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Lost in Translation? Domesticating Global Policy onGenetically Modified Organisms: Comparing India andChinaPeter Newell

Online Publication Date: 01 January 2008To cite this Article: Newell, Peter (2008) 'Lost in Translation? Domesticating GlobalPolicy on Genetically Modified Organisms: Comparing India and China', GlobalSociety, 22:1, 115 - 136To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/13600820701740761URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600820701740761

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08 Lost in Translation? Domesticating Global Policy on

Genetically Modified Organisms: Comparing India

and China

PETER NEWELL�

This article compares the way in which China and India, two leading developingcountries in the global debate on biotechnology, have sought to translate policy commit-ments contained in international agreements on trade and biosafety into workablenational policy. It is a complex story of selective interpretation, conflict over prioritiesand politicking at the highest levels of government. It connects the micro-politics ofinter-bureaucratic turf wars with the diplomacy of inter-state negotiations and coalitionbuilding. Empirically, the article provides the first systematic comparison of patterns ofimplementation in the two countries based on extensive fieldwork, contributing todebates about biotechnology regulation and the extent to which developing countriescan exercise policy autonomy in a global environment of high commercial interest andaggressive political lobbying. Conceptually, the article develops thinking about the inter-action and non-linear relationship between “domestic” and “international” policy-making arenas and does so in a way which is sensitive to the key role of non-stateactors in this field.

Introduction

A key driver of biotechnology policy is international agreements such as theCartagena Protocol on Biosafety set up to manage the international trade in geneti-cally modified organisms (GMOs). While many countries had developedgeneral guidelines on research into biotechnology, and some had more detailedprovisions for the handling of transgenics entering the country, before theProtocol’s arrival in 2000, very few had in place detailed procedures for riskassessment and biosafety management. At the same time, an increasing numberof developing countries are joining the World Trade Organisation (WTO) andhave become signatories to a range of agreements on agriculture and intellectualproperty rights (IPRs) that affect the way they handle biotechnology developmentand biosafety issues at the national level. A critical debate centres on the extent towhich developing countries, in particular, are able to reconcile these obligations inways which reinforce, rather than undermine, their broader developmental

� I am grateful to Shaun Breslin, James Keeley, Ian Scoones and two anonymous referees for helpfulcomments on earlier versions of this paper.

Global Society, Vol. 22, No. 1, January, 2008

ISSN 1360-0826 print/ISSN 1469-798X online/08/010115–22 # 2008 University of Kent

DOI: 10.1080/13600820701740761

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goals.1 This dynamic is both revealing of the way in which countries “domesti-cate” global policy commitments while seeking to preserve “developmentalspace”,2 and the limits of harmonised responses to global policy objectives.

This article explores the extent to which and the ways in which these globalcommitments change the nature of national policy processes in India and Chinawith regard to the regulation of GM crops and the factors which account for thevery different ways in which the same international agreements have been trans-lated in the two countries. As the first study to compare patterns of implemen-tation in the two countries and based on extensive fieldwork,3 the articlecontributes to debates about the politics of GM regulation in developingcountries4 and broadens existing studies on India and China in particular,5

which have tended to focus on the “domestic” politics of GM policy formulationand particularly the interface between science and policy.6 The two countriesmake for an interesting comparison because, despite a number of such parallels,there is much which sets them apart in terms of the courses their approach to bio-technology regulation have taken and the role, for example, of business and civilsociety organisations in translating and contesting the way in which the govern-ments of India and China have sought to “domesticate” global policycommitments.

It is argued that global commitments take on a fundamentally different shapeonce they have been refracted through domestic political processes. The analysisbelow shows that competing policy networks that cut across the state and formpart of global alliances seek to interpret international legal obligations in wayswhich help to consolidate their position. Working with allies in industry oramong civil society groups, different government departments seek to domesti-cate loosely worded and often ambiguous obligations contained in trade andenvironmental agreements in ways which advance their political goals. This

1. Erik Millstone and Patrick van Zwanenberg, “Food and Agricultural Biotechnology Policy: HowMuch Autonomy can Developing Countries Exercise?”, Development Policy Review, Vol. 21, No. 5–6(2003), pp. 655–667.

2. Robert Wade, “What strategies are Viable for Developing Countries Today? The WTO and theShrinking of Development Space”, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2003),pp. 621–644.

3. Funding from ESCOR (DfID) under the “Biotechnology Policy Processes in DevelopingCountries” and “Globalisation and the International Governance of Modern Biotechnology” researchgrants to support this research is gratefully acknowledged.

4. Robert Paarlberg, The Politics of Precaution: Genetically-modified Crops in Developing Countries(Washington, DC: IFPRI; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

5. James Keeley, “Interrogating China’s Biotechnology Revolution: Contesting dominant SciencePolicy Cultures in the Risk Society”, in Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones and Brian Wynne (eds.), Scienceand Citizens: Globalisation and the Challenge of Engagement (London: Zed Books, 2005), pp. 155–166;James Keeley, “Balancing Technological Innovation and Environmental Regulation: An Analysis ofChinese Agricultural Biotechnology Governance”, Environmental Politics, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2006), pp.293–309; Anitha Ramanna, India’s Policy on Genetically Modified Crops, Asia Research Centre WorkingPaper No. 15 (London: LSE, 2006); Aarti Gupta, Governing Biosafety in India: The Relevance of the Carta-

gena Protocol, ENRP Discussion Paper, 2000-24 (Cambridge, MA: Belfer Center for Science and Inter-national Affairs, Harvard University: JFK School of Government, 2000); Ian Scoones, Science,Agriculture and the Politics of Policy: The Case of Biotechnology in India (NewDelhi: Orient Longman, 2005).

6. One recent exception to this is Aarti Gupta and Robert Falkner, The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety

and Domestic Implementation: Comparing Mexico, China and South Africa, Chatham House Briefing PaperNo. 06/01 (London: RIIA, 2006) which looks at global influences upon GM policy in China, though notcomparatively with India.

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political manoeuvring takes on global dimensions when alliances are formed withinternational scientific, industry or activist communities to bolster positionsadopted domestically. Likewise, domestic politics get played out in global foraas these agreements are being negotiated, where countries such as India andChina have to navigate a course which is likely to be acceptable to key domesticconstituencies when the agreement comes to be implemented. In addition, eachhas a sufficiently clearly defined interest in biotechnology that international pro-cesses are also regarded as an opportunity to “internationalise” domestic policypreferences and secure scope for national discretion in policy making.

By emphasising the superficiality and fragility of the distinction between dom-estic and international in the practice of biotechnology politics, amid evidence of“globalising state bureaucrats”7 and localised “global” actors such as multina-tional companies and scientific elites playing key roles in GM regulation, thisaccount is at odds with prevailing orthodoxy in the study of global governanceabout the ways in which domestic politics influence international politics andvice versa. While Putnam’s8 concern was with the ways in which the possibilitiesfor international cooperation are circumscribed by patterns of domestic politics,Keohane and Milner’s9 approach aimed to look at how the process of “internatio-nalisation” is serving to reconfigure politics at the national level, even withinfairly closed and autarkic societies. The work of Risse-Kappen10 aimed at bringing“Transnational Relations Back In”, building on the earlier work of Keohane andNye,11 and studies by Schreurs and Economy,12 for example, have exploredthese dynamics around environmental challenges. While these accounts generateimportant insights into the links between the “competing” arenas of domestic andinternational politics, each adopts a somewhat linear understanding of how oneinfluences the other.

The approach here is to understand how two countries that bear similar inter-national legal commitments have processed, interpreted and “domesticated”those obligations in very different ways. This requires us to look at the politicalwebs which bind global negotiations to intra-governmental decision making ona continuing basis and how these are contested and shift over time. Looking atthe role of particular departments, and indeed particular individuals withinthose departments, it becomes clear that some are more embedded withinglobal processes than others and that understanding their location within dom-estic political settings means understanding the policy networks they form withlike-minded government officials in other countries, industry and NGO alliesand those sympathetic to their position within the scientific community. Viewedthis way, the importance of policy styles, bureaucratic politics and transnational

7. Shaun Breslin, “Reforming China’s Embedded Socialist Compromise: China and the WTO”,Global Change, Peace and Security, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2003), pp. 213–229.

8. Robert Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-level Games”, InternationalOrganisation, Vol. 42, No. 3 (1988), pp. 427–460.

9. Robert Keohane and Helen Milner (eds.), Internationalisation and Domestic Politics (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996).

10. Thomas Risse-Kappen, Bringing Transnational Relations Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1995).

11. Robert J. Keohane and Joseph Nye, Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1972).

12. Miranda Schreurs and Elizabeth Economy (eds.), The Internationalization of Environmental Protec-

tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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coalition building to understanding the interpretation and implementation ofglobal commitments becomes clear.

In policy terms, the article suggests the limits of attempts to promote univer-salised and “one-size-fits-all” models of biosafety regulation across the world.For reasons of promoting international trade and realising the commercialpotential of GMOs, bodies such as the OECD, the GEF (Global EnvironmentFacility) and to a lesser extent the Cartagena Protocol itself have sought toencourage countries to adopt broadly similar models of biotechnology regu-lation that are minimally disruptive of trade.13 The issue is not just the appro-priateness of standard prescribed measures for countries with enormouslydiverse ecologies and capacities for effectively regulating the trade in GMOsor undertaking rigorous risk assessments, but the naivety of attempting to gen-erate political conformity through international law. The strongest and mosteffective pressures towards policy conformity in the global politics of GMOregulation derive from bilateral trade and industry pressures and threats tobring cases at the WTO. These have been used to discipline those countriesadopting regulatory models threatening to the interests of biotech exportersand seem to act as a far more immediate catalyst to action than the well-intended but abstract commitments contained in the texts of global legal instru-ments on biosafety. The limited reach of international environmental law inthese cases may provide pause for thought against a background of enthusiasmabout China and India’s public acceptance of other leading multilateral environ-mental agreements such as the Kyoto and Montreal Protocols.

The article is structured as follows. After providing a brief overview of the his-torical and contemporary context of biotechnology policy in the two countries, keyconflicts around biosafety and its links to trade policy are explored in turn, beforethe concluding section summarises key points of convergence and divergence inthe two countries’ policies and suggests the conceptual challenges that flow fromthis analysis. The section on biosafety politics looks firstly at the position of Indiaand China in the biosafety negotiations before examining the bureaucratic politicsthat have characterised each country’s attempt to “domesticate” their obligationscontained in the Biosafety Protocol and then finally analyses the politics surround-ing the enforcement and implementation of those commitments on the ground.The section on trade politics explores the way trade-related issues of marketaccess and IPRs intersect with biotechnology policy, leading to commerciallydriven challenges to the ways in which India and China have sought to evolvetheir own regulatory responses to commitments in WTO agreements and theCartagena Protocol on Biosafety respectively.

Context

Both India and China have relatively long histories of promoting and developingbiotechnology spanning several decades. Each has seen in biotechnology thepotential to deliver development gains through the application of hi-techscience to the industrialisation and modernisation of agriculture. China facesthe challenge of feeding 22% of the world’s population using only 7% of the

13. Peter Newell, “Globalisation and the Governance of Biotechnology”, Global Environmental

Politics, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2003), pp. 56–72.

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world’s cultivable land.14 With high levels of rural poverty, declining yields frommany key crops and damaging levels of pesticide use, technologies that promiseto reduce reliance on chemical inputs and boost yields are a welcome develop-ment. The same is in many ways true of India with problems such as limitedland availability and a rapidly expanding population adding to a sense of crisisin agriculture upon which 700 million people depend for their livelihood.

Because of this, both countries have sought to promote biotechnology devel-opment through strong state-funded research programmes. In China’s case,four top scientists made a proposal to former Premier Deng Xiaoping, inwhich the development of biotechnology featured highly, which he approvedin March 1986. This was to become programme 863, the platform of biotechdevelopment in China.15 As far back as 1982, the Indian government establishedthe National Biotechnology Promotion Board which became the Department ofBiotechnology (DBT) in 1986. In the years following the creation of the DBT,the state sector invested more than 90% of the funds in biotech R&D.16 Sincethat time, the role of the private sector has increased quite rapidly, whereas inChina the private sector still plays a relatively small overall role in biotech devel-opment, partly because of the sorts of constraints on foreign investors that Indiaremoved in the early 1990s. Despite these constraints on private-sector invest-ment, in overall terms investment in the biotech sector in China vastly outstripsthat in India. Even after private-sector investment is added to the equation, plantbiotechnology research expenditures in India are still only about 20% of those inChina.17

Despite the fact that by 2002 Chinese researchers had produced 141 types of GMcrops, 65 of which were already in field trials,18 as with India, only Bt19 cotton hasbeen commercialised successfully thus far. Agricultural biotechnology develop-ment has been conceived as strongly consistent with the national interest asdefined by the heads of the two countries. At the Science Congress in Delhi in2001 India’s prime minister at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, stated that India’svision included “shaping biotechnology into a premier precision tool of thefuture for creation of wealth and ensuring social justice especially for thewelfare of the poor”.20 In China, support for the technology has been declaredfrom the highest echelons of the state. In his Government Work Report deliveredto the National Peoples’ Congress in March 1999, then Chinese Premier ZhuRongji said “We should work vigorously to develop agriculture through scienceand technology . . . accelerate the work of breed selection and improvement and

14. SEPA, National Biosafety Framework of China (Beijing: China Environmental Science Press, n.d.).

15. Ministry of Science and Technology, The National High Technology Research and Development

Program of China (863 program), Annual Report (Beijing: MoST, 2001).

16. Biswajit Dhar, “Regulating Biotechnology in India”, Draft paper for the “Globalisation and theInternational Governance of Modern Biotechnology” project, Unpublished (2002).

17. Jikun Huang, Scott Rozelle, Carl Pray and QinfangWang, “Plant Biotechnology in the Develop-ing World: The Case of China”, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Agricultural Science andTechnology, 7–9 November 2001, Beijing, pp. 199–203.

18. Jikun Huang and Qinfang Wang, Biotechnology Policy and Regulation in China, IDS WorkingPaper, Biotechnology Policy Series No. 4 (Brighton: IDS, 2003).

19. Bacillus thuringiensis.

20. Ronald Herring, “Miracle Seeds, Suicide Seeds and the Poor: Mobilising around GeneticallyModified Organisms in India”, in R. Ray and M.F. Katzenstein (eds.), Social Movements and Poverty in

India (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

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spread the use of advanced, applicable techniques which can increase productionand income.”21

China was a leading developer and promoter of biotechnology during the1990s. More recently, however, Chinese biotech policy has expressed a greaterdegree of uncertainty, despite continuing levels of high investment in thesector.22 There is less consensus now than throughout the 1990s about the politicaland economic costs associated with following a strongly promotional position onbiotech. Despite the approval in September 2005 of a new Bt cotton variety andsignificant interest in GM rice, no other types of crop have been fully commercia-lised since 1999, despite the fact that safety certificates have been issued to Mon-santo’s Roundup Ready soybeans and one version of the companies’ RoundupReady Corn and YieldGard Corn Borer.

This shift results in part from strategic choices about the need to export food toEuropean publics sceptical about the safety of GM crops. This signal was receivedloud and clear when Chinese soy sauce was rejected by the United Kingdombecause it contained GM ingredients from the United States. This was said to bethe most direct cause of labelling restrictions that were subsequently introducedin China. Highlighting this sensitivity once again, in September 2006, controversyerupted when traces of illegal GM rice were found in food products on sale inthe United Kingdom and other parts of Europe imported from China.23 Themove towards process-based regulations akin to those adopted in Europe, whichassume extra risks to be associated with genetic engineering, and the evolution ofregulations on labelling also suggest that China has started to follow a precaution-ary position more akin to the European stance than that of North America.24 Thediscussion below makes clear that protection of Chinese producers and promotionof China’s own biotechnology enterprises are also key factors in this shift ofposition. This helps to explain the restrictions on foreign investment that other com-mentators have taken as evidence of a “cooling” towards the technology per se.

While also affected by these global developments, the Indian government hasfaced a more difficult path in seeking public acceptance of GM crops. Their intro-duction into the country was swept up in broader debates about the pace of liber-alisation, the appropriate role of multinational companies in the Indian economyand, invoking powerful symbolism from India’s colonial history, the threats posedby Western control of key resources in India such as seeds. What is interesting isthat India, despite these auspicious beginnings, is now looking to move forwardwith biotech development and approvals of GM crops at the very time thatChina’s rush to embrace biotechnology has slowed. Despite this, Bt cottonremains the only crop to be cleared for commercialisation and the case-by-caseand precautionary emphasis within India’s biosafety regulations, like China’s,places its overall approach closer to the European model of biosafety regulationthan to that of the United States.

21. GuihuaMa, “InChina, aNo-bias Embrace of Transgenics”, inTheWorld Paper, December 1999, avail-able:,http://www.worldpaper.com/Archivewp/1999/dec99/guihua.html. (accessed 14 March 2003).

22. According to MoST’s Annual Report for 2001, of the six priority areas that receive funding “Bio-technology and advanced agriculture” attract both the largest number of projects (30%) and the highestlevels of expenditure (27%). MoST, op. cit.

23. David Adam, “Unlicensed GM Rice ‘Found in the UK’”, Guardian (6 September 2006), onlineedition available: ,http://environment.guardian.co.uk/food/story. (accessed 6 September 2006).

24. Greenpeace interviews, Beijing, 7 April 2003.

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A further interesting element of the comparison is the way in which the twocountries situate themselves in relation to one another regarding biotech develop-ment. The idea of China as a biotech “super power” has been invoked in media-led constructions that resonate in policy circles in India in order to underscore theenormous potential of agricultural biotechnology and the urgency with which it isto be tapped if India is to compete with China in this area. Slowdowns in theprocess are regarded as missed opportunities to catch up with China. P.K.Ghosh, former advisor to the DBTand member and secretary of the RCGM25 com-mittee, regrets that when Monsanto and Mahyco proposed cotton back in 1993 adecision was stalled which meant that India “lost the bus” that would haveallowed it to surpass China’s technological supremacy in this area.26 Industrygroups such as CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) also draw on this senseof a zero-sum competition between India and China, where potential investorsare “waiting and watching” to see which signals the government sends outabout its likely stance on approvals for living modified organisms (LMOs), tocreate pressure on government officials to speed up the approval process. Pro-biotech Indian government officials also readily cite the savings in pesticideuse, the absence of detrimental environmental affects and the positive benefitsaccruing to smaller farmers fromGM crops in China.27 The analysis underpinningthis narrative is weak on detail, especially regarding the extent to which there isscope to apply in India the Chinese model of agribiotech development amidsuch different capacities for public-sector research, divergent degrees of depen-dence on external market acceptance and, importantly, the contrasting role ofcivil society in contesting the benefits of the technology.

Biosafety Politics

As parties to the Biosafety Protocol,28 India and China assume a number of keypolicy obligations which provide the areas of contention, discussed below, overhow they should be interpreted and implemented in practice. Since the Protocolis essentially about managing the international trade in GMOs in such a waythat minimises potential environmental risks, it establishes procedures for riskassessment and a grammar of conduct for the trade in GMOs. Central to thisare the provisions on Advance Informed Agreement. These place the onus onan exporting country to provide, in advance of the first importation, a set of infor-mation on the GMO in question and a scientific risk assessment. This procedure isto be completed within a specified timeframe in which a final decision has to betaken by the importing country within 270 days. We will see below how Chinahas used that leeway to justify controls on imports of GMOs from the UnitedStates. The Protocol also contains the precautionary principle and goes furtherthan many other environmental treaties in seeking to specify the terms to opera-tionalise it. This is seen as critical to ensuring for developing countries, in particu-lar, the right to raise uncertainties about the technology’s safety as a legitimate

25. Review Committee on Genetic Modification.

26. Interview with Dr P.K. Ghosh, Scientific Advisor, DBT, Delhi, 28 March 2001.

27. Interview with Dr S.R. Rao, DBT, 4 April 2001.

28. Peter Newell and Ruth MacKenzie, “The 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety: Legal andPolitical Dimensions”, Global Environmental Change, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2000).

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basis for denying access to their markets. We will see below how support for theprinciple has strengthened the hand of environment ministries in both India andChina in seeking to advance a more cautious approach to the technology’sacceptance.

More controversial are the provisions regarding socio-economic considerations,opposed by leading GM exporters and successfully fought for by the Like-mindedGroup of developing countries, that create a space to consider the potential socio-economic impacts of the technology, albeit understood in relation to impacts onbiodiversity reflecting the fact that the Protocol derives from the Convention onBiological Diversity. The scope of these provisions is disputed, but they are poten-tially critical to managing the technology’s interface with poverty in countriessuch as India and China, and in India’s case have been invoked to lend supportto an approval system that explicitly evaluates the potential agro-economicimpact of introducing a GM variety. The final element of the Protocol, whichneeds to be flagged at the outset, concerns its relationship to other treaties, particu-larly those within the ambit of the WTO. The issue commonly referred to as the“savings clause” was, as former US negotiator Sabrina Safrin put it, “one of thefew issues that, by itself, could have prevented the protocol’s successful com-pletion”.29 Controversy centred on the Protocol’s relationship to the SPS (Sanitaryand Phytosanitary) and TBT (Technical Barriers to Trade) agreements which regu-late the use of standards to restrict trade and in particular over which should takeprecedence in the event of a conflict between the two. The language of the Protocolis ambiguous, claiming both that the Protocol is not “subordinate” to other agree-ments, nor, however, that it implies a change to existing obligations which partieshave agreed to under other treaties. Contention over the relationship between theagreements continues in light of the WTO case brought against the EuropeanUnion by the United States and its allies and provides the context for the nationalconflicts over trade and biosafety described below, particularly in the case ofChina.

Role in the Negotiations

In the international negotiations on biosafety both China and India interact closelywith the “Like-minded Group” of which they are a part, urging a cautiousapproach to the trade in GMOs.30 Although China has differences of opinionwith the Like-minded Group and small island states in particular, for exampleon issues around the conditions in which it is acceptable to block the trade inGMOs, it continues to align itself most closely with this grouping across a spec-trum of substantive issues. Indeed, Cai Lijie from SEPA, (State Environmental Pro-tection Administration) was head of the Chinese delegation and spokesperson forthe Like-minded Group at different points in the international negotiations. He iscredited with maintaining a firm stance on issues such as the relationship between

29. Sabrina Safrin “The Relationship with Other Agreements: Much Ado about a Savings Clause”,in Christopher Bail, Robert Falkner and Helen Marquard (eds.), The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety:

Reconciling Trade in Biotechnology with Environment and Development? (London: Earthscan, 2002),pp. 438–454.

30. Lijie Cai, “China”, in Bail et al. (eds.), op. cit., pp. 160–166; Rajen Habib Khwaja, “Socio-economic Considerations”, in ibid., pp. 361–365.

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the Protocol and the WTO and the importance of adopting the precautionaryprinciple in the agreement in the face of intense pressure from the Miami groupof leading biotech exporters such as the United States, Canada and Argentina.Equally, the Indian delegation played a key role on behalf of the Like-mindedGroup in resisting calls from developed countries to omit socio-economicconsiderations from the text of the agreement.31

Both India and China have signed and ratified the Cartagena Protocol onBiosafety (CPB).32 China’s ratification was slowed by a tussle between SEPA andthe Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) over the extent of their mandates and respon-sibilities for overseeing the different elements of the Protocol. While SEPA pushedfor early ratification of the Protocol, the MoA sought to take overall control of theimplementation of the agreement as a condition for accepting early ratification.SEPA has been the main government agency involved in the negotiations on theProtocol,33 just as the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has takenthe lead in the case of India. Though leading on the CPB negotiations, SEPA doesconsultwith theBiosafetyOfficewithin theMoA through a small cross-departmentalmeeting before each set of negotiations. In the case of India, the make-up of thedelegation which attends the biosafety negotiations depends on the primaryissues under discussion so that the respective presence of the MoEF, as opposedto Agriculture, Commerce and Industry or the DBT, can vary.34

Given the sensitivity of the issue, it is unsurprising that responsibilities for bio-safety management are dispersed across government in both India and China. InChina, the Ministries of Agriculture, Health and SEPA each have officials dealingwith biosafety issues that are meant to work together and exchange information.In practice, however, as one official put it, “rather like the UN”, it is difficult to co-ordinate policy effectively across so many agencies. The inter-ministerial commit-tee on biosafety, which was set up in April 2002, covers sevenministries, includingthose mentioned above, and normally meets twice a year though its schedule ofmeetings is not fixed. India’s approval committees for biotech products alsohave representation from all key departments.35

Bureaucratic Politics

Despite the fact that the MoA in China has traditionally played a more powerfulrole in biosafety regulation and the monitoring of field trials, covering import lab-elling as well as research and production, some accounts suggest that SEPA maybe carving out a greater role for itself within the new biosafety law that is currentlybeing developed to satisfy the terms and conditions of the Cartagena Protocol.While on many issues there will not be a significant change in responsibilitiesbetween ministries, there will be some amendments which mean that SEPA willcapture a greater degree of responsibility and hence secure enhanced resources

31. Ibid., p. 364.

32. China signed the CPB in August 2000 and ratified it in May 2005. India signed in January 2001and ratified it in January 2003.

33. SEPA also hosts the focal point of the Biosafety Clearing House mechanism and co-sponsoredthe Asia-Pacific regional conference on Biosafety and the Biosafety Clearing House in March 2002 inBeijing.

34. Interview with Dr Babu, MoEF, 30 March 2001.

35. Gupta, op. cit.

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for overseeing implementation of the CPB. At the time of writing, a bureau madeup of 13 departments and ministries is carrying forward the process of designing anew biosafety law. It is intended that the new lawwill surpass all existing biosafetypolicies and be broader in its coverage. Officials within SEPA hope that the lawwillmagnify the effect that the CPB has had to date in shifting the balance of the debatein China towards biosafety concerns, raising the profile of the issues that SEPA hasbeen working on. As one member of the Chinese delegation to the biosafety nego-tiations put it, “A positive impact of the Biosafety Protocol in China has been thatother ministries pay more attention to biosafety issues than before.”36 In thisregard, SEPA officials hope that the new lawwillmirrormany of the key provisionsof the CPB. Their hosting of a United Nations Environment Programme–GlobalEnvironment Facility (UNEP–GEF) National Biosafety Framework project willundoubtedly help in this endeavour. Here we find evidence, then, of the way inwhich the alignment of bureaucratic interests with provisions in internationallaw makes it more likely that the latter will be “domesticated”: having a sponsorwithin government that has a short-term self-interest in seeing the Protocoladopted increases the likelihood of its implementation in practice.

These bureaucratic battles are also manifest at the interface between science andpolicy. The MoA biosafety expert group is primarily responsible for risk assess-ments of applications on a case-by-case and province-by-province basis. Arange of experts from bodies such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences and theInstitute of Botanical Research sit on these committees, though some indicationsare that up to 80% of the members of the committee have biotechnology back-grounds, while only 20% are ecologists, reflecting a bias common to many regulat-ory systems, including India’s, towards those more likely to be in favour of biotechdevelopment than those more familiar with the environmental risks associatedwith the technology. This profile may also reflect the fact that the ChineseAcademy of Environmental Sciences, from which SEPA draws its expertise, isless influential in these matters than the Chinese Academy of AgriculturalSciences which works closely with the MoA. The contested nature of the scienceof agricultural biotechnology, reflected in the Protocol, is also, therefore, apparentin domestic conflicts over authority and whose expertise best serves policy.

Government officials claim to draw on elements of a variety of differentapproaches adopted by countries such as the United States, Japan and the Euro-pean Union as well as international institutions such as the OECD and Codexin the design of their own risk assessment processes. This is similar to India,where risk assessment guidelines have drawn upon models used by the USDepartment of Agriculture, Plant and Animal Health Inspection Service(APHIS) as well as from biosafety guidelines elaborated by other OECD countries.One key difference in India’s case is a requirement, added to the 1998 BiosafetyGuidelines, that safety assessments include an agronomic evaluation of a trans-genic crop to determine its economic advantage to farmers. How India willsquare its commitments to sound science and precautionary decision makingwith an assessment of socio-economic considerations is currently unclear. Theambiguity surrounding these concepts and the latent tensions between themthat derives from the CPB is in many ways reproduced at the national levelthrough India’s biosafety system. Even areas of policy that are fairly tightly

36. Interview at Biosafety negotiations, Nairobi, Kenya, May 2001.

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proscribed in the CPB can be subverted by bureaucratic politicking. Just as riskassessment procedures in China are subject to fierce bureaucratic infightingover respective responsibilities, so Gupta notes that the impetus for India’sdemarcation for contained use appears to be the need to ensure that the RCGMmaintains control over field tests and biosafety evaluations of transgenic crops.37

Rather like in India, where there are tensions between the DBT and MoEF overhow to strike a balance between promoting biotech and protecting against some ofthe risks implied by its development, in China the Ministry of Science and Tech-nology (MoST) plays a key role in promoting biotechnology through fundingpublic research and helping public–private commercial ventures such as BioCen-tury. Evidence of the priority the government attaches to biotech promotion overprotection, in spite of the alleged cooling towards the technology noted above, isfound in the fact that funding for biotech promotion vastly outstrips that providedfor biosafety assessment in the 863 programme. The balance may also be tiltedtowards biotech promotion over biosafety concerns by the incentive structuresthat exist within government that serve to speed up the approval process. Praynotes that the Chinese regulatory system is “susceptible to political and economicpressure especially since regulators now have to earn part of their income throughcommercial activities”.38 This means that “Regulators need enough governmentfinancing so that they do not need to be involved in commercial enterpriseswith the firms they are supposed to regulate.”39

It is important, though, to probe beyond inter-departmental conflicts of interestand the clashing mandates over biosafety regulation in order to make sense ofthese contests over how to domesticate global policy. There are divisions withinthe key ministries such that the biosafety office within China’s MoA is said tobe pushing for stronger forms of biosafety regulation and even within theMoST there are some individuals sympathetic to these concerns. Equally, on theissue of restrictions on foreign investment in biotech in China, the biosafetyoffice within the MoA is opposed to the rule, despite its own former seed divisionexpressing support for something similar three years earlier. Hence, while JohnKillmer of Monsanto claims “[the Chinese] have one foot on the accelerator,which is funding biotech research and development, and they have the otherfoot on the regulatory brake”,40 it is clear that these apparent inconsistenciesreflect genuine differences of opinion between government ministries and evenbetween departments and individuals within ministries that attach different pri-ority to biotech development, as opposed to biosafety protection.41 The apparently“schizophrenic” position is a function of different departments reacting to differ-ent realities and pressures from constituencies, including international insti-tutions, which in turn pull the government in divergent directions, the privateand public commercial sectors, each with their conflicting preferences, and thelarge agricultural sector of scientists and farmers with a clear stake in thedebate. Individual policy makers are embedded to different degrees in policy net-works that both shape their positions but also bolster them within bureaucratic

37. Gupta, p. 25.

38. Carl E. Pray, “Public and Private Collaboration on Plant Biotechnology in China”, AgBioForum,Vol. 2, No. 1 (1999), pp. 48–53 (p. 52).

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Greenpeace interviews, Beijing, 7 April 2003.

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power struggles. Policy stances only appear schizophrenic, therefore, if weassume that the government should, or indeed can, operate as a cohesive unit.

Nevertheless, these competing bureaucratic mandates and positions undoubt-edly serve to slow the approval process for GM crops as each department andministry seeks to ensure that the issues it is responsible for have been properlyaddressed. Just as with the labelling debate, concerns have been expressed byforeign firms and the trade officials that often speak on their behalf, that theapproval process in both India and China is too fragmented and incoherent,being dispersed across too many departments whose precise roles in theprocess are poorly defined. In India, this has led to demands from prominentindustry groups such as the CII and the All India Biotech Association for a conso-lidated one-stop approval process.42 US trade officials have made a similar requestto Chinese regulators, expressing their preference for a single agency mirroringtheir own FDA (Food and Drug Administration) that would deal with allapprovals. Bilateral pressure from other governments and commercial interestswith a high stake in how a government domesticates its commitments featuresheavily in the politics of biotechnology. An important difference between Indiaand China, however, is that businesses have far fewer channels of formal andinformal engagement with the state in China in comparison with India. Thisabsence of dialogue is a source of immense frustration for multinational biotechcompanies used to high levels of access to sympathetic governments and estab-lished channels of interest group representation in other countries where theyoperate.43

Enforcement

Beyond the process of translating global policy commitments into national policyamid these competing pressures, there are questions about the practical enforce-ability of biosafety regulations. In India in 2001 it was found that Bt cotton hadbeen grown in Gujarat state, having been supplied by the company NavbharatSeeds that distributed the seed through a number of states without governmentapproval.44 Micro-managing the seed trade with high levels of governmentcontrol is almost impossible in large countries such as India where seedmarkets are heavily deregulated. A representative of the Karnataka Seed Associ-ation stated frankly: “There are hundreds of seed sellers in Karnataka. Regulationis an impossibility.”45 There is also evidence of the illegal growing of Bt cotton inthe Yangtze Valley in China. One official from the MoA conceded that when thearea was opened up it was found that the Yangtze valley “was 40% plus insect-resistant cotton already”.46 Governing the transboundary movement of GMOs,as required by the CPB, also makes unrealistic demands of overstretched andunder-trained customs and quarantine officials in developing countries. Green-peace has pointed to the ease with which imported soya, for example, can be

42. Peter Newell, “Biotech Firms, Biotech Politics: Negotiating GMOs in India”, Journal of Environ-ment and Development, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2007), pp. 183–206.

43. Interview with Monsanto official, Beijing, 10 April 2003.

44. E. Shah, “Local and Global Elites Join Hands: Development and Diffusion of Bt Cotton Technol-ogy in Gujarat”, Economic and Political Weekly (22 October 2005) Vol. 43, pp. 4629–4640.

45. Scoones, op. cit.

46. Interview, Ministry of Agriculture, Beijing, April 2003.

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grown illegally in China despite claims that most of it is ground down to preventaccidental release into the environment.

In both countries there are concerns that equipment and training are insufficientto fulfil international obligations to oversee the trade in GMOs with any degree ofscrutiny or effectiveness. SEPA in China concedes that “there is a lack of safetymanagement measures addressing the export, transportation, commercialisation,storage, use and waste disposal . . . national capacity for biosafety management israther weak”.47 In addition, despite notional responsibilities that district and stateadministrations have in India, or the GMO detection agencies that have been setup at county and prefecture level in China,48 capacity is lacking and most keydecisions continue to be made in the capitals of the two countries. This is truefor decisions on the nature of trials and whether or not products will be approved,for example. Hence, while province-level governments in China are allowed tostrike deals with foreign investors in some sectors, for seeds and GMOs all appli-cations have to go through central government given the sensitivities surroundingthe subject. This contest of authority reflects the “dual control” between centre andprovince that in practice characterises environmental policy in China, despite thefact it is considered a “fundamental state policy”.49 In India, there have been com-plaints about the arrogance of the central government in Delhi in allowingapprovals for the trial of crops in states without consulting officials in thosestates. The Minister of Agriculture for Karnataka claimed he only learned of theapproval of trials of MMB’s (Mayhco-Monsanto Biotech India) Bt cottonthrough the media.50 A state biotechnology committee was set up only after thetests were well underway.51 Expectations in the CPB regarding the implemen-tation of biosafety rules seem, therefore, to run up against the reality of capacitydeficits, shortfalls in resources and competition between state agencies in whichcompetence for biosafety management becomes one more site for a widercontest over bureaucratic authority.

With the domestication of biosafety policy we see many similarities in theexperience of India and China. Each has allowed environment bureaucrats a rela-tively free rein in the global negotiations on biosafety, but at the stage of interpret-ation and implementation bureaucratic infighting has given rise to battles over theweight given to different elements of the Protocol which relate, in turn, to compe-tition over mandates and their resource implications. Both also face common pro-blems of the non-enforceability of biosafety regulations and the ungovernability ofthe seed trade, within the countries as well as across borders. Unresolved ques-tions remain in both cases, as with many other countries, about how commitmentsto trade liberalisation in the agricultural sector can be squared with the use of bio-safety regulations to restrict the trade in GM seeds.

47. SEPA, op. cit., p. 27.

48. For example, training has been undertaken by the MoA at prefecture and county level for 21research stations for them to become GMO detection agencies. Officials at these levels are also respon-sible for submitting reports to local government officials who collect data on trials taking place. Havingreviewed the data, however, it is still national-level agencies that issue approval certificates.

49. Barbara J. Sinkule and Leonard Ortolano, Implementing Environmental Policy in China (Westport:Praeger, 1995), p. 5.

50. Scoones, op. cit.

51. Gupta, op. cit.

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The Trade Politics of Biosafety and IPRs

The different pace of trade liberalisation in the two countries’ agricultural sectorshas produced competing political coalitions contesting the impact and benefits ofliberalisation. While conflict over the pace of liberalisation exists in both countries,in China the fissures are formed within government between “globalising statebureaucrats”,52 concentrated in theMinistry of Commerce,53 and those whose pol-itical agendas are better served by protecting rural China from rapid exposure toglobal markets. In India, civil society groups have mobilised around trade issuesfor some time and continue to be involved in debates such as those around theappropriate relationship between IPRs, plant variety protection and farmers’rights. Some have successfully formed alliances with elements within the MoAconcerned about the impact of such measures on rural livelihoods.

While both countries have been subject to intense foreign pressure concerningtheir trade rules—on labelling in China’s case, and intellectual property protectionin India’s—they have sought to defend their interests in different ways. Whileboth have worked to develop alliances within the WTO among fellow membersof the G77, different policy cultures have meant that China tends to operate in aless confrontational manner in global arenas, but works to keep policy optionsopen at the national level. The government of India, on the other hand, is morecomfortable adopting adversarial positions internationally, but has manifestedless willingness or ability to use stalling and obfuscatory tactics at the nationallevel in the face of global scrutiny. This difference in approach results both fromdivergent diplomatic strategies and distinct political cultures in which, forexample, open political conflict is more acceptable in India than in China.

Within domestic arenas, developments in biosafety regulation with trade policyimplications have also come under increasing international scrutiny. On 7 June2001 the Chinese State Council announced the “Safety Management Regulationsfor GMOs in the Agricultural Sector”. Imports of GMO products were to be certi-fied as harmless to people, animals and the environment before they could be soldin the Chinese market. The regulation required mandatory labelling on productsbefore they could be retailed, with the State Council establishing a committee tosupervise the evaluation of the safety of GMO products. The compulsory labellingrules were to come into force by 1 July and were welcomed by environmentalgroups, such as Greenpeace, because they located China nearer to the process-based labelling approach of the European Union.54 Many, however, viewed thenew rules as an explicit non-tariff barrier with the Chinese government “intenton setting up the barrier before WTO entry to protect the domestic market”.55

Biotech companies were quick to suggest that China’s new rules on labellingand importation exploited global fears regarding the safety of GMOs in order to

52. Shaun Breslin, “Reforming China’s Embedded Socialist Compromise: China and the WTO”,Global Change, Peace and Security, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2003), pp. 213–229.

53. As a result of restructuring, the Ministry of Commerce now subsumes the State Economic andTrade Commission and what was formerly known as MoFTEC, the Ministry of Foreign Trade andEconomic Cooperation.

54. Greenpeace, “China: Compulsory Labelling for All Genetically Engineered Foods Comes intoForce July 1”, Greenpeace Hong Kong (1 July 2002), available: ,http://www.greenpeace.org/press/release. (accessed 17 March 2003).

55. Chang You Sun, China Requires Mandatory Labelling on Genetically Modified Organisms, IndustryNote (Hong Kong: Food and Agricultural Research, Rabobank International, August 2001).

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protect its domestic biotech industry. Chinese government officials were keen toassure investors that “Concerns over GMO safety will not disrupt world trade”,as Minister of Agriculture Du Qinglin declared.56 Nevertheless, the issue pro-voked a dispute that was so serious that, according to John Gittings, it “at onetime threatened to derail WTO entry” and was only resolved at the Asia-PacificEconomic Cooperation meeting attended by US President George Bush.57 Thefact that rules on biotechnology were thought to provide valid grounds for ques-tioning China’s entry into the WTO gives an indication of the strategic economicimportance attached to the export of GMOs to China.

Foreign biotech firms have not been left to fight the battle alone. Their positionson the various incarnations of China’s biosafety regulations have been actively sup-ported and advanced by government officials acting on their behalf. FollowingChina’s imposition of a temporarymoratorium onGM soybean importswhile regu-lations were developed, President Bush made a high-level visit in February 2002 topersuade the government to keep trading channels open while regulations on bio-safety were recast. Referring to the trade in soybeans, a trade adviser to the USAgri-culture Secretary said “it’s a billion dollar market to us” access to which is beingdenied by “unreasonable delays”.58 The chief agricultural negotiator at the time,Allen Johnson of the US Trade Representative office, said that after two days oftalks with his Chinese counterparts his mission had been a success and that heexpected that China would take necessary steps to “adjust its regulations so asnot to hold up $1 billion worth of annual US soybean exports to China”.59 Agricul-ture Secretary AnnVenemanwas also keen to echo the fact that assurances had beenobtained from officials from the Ministries of Agriculture, Trade, Science and Tech-nology, as well as the State Planning Commission and AQSIQ, the quarantine andinspection agency, that China will meet its WTO obligations and ensure that US–China trade is not affected by the new regulations. Understating the case dramati-cally, Allen Johnson acknowledged that Bush’s visit helped “pave the way” for theinterim settlement.60 Bilateral trade pressure proved to be amore powerful driver ofregulatory change than provisions within the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.

In order to resume imports of agricultural products that contain GMOs, theMoA’s GMO Safety Regulation Office in China issued its first batch of preliminaryGMO safety certificates to 19 foreign firms on 18 April 2002 and thereafter to afurther 20 firms for products that have been approved in the exporting countryand for which applications have been initiated in China.61 Despite this deal,further delays became apparent shortly afterwards causing concern among USofficials and consternation among biotech firms. Delays were justified by the

56. B. Blanchard, “China Farm Minister Says GMO Rules Won’t Disrupt Trade”, Reuters (11 March2003).

57. John Gittings, “China Faces Agricultural Revolution”, Guardian (13 November), available:,http://www.guardian.co.uk. (accessed 1 April 2001).

58. Quoted in ibid.

59. Neil Smith and Chris Rugaber, “China to Issue Temporary Certificates to Allow Imports ofGMOs to Continue”, BioTech Watch (8 March 2002), available: ,http://subscript.bna.com/SAMPLES.btb.nsf. (accessed 2 April 2003).

60. Ibid.

61. Dow Jones Newswires, “China’s Ban on Biotech Investors May Violate WTO Obligations” (13May 2002), available: ,http://www.biotech-info.net/chinas_ban.html. (accessed 1 April 2003);Dow Jones Newswires, “China Issues GMO Certificates to 20 More Companies” (Monday 29 April2002), Monsanto UK website, available: ,http://www.monsanto.co.uk/news..

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Chinese government on the grounds that some foreign firms did not provideenough material as required by the supplementary rules created by the MoA inMarch 2002 requiring firms to provide information on the contents, size of thelabels and where it is going to appear on the products. Many importers com-plained about the short notice they were given and the lack of transparency ingovernment decision making. Despite the fact that formal three-year certificateswere issued in February 2004, the experience seemed to realise the fears oftraders that “China’s trade ministry could still play games with import approvalsfor individual traders”.62 Looked at from another angle, however, Chinese officialswere able to draw upon provisions within the CPB which allow up to 270 days tomake a final decision about an import and in so doing use international law toprotect themselves against foreign pressure for policy change.

Recognising Rights

Besides the issue of the extent to which market access is impeded by biosafetyregulations, one which powerful exporters have sought to resolve bilaterally,the question of what level of IPR protection should be accorded to geneticallymodified crops has become a flashpoint in global biotechnology politics. As signa-tories of the WTO Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs)agreement, both India and China have found themselves under intense politicalscrutiny regarding their deliberations about how best to translate their inter-national obligations into domestic policy practice.

Itwasnoted abovehowChinahas consistently aligned itselfwith theLike-mindedGroup in the biosafety negotiations.With respect to trade, however, China’s allianceswithin the WTO tend to shift according to the issue. On some issues China worksclosely with other large developing countries such as India, Mexico and Brazil inexpressing concerns about the timetables for the lifting of quantitative restrictions,or resisting more restrictive patenting provisions under Article 27.3b of TRIPs, forexample, which relates to the patenting of living organisms. Yet China also worksclosely with the Cairns group on other agricultural issues on the WTO’s agenda.Within global debates, India’s MoA also forms alliances with the European Unionand countries such as China against those seeking to strengthen patent protectionincluding theUnited States, Canada, Australia and Japan. India has played a leader-ship role in the negotiation of the TRIPs agreement at theWTO, given its long-stand-ing tradition of limiting IPRs to protect public policy goals in the agricultural sectorand has been one of the few developing countries where there has beenwidespreaddebate about the benefits of implementing TRIPs.63

When the TRIPs agreement came into effect on 1 January 1995, developingcountries were given five years to ensure compliance, with five more years forthose without product patents in the area of technology. China’s patent law pro-hibits patents on plants and animal varieties under Article 25, even if individualgenes can be patented, unlike in many other developing countries.64 The rationale

62. Smith and Rugaber, op. cit.

63. Farhana Yamin, IPRs, Biotechnology and Food Security, IDSWorking Paper 203 (Brighton: IDS, 2003).

64. Ministry of Science and Technology, Patent Law of the People’s Republic of China, Adopted at the4th session of the Standing Committee of the Sixth National Congress on 12 March 1984, available:,http://www.most.gov.cn/English/Polocys/patent_law.htm. (accessed 30 March 2003).

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for this is that genes are treated as chemical material rather than living organisms.When a patented gene is used to create a new variety, this protection does notextend to the new variety. Despite the fact that leading firms such as Monsantoclaim to be keeping some of the best varieties out of China because of poorlevels of IP protection, since accession to the WTO China has not faced significantfurther pressure to amend its laws on patenting, considering itself to be largelyTRIPs compliant. Despite the publicity attracted to Greenpeace’s claims aboutthe implications for Chinese farmers of Monsanto’s attempt to patent a soybeanvariety, the issue appears not to have generated much controversy. China alsohas a Plant Variety Protection (PVP) system in place following the UPOV65 1978provisions, but there is a question mark over whether it constitutes a sui generissystem as required under TRIPs as an alternative to the patenting of living organ-isms. Notably, cotton is not on the PVP list that China agreed to when it joinedUPOV 1978 and is not included on the list of protected crops under the PVP regu-lations. Monsanto, though, is making money on its Bt cotton variety and whilecounterfeit versions of its seeds are being sold illegally, the cost of pursuing indi-vidual legal claims is prohibitive in a market to which the company desperatelywants to maintain access.

Despite the proactive stances adopted in international fora, described above,India also continues to have to revise its domestic laws in order to make themTRIPs-compliant. The relevant legislation in this regard is the First and SecondPatent Amendments Acts, the Plant Variety and Protection and Farmers’ RightsAct, which was passed by parliament in August 2001, and the Biological DiversityAct. When the attempt by the Government of India (GoI) to amend the Patent Actfailed in 1995, the United States filed a case against India through the disputesettlement mechanism of the WTO, which found against India. In order tocomply with the ruling the GoI enacted the Patent Amendment Act in 1999 toaccept product patent applications from 1 January 1995 onwards and to provideexclusive marketing rights to such applicants.66 Various adjustments have beenmade to the Patent Act to make it TRIPs compliant, but in the process the pro-visions excluding plants from patent protection have been significantly diluted.The government was obliged to set up a system for the protection of plantvarieties given that the 1970 Patent Act excludes plant varieties from protection.India has established a sui generis system for plant varieties pursuant to Article27.3(b) of the TRIPs agreement. The PVP and Farmers’ Rights Acts excludesplant varieties and seeds from patentability and allows farmers to save, exchangeand share seed, going against the wishes of multinational companies that wantedto restrict the selling of protected varieties. Questions have been raised, however,about the consistency between India’s approach to PVP protection and UPOV,particularly concerning the “farmers’ privilege” clause in India’s approachwhich allows farmers to sell saved seeds to others rather than just re-sow seedssaved from their own holding.67 Critics allege that the Act was being rushedthrough with such haste in spite of these concerns “in response to international

65. International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants.

66. T. Ramakrishna, “Development of the IPR Regime in India with Reference to Agricultural Bio-technology”, Unpublished paper for the “Globalisation and the International Governance of ModernBiotechnology” project, Centre for Intellectual Property Rights, Research and Advocacy, NationalLaw School of India, Bangalore (2003).

67. Yamin, op. cit.

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pressure and pressure from the powerful commercial plant breeders”.68 Thetensions, incompatibilities and creative interpretation of the commitments thatthe Indian government has agreed to by being party to these agreementssupport Seshia’s claim that

. . . the emergence and expression of PBRs [Plant Breeders’ Rights] andfarmers’ rights in the bill is not simply a cut-and-paste transfer of pro-visions from international agreements to domestic legislation. Rather,analysis of both provisions indicates that it is instead importantly con-ditioned by the Indian policy context and the actions and interactions ofindividuals and groups within India.69

Rather like in China, Indian policy across these areas is interpreted by critics aspoorly co-ordinated and incoherent. There is significant overlap between thebodies of legislation, despite the fact that they were produced for the most partby different ministries. This is the case, for example, with the Protection ofPlant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Bill that the MoA has drafted, the BiodiversityBill which the MoEF has taken the lead in drafting, and the Patent Act which theMoST has drafted. Since each employs different understandings of propertyrights, Ramakrishna claims that “It should be clear that these regimes cannoteasily co-exist since they seek to protect the same subject matter but operate onfundamentally divergent principles.”70

Bureaucratic Politics and the Role of Civil Society

In both countries different ministries within the government have also adopteddivergent positions on the trade agreements which the government has signed.For example, in India, while the Ministry of Commerce and Industry is largelyin favour of stronger forms of patent protection, the MoA expresses concernabout overly restrictive patenting practices. Such moves, argues Mr Jain,Additional Secretary of the MoA, go against the principles of access and benefitsharing enshrined in the Convention on Biological Diversity.71 This position hasbeen supported by groups such as the Gene campaign in Delhi that claims tohave organised over 400 meetings in 17 states on issues such as IPRs and in theprocess “significantly altered the government’s view on this issue”.72 Theirstrategy was to hold meetings on farmers’ rights and IPR issues in politician’s con-stituencies to maintain pressure on them given that “no-one wants to be seen asanti-farmer”.73 The use of non-state actors and farmers’ movements to bolsterpositions within inter-bureaucratic wrangles in such an openway is clearly in con-trast to the nature of the process in China where such deliberations are kept withingovernment circles, even if appeals are made to other state institutions such as

68. Ramakrishna, op. cit, p.20

69. Shaila Seshia, “Plant Variety Protection and Farmers’ Rights: Law-making and the Cultivationof Varietal Control”, Economic and Political Weekly (6 July 2002), pp. 2741–2747 (p. 2747).

70. Ramakrishna, op. cit., p. 28.

71. Interview with R.C.A. Jain, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, 3 May 2001, NewDelhi.

72. Interview with Suman Suhai, Head, Gene Campaign, 4 May 2001, New Delhi.

73. Ibid.

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academies of agricultural or environmental sciences to provide legitimation forparticular decisions. Xue Dayuan, Professor at the Nanjing Institute of Environ-mental Science, for example, was quick to endorse China’s ratification of theCPB by stating that “This means that countries have the right to ban or restrictimports when there is a lack of scientific knowledge or consensus regardingtheir safety”,74 a claim widely reported in the media that bolstered SEPA’s moreprecautionary approach.

On the Agreement onAgriculture, India’sMoA’s involvement in inter-ministerialmeetings is strengthened by consultation processes with farmers and NGOs at thestate level which are used to claim that the MoA represents the rural poor in thesedebates. The MoA professes to be the vehicle for advocating food security andlivelihood concerns in the biotech debate and participated actively from 1996onwards in the debate about the lifting of quantitative restrictions. It has alsopushed for “agro-economical” considerations of quality, income and access toplay a part in the trials of GM crops in order to enlarge the scope of theassessments beyond those strictly endorsed by the Protocol. Rather like in China,there is a strong sense that multinational companies entering India have to do soon terms set by the government. There is little fear on its part, therefore, that policieson biotech aimed at checking the “greed and insensitivity” of those multinationalcompanies seeking to “short-circuit” the policy process, as some officials put it,will deter potential investors from operating in India. In the case of both Indiaand China, this position seems to reflect a combination of assertive state autonomyregarding rights to determine investor entry on their own terms and a strategicsense that the huge domestic market that potentially exists for biotech productsin their countries will provide sufficient incentive for companies to comply withwhatever regulations the government regards as necessary.

In India’s case, however, and in sharp contrast to China, civil society groupshave played an important role in bolstering and reinforcing government auton-omy, backing attempts to stand firm in the face of foreign state and private-sector pressure. The degree of influence of civil society activism upon thecourse of the national policy debate about how commitments contained in inter-national agreements should be translated into national policy has been highly sig-nificant. India’s strong tradition of judicial activism in environmental affairs hasbeen brought to bear in the biotechnology field with legal cases brought bygroups such as the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology,headed by leading activist Vandana Shiva, contesting the process by which cropshave been approved in the country’s Supreme Court and then, latterly, managingto secure a temporary ban on the field trials of certain GM crops. In general, thepublicity, scandal and exposure which activists have managed to generate regard-ing regulatory failures such as the growing of non-approved varieties in Gujarat in2001, noted above, the use of GM food aid in India or the rumours that so-calledsterile-seed “terminator technologies” were being used, has served to slow theadoption of the technology and raise doubts in the public mind about the safetyand desirability of the technology. The fact that such groups are able to orchestratemobilisations, and that such forms of protest get reported in what remains arelatively free media, also sets India apart from China where space for such

74. Environmental News Service, “China Ratifies Biosafety Protocol on Transgenic Organisms” (24May 2005), available: ,http:///www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2005. (accessed 15 June 2005).

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public-political contestation does not yet exist. The profile achieved by suchcampaigns has undoubtedly strengthened the hand of those government officialspushing for a more cautious acceptance of the technology, a pillar of support thatofficials in the Chinese SEPA have to do without for the most part.

Conclusion

As relatively powerful developing countries, both India and China haveattempted to domesticate global obligations in ways which conform with theirdomestic priorities. They have been able to resist, to a greater degree than manyother developing countries, bilateral and commercial trade pressures to reviseand reform their regulations to suit the needs of biotech multinationals orleading exporters of GMOs. China had to go some way to assure the UnitedStates that its regulations were not discriminatory towards US exports and thatinterim arrangements would be put in place so as not to jeopardise the lucrativeglobal soybean trade. But its position across a range of issues continues to embodysufficient ambiguity and flexibility that it can preserve policy space to manoeuvrea position that reflects an evolving sense of the national interest. In some cases, thegovernment position has been quite overtly oppositional to Western commercialinterests, the ban on foreign investment in the biotech sector in China being oneobvious example.

The Government of India has also been subject to intense foreign pressureregarding its patent legislation in particular. It has been strongly encouraged toadopt a process-based patenting system that would allow firms to patent biologi-cal processes rather than just end products. The exemptions that India included inits pre-TRIPs legislation in the areas of agriculture and pharmaceuticals, in par-ticular, as well as both its large domestic market and competitive potential asan exporter of these products, made India one of the targets of US global effortsto tighten IPRs. India had until 2005 to provide product patent protection that ithad hitherto denied following a 10-year transition period. The implementationof the provision has already been the subject of a WTO dispute. It remains thecase, however, that despite these pressures the Indian government has soughtto find creative ways of squaring the strengthening of the scope and enforcementof IPRs, as required by TRIPs, with its long-standing commitment to balance IPRsagainst other policy goals such as public health and food security.

Like China, the Indian government has been subject to lobbying from individ-ual firms whose products are under consideration for approval, though in a farmore open and direct manner than is possible in China where business interestshave had to represent their concerns through their home governments.However, the GoI has ultimately been able to resist these pressures for sometime, due to a combination of under-developed regulatory safeguards, vocalpressure from civil society groups and the slow process of learning by doingthat characterises any bureaucratic procedures that are being operationalisedfor the first time. The relative importance of China and India as potentialmarkets for GM products, the relatively advanced level of skills and infrastructurethat the two countries can provide, as well as their function as symbolic signifiersfor other developing countries about the future direction of biotechnology, allmean that exporters are willing to invest considerable effort in engaging and

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working with both governments to ensure that regulations are designed thataccommodate their commercial needs.

The lack of civil society resistance, and the strong commitment from the Chinesegovernment, was enough to drive biotech development in the early years. Morerecently, WTO membership and the need to identify more strategically whereChina’s strengths lie in global market terms appear to have precipitated a re-evaluation of priorities. China has created a space to do this through a strategicuse of prevailing concerns about biosafety to challenge the unregulated importof GMOs from foreign investors, and the careful construction of regulations thatare likely to benefit Chinese producers and traders more than foreign actorstrying to operate in the Chinese market. It may be true to say that China is lessopenly vocal about its concerns regarding global trade and environmental instru-ments in the arenas where these are negotiated, but nevertheless finds creativeways to interpret and enforce the obligations in a manner that leads critics toallege that the intent of those commitments is being subverted. India, on theother hand, adopts a different negotiating style, more openly questioningmeasures proposed by international institutions, but perhaps ultimately morewilling to meet the letter of those agreements when it comes to nationalenforcement.

The extent to which the domestic biotechnology policy processes of the twocountries are shaped by global economic forces and the constraints imposed byinternational agreements to which they are party is, in part, a function of therole they see for biotechnology in their national agricultural systems. Withinboth countries, the debate about the role of biotechnology in agricultural develop-ment has strongly emphasised the extent to which the technology can help totackle problems of food insecurity within the country. While both countries areself-sufficient in food, poverty and problems of distribution, storage and transpor-tation conspire to leave many people undernourished and without access to food.There may be strong reasons for assuming, therefore, that both countries coulddevelop relatively autonomous biotech strategies aimed at serving domesticneed rather than global market requirements. Nevertheless, what we see fromthe analysis above is a desire on the part of both countries to be global playersin the biotech industry. To do this means meeting the requirements and obli-gations of global trade accords and attempting to reconcile these with correspond-ing commitments in environmental agreements such as the Cartagena Protocol onBiosafety. As long as this desire to be key players in the global political economy ofbiotechnology persists, it is almost inevitable that international rules on trade andbiosafety will continue to play an important, yet contested, role in their nationalresponses to the regulation of GMOs.

At a policy level, this analysis suggests that expectations that countries can andwill implement international treaty obligations in common and predictable ways,an assumption embedded in many trade and biosafety capacity-building pro-grammes for example, are out of touch with the reality of uneven implementation,foot-dragging and conscious non-implementation of articles and provisions thatare seen to be burdensome or inappropriate to national circumstances. Theoreti-cally, the account presented here suggests the need to conceive of the linksbetween national and international policy processes in more dynamic and lesslinear ways. We have seen how particular government departments and even par-ticular groups of individuals within those departments forge global alliances with

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like-minded policy makers in other governments as well as with allies in theprivate sector and civil society. In this context, the analytical benefit of talkingabout “levels of analysis” which separate the supposedly distinct spheres of dom-estic and international politics, as is the tendency in conventional approaches inInternational Relations, is of limited purchase.

The account provided in this article also underscores the importance of seeingstates not as bounded and homogeneous entities but rather as complex configur-ations of competing political and bureaucratic units adopting unique policy stylesand embedded in different ways within global economic and policy networks.This requires us to move beyond viewing global politics as the product of relationsbeyond the state, to look instead for the sources of global policy within the stateand its links to global coalitions of interest. It also requires us to locate the rootsof domestic policy processes within the global coalitions that transcend stateboundaries to simultaneously create opportunities and constraints within whichstates have to operate. Only then will we be well positioned to capture thedynamic nature of the global politics of biotechnology and the multiple theatresin which it is staged.

136 P. Newell