ardently opposed by agribusiness interests and their allies. According to former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, such labeling would make U.S. exports rot at ports around the world. (A wide-ranging coalition of U.S. scientists, health professionals, consumers, farmers, and religious leaders have filed a lawsuit demanding mandatory labeling.)
U.S. companies are therefore desperate to dump their genetically engineered soybeans on countries such as India. The mustard-oil tragedy is a perfect “market opening.” For while the Indian government lost no time imposing packaging and labeling restrictions on the indigenous edible-oil industry, it has taken no steps to require segregation and labeling of genetically engineered soybeans.
A new soybean-futures exchange has been opened in India. According to Harsh Maheshwari of the Soya Association, the most conservative estimate of its activity is a turnover of $2.3 billion. Some say it will be five times more. The Council for Scientific Research and the Technology Mission on oilseeds have announced steps to promote the use of soybeans for food. Every agency of government in the United States and India is being used by the soybean lobby to destroy agricultural and food diversity in order to spread the soybean monoculture.
While the profits for agribusiness grow, the prices U.S. farmers receive for soybeans have been crashing. Both U.S. farmers and Indian farmers are losers in a globalized free-trade system that benefits global corporations.
In 1921, 36 firms accounted for 85 percent of U.S. grain exports. By the end of the 1970s, six giant “Merchants of Grain” controlled more than 90 percent of exports from the United States, Canada, Europe, Argentina, and Australia. Today, Cargill and Continental each control 25 percent of the grain trade.
Referring to this concentration of power, former Representative James Weaver (D-OR) said,
These companies are giants. They control not only the buying and the selling of grain but the shipment of it, the storage of it, and everything else. It’s obscene. I have rallied against them again and again. I think food is the most—hell, whoever controls the food supply has really got the people by the scrotum. And yet we allow six corporations to do this in secret. It’s mind-boggling!6
The United States is the world’s biggest producer of soybeans, an East Asian crop that is also the United States’ biggest export commodity. Twenty-six percent of U.S. acreage is under soybean cultivation. This production doubled between 1972 and 1997, from 34.6 million to 74.2 million metric tons. More than half of this crop is exported as soybeans or as soybean oil.
The U.S. acreage planted with genetically engineered soybeans has shot up from 0.5 million hectares in 1996 to 18 million hectares in 1998, accounting for 40 percent of the country’s genetically engineered crops.7 It is thus becoming inevitable that conventional soybeans will be mixed with genetically engineered soybeans in export shipments.
In the United States, soybeans are used for cattle feed, fish feed, adhesives, pesticides, plastics, solvents, soaps, paints, and inks.8 Eighty percent of industrially processed foods now have soybeans in them, as European consumers discovered when they tried to boycott foods with Monsanto Roundup Ready soybeans.
Brazil follows the United States in soybean production, producing 30.7 million metric tons in 1997. Argentina is the third-biggest producer. Acreage in Argentina under soybean cultivation has increased from none in the 1960s to nearly 7 million hectares in 1998, with more than half planted with transgenic varieties. India’s acreage under soybean cultivation has also increased from zero in the 1960s to nearly 6 million hectares in 1998.
The soybean trade, like trade in other agricultural commodities, is controlled by six Merchants of Grain: Cargill, Continental (now owned by Cargill), Louis Dreyfus, Bunge, Mitsui Cook, and Andre & Company.10 These companies also control the storage and transport facilities, and hence the prices of commodities.
Not only is the soybean trade controlled by multinational corporations; soybean cultivation is becoming increasingly monopolized through control over the seed itself.
Monsanto has bought up the seed business of corporations such as Cargill, Agracetus, Calgene, Asgrow Seed, Delta and Pine Land, Holden, Unilever, and Sementes Agrocetes. It owns the broad species patents on soybean. A subsidiary of W.R. Grace, Agracetus owns patent on all transgenic soybean varieties and seeds, regardless of the genes used, and all methods of transformation.
Agracetus’s extraordinarily broad soybean patent has been challenged by Rural Advancement Foundation International, a public-interest group. Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin, director-general of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute in Rome, Italy, expressed his concern at such patenting:
The granting of patents covering all genetically engineered varieties of a species, irrespective of the genes concerned or how they were transferred, puts in the hands of a single inventor the possibility to control what we grow on our farms and in our gardens. At a stroke of a pen the research of countless farmers and scientists has potentially been negated in a single, legal act of economic hijack.11
While Monsanto had originally challenged the patent, it has withdrawn the challenge after buying Agracetus.
Monsanto also owns a patent on herbicide-resistant plants. This patent covers herbicide-resistant corn, wheat, rice, soybean, cotton, sugar beet, oilseed, rape, canola, flax, sunflower, potato, tobacco, alfalfa, poplar, pine, apple, and grape. It also covers methods for weed control, planting of seeds, and application of glyphosate (a herbicide). Thus Monsanto controls the entire production process of these plants, from breeding to cultivation to sale.
The Roundup Ready soybean has been genetically engineered to be resistant to Monsanto’s broad-spectrum herbicide Roundup. The three new genes genetically engineered into the soybean—from a bacterium, a cauliflower virus, and a petunia—don’t do a thing for the taste or nutritional value of the bean. Instead, the unusual genetic combination—which would never be created by nature—makes the soybean resistant to a weed-killer. Normally soybeans are too delicate to spray once they start sprouting from the ground. But now, since two of its products—the bean and the weed-killer—are so closely linked, Monsanto gets to sell more of both.12 Monsanto claims this will mean more soybean yields from each crop, but they cannot guarantee it.
From seed to distribution to processing, soybeans are associated with concentration of power. While the oil content of coconut is 75 percent, ground nut 55 percent, sesame 50 percent, castor 56 percent, and niger 40 percent, the oil content of soybeans is only 18 percent. However, textbooks state that “soybean yields abundant supply of oil” and “soybeans have oil content higher than other pulses.”13
Being low in oil content, soybean oil is extracted at large solvent-extraction plants. (Solvent-extraction was first applied in the United States to extract grease from garbage, bones, and cracking and packing house waste.) Chlorinated solvents such as chloroethylene are used to extract the oil.
Food safety is necessarily sacrificed in large-scale industrial processing since:
•the processing allows mixing of non-edible oils with edible oils,
•the processing is based on the use of chemicals,
•processing creates saturated fats,
•the long-distance transport lends itself to risks of adulteration, adds “food miles” in the form of CO2 pollution, and contributes to climate change, and
•consumers are denied the right to know what ingredients have been used and what processing has been used to produce industrial oils.
Soybeans and soybean products are being pushed as global substitutes for diverse sources of foods in diverse cultures. They are being promoted as substitutes for the diverse oilseeds and pulses of India and for cereals and dairy products worldwide. The American Soybean Association is promoting “analogue” dais—soybean extrusions shaped into pellets that look like black gram, green gram, pigeon pea, lentil, and kidney bean. The diet they envision would be a monoculture of soybean; only its appearance would be diverse.
However, even though the promotion of soybean-based foods is justified on grounds of health and nutrition, studies show that this sudden shift to soybean-based diets can be harmful to health. Soybean foods, in both raw and processed form, contain a number of toxic substances at concentration levels that pose significant health risks to humans and animals.
Soybeans have trypsin inhibitors that inhibit pancreatic processes, cause an increase in pancreatic size and weight, and can even lead to cancer.14 In the United States, pancreatic cancer is the fifth most common fatal cancer, and its incidence is rising. The highest concentrations of trypsin inhibitors are found in soybean flour, which is a soy-based product that is not consumed in traditional soybean-eating cultures, which specialize in the consumption of fermented soybean products.15
Soybeans also have lectins that interfere with the immune system and the microbial ecology of the gut. When injected into rats, lectins isolated from soybeans were found to be lethal. When administered orally, these lectins inhibited rat growth.16 Soybeans also contain phytic acid, which interferes in the absorption of essential minerals such as calcium, magnesium, zinc, copper, and iron. Given that deficiencies in calcium and iron are major symptoms of malnutrition in women and children in countries such as India, compromising the body’s absorption of these essential minerals can have serious consequences.17
The most significant health hazard posed by diets rich in soybeans is due to their high estrogen content, especially in genetically engineered soybeans. The devastating impact of estrogenic compounds was highlighted when women born to mothers who took synthetic estrogens were found to have three times more miscarriages than other women and a greater incidence of a rare form of malignant vaginal cancer. Men born to mothers who took these synthetic estrogens had higher infertility levels than other men.18
Since soybeans are being used widely in all food products, including baby food, high doses of estrogen are being consumed by children, women, and men. Infants fed with soy-based formula are daily ingesting a dose of estrogens equivalent to that of 8 to 12 contraceptive pills.19 According to New Zealand ecologist Richard James, soybean products are “unsafe at any speed and in any form.”20 The globalization of soybean-based foods is a major experiment being carried out on present and future generations. It is an unnecessary experiment, since nature has given us a tremendous diversity of safe foods, and diverse cultures have selected and evolved nutritious foods from nature’s diversity.
During the mustard oil crisis in 1998, women from the slums of Delhi, organized by a women’s group called “Sabla Sangh,” invited me to discuss with them the roots of the crisis. They said that “Mustard is our life. . . . We want our cheap and safe mustard oil back.” Ultimately, a women’s alliance for food rights was formed. We held protests and distributed pure organic mustard oil as part of the Sarson Satyagraha, a program of non-cooperation against laws and policies that were denying people safe, cheap, and culturally appropriate foods.
The National Alliance for Women’s Food Rights has challenged the ban on small-scale processing and local sales of open oil in the Supreme Court of India. We are building direct producer-consumer alliances to defend the livelihood of farmers and the diverse cultural choices of consumers. We protest soybean imports and call for a ban on the import of genetically engineered soybean products. As the women from the slums of Delhi sing, “Sarson Bachao, Soya Bhagao,” or “Save the Mustard, Dump the Soya.”
The highest-level political and economic conflicts between freedom and slavery, democracy and dictatorship, diversity and monoculture have thus entered into the simple acts of buying edible oils and cooking our food. Will the future of India’s edible-oil culture be based on mustard and other edible oilseeds, or will it become part of the globalized monoculture of soybean, with its associated but hidden food hazards?
1Some of these diverse varieties include Indian mustard, Brassica juncea; black mustard, Brassica nigra; turnip rape; brown and yellow Brassica campestris; Indian rape; and rocket cross.
2“Conspiracy in Mustard Oil Adulteration,” The Hindu, September 17, 1998.
3Status Paper on “Ghani Oil Industry,” Mumbai: KVIC.
4“Oilseeds Sector Needs to be Liberalized: U.S. Soya Body,” Economic Times, September 22, 1998.
5 Business Line, October 12, 1998.
6A.V. Krebs, “The Corporate Reapers: The Book of Agribusiness,” Washington, DC: Essential Books, 1992.
7Clive James, “Global Status of Transgenic Crops in 1997,” ISAAA Briefs, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Also, Greg D. Horstmeier, “Lessons from Year One: Experience Changes How Farmers Will Grow Roundup Ready Beans in 98,” Farm Journal, January 1998, p.16.
8American Soybean Association, “Soy Stats, 1998.”
10A.V. Krebs.
11Brian Belcher and Geoffrey Hawtin, “A Patent on Life Ownership of Plant and Animal Research,” Ottawa, Canada: International Development Research Centre, 1991.
12Vandana Shiva, “Mustard or Soya? The Future of India’s Edible Oil Culture,” Navdanya, 1998.
13Dr. Irfan Khan, Genetic Improvement of Oilseed Crops, New Delhi: Ukaaz Publications, 1996, p. 334.
14M.G. Fitzpatrick, “Report on Soybeans and Related Products: An Investigation into Their Toxic Effects,” New Zealand: Allan Aspell and Associates, Analytical Chemists and Scientific Consultants, March 31, 1994, p. 5.
15B.A. Charpentier and D.E. Lemmel, “A Rapid Automated Procedure for the Determination of Trypsin Inhibitor Activity in Soy Products and Common Food Stuffs,” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Vol. 32, 1984, p. 908.
16I.E. Liener and M.J. Pallansch, “Purification of a Toxic Substance from Defatted Soy Bean Flour,” Journal of Biological Chemistry, Vol. 197, 1952, p. 29.
17S.L. Fitzgerald et al., “Trace Element Intakes and Dietary Phytat/Zn and Caz Phytate/Zn Millimolar Ratios in Periurban Guatemalan Women During the Third Trimester of Pregnancy,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 57, 1993, p. 725. See also J.W. Erdman and E.J. Fordyce, “Soy Products and the Human Diet,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 49, 1989, p. 725.
18F.A. Kinil, “Hormone Toxicity in the Newborn,” Monographs on Endocrinology, Vol. 31, 1990. See also R.J. Apfel and S.M. Fisher, To Do No Harm: DES and the Dilemmas of Modern Medicine, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
19A. Axelsol et al., “Soya—A Dietary Source of the Non-Steroidal Oestregen Equal in Man and Animals,” Journal of Endocrinology, Vol. 102, 1984, p. 49. See also K.D.R. Setchell et al., “Non-Steroidal Estrogens of Dietary Origin: Possible Roles in Hormone-dependent Disease,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 40, 1984, p. 569.
20Richard James, “The Toxicity of Soy Beans and Their Related Products,” unpublished manuscript, 1994, p. 1.