The Mustard Oil Conspiracy

Mustard oil, whose production and consumption were until recently integral to India's way of life, has been banned, so as to provide a market for Monsanto's soya oil.

On 27 August 1998, the government of India banned the sale of mustard oil. On 4 September it went further and banned the sale of all unpackaged edible oils. The decision was a terrible blow to the Indian population. In many states, mustard oil is an essential constituent of the diet. It has a high oil content, is usually processed locally, and is available to the poor at low cost, especially when unpackaged. One can go so far as to say that it is an integral part of India's food economy, having been integrated into cropping and food patterns over centuries.

`Sarson', as mustard oil is called in India, is not only an edible oil. It is an important medicine in the indigenous, Ayurvedic system of health care. It is used for therapeutic massages. Oil mixed with garlic and turmeric is used to alleviate symptoms of rheumatism, and muscular and joint pains. It is also used as a mosquito repellant, a significant contribution in a region where the resurgence of malaria is responsible for thousands of deaths.

In other words, mustard oil is central to Indian culture. It is the symbol of spring and renewal. The yellow of the mustard flower is the colour of spring. Songs on the theme of `Sarson' are an integral part of folk culture. Makki ki roti and Sarson ka Saag (corn bread with vegetables and mustard leaves) is the best known food linked to Punjab culture and identity. Mustard oil is the olive oil of Bihar, Bengal, Orissa and East Uttar Pradesh.

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 vegetables, rice curd, and so on.

The pretext for banning mustard oil, which was produced on a small scale by artisanal methods, is that it is unhygienic and therefore unsafe. It is nice to know that our government is so concerned about the health of the people who elected it to power. But why has it shown so little interest in this issue before? It has never taken any action to limit the use of the carcinogenic pesticides that were introduced on a vast scale with the Green Revolution. It has never taken any action to prevent the radioactive pollution caused by the nuclear industry in those areas where its nuclear installations have been set up, in spite of the fact that ionising radiation is the best documented of all carcinogenic pollutants. Why then this sudden concern with public health?

The connection was difficult to ignore. The first hint came in July 1998, when the government announced plans to import as much as a million tons of soyabean as oil seeds. These oil seeds were previously on the list of restricted imports. Citizen groups and the Agriculture Ministry challenged the decision on the grounds that the imports were not necessary. The second clue came on 27 August 1998. On the very day on which the government announced the ban of the sale of mustard oil, it also announced that all restrictions on the import of the soyabean would be removed. Concerns regarding food safety were now raised, particularly as there was no guarantee that imports would not include soyabean contaminated with alien genes, that is, genetically modified soya. In the face of this opposition the government needed to find a more convincing justification for their action.

This was conveniently provided during the month of August of that year when a terrible tragedy unfolded in Delhi and elsewhere: an epidemic of what was referred to as `dropsy'. The symptoms were nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, abdominal swelling, kidney damage, breathlessness due to retention of fluid in the lungs, and even death due to heart and liver failure. In all, 41 people died and some 2,300 were affected. This tragedy was traced to the consumption of mustard oil that had been adulterated with argemone, and also with diesel oil and waste industrial oil.

There had been cases of mustard oil adulteration in the past, but nothing on this scale. Argemone had been found as a contaminant before, but never in more than 0.1 per cent of the available mustard oil on the market. In this case 10-30 per cent of the oil had been adulterated. The use of diesel and waste oil was also something new. Indeed, it looked very much as if someone had set out deliberately to adulterate the oil. In any case, this was the view of the Health Minister, who stated that the tragedy could only have been the product of a conspiracy. There was no other way to explain why the contamination was so extensive.

Whether the conspiracy theory was justified or not, it was considered likely by many people. The Rajasthan Oil Industries Association, for instance, demanded a government inquiry and insisted that punitive action be taken against those found guilty of adulterating the oil supply. But the question remained: who could have been motivated to commit such a crime?

The popular, and disturbing, view was that responsibility lay with the multinational corporations who were desperately seeking to export their soyabeans to India. What made this thesis more credible was the fact that although the United States government had imposed trade sanctions on India in May 1998 to penalise the country for undertaking nuclear tests in defiance of US demands, an exception was suddenly made for the export of agricultural commodities. This is unlikely to have been a purely spontaneous gesture -- it is much more likely that it was a response to heavy lobbying on the part of the multinationals.

At that time, US-based multinationals were faced with a serious problem. They could no longer dispose of their genetically engineered soya in Europe, where it was increasingly being rejected by consumers who had forced their respective governments to insist that GM foods be properly labelled. In addition, the US public was beginning to view such foods with suspicion. A wide ranging coalition of scientists, health professionals, consumers, farmers, and religious leaders, had filed a law suit demanding mandatory labelling, which would have made such foods very difficult to export.

The problem was particularly serious given that by 1998 some 18 million acres in the US had been planted with genetically engineered `Round-up Ready' soyabeans, which were specifically designed to create a growing demand for Round-up -- the world's best-selling herbicide, produced by Monsanto Corporation. How to get rid of all this increasingly unsaleable produce? The answer could be to dump it on the Third World, in countries such as India, where the public had not yet been alerted to the possible dangers of GM crops.

By encouraging the Indian government to ban the sale of mustard oil throughout the country, the food multinationals were provided with a perfect market opening for their products -- which would enable them to dominate, and on a permanent basis, the market in that country for vegetable oil. And, if traders cannot sell mustard oil, they will not buy mustard from farmers and farmers will stop growing it. This will lead to the extinction of a crop that is central to India's farming system and food culture. Once mustard oil has gone out of cultivation, even were the ban on mustard oil to be lifted, we would still remain dependent on soyabean for our edible oil. If the government were to allow us one day to reintroduce mustard oil it could only be a patented genetically engineered variety - as Monsanto has already patented all the brassica grown in India.

Clearly, a death knell has been sounded for the entire domestic edible oil industry, not for just mustard oil. Farmers will stop growing sesame, linseed, mustard and groundnut in all their diversity since the markets for these crops will also be destroyed. India's agricultural biodiversity will be seriously eroded, hundreds of varieties will be driven to extinction, and, what is more, the livelihoods of millions of small farmers will be destroyed. Crucially, India's food production system will be more vulnerable to world financial volatility.

There is a precedent for this phenomena. In Indonesia, the recent food riots were largely caused by massive imports of soyabean oil, on which the Indonesian people had become cripplingly dependent. When the Indonesian currency collapsed, the retail price of soya escalated, making the cooking oil far too expensive for the bulk of the people to afford. India would be put in a similarly vulnerable position if we were to become dependent on imported soya for cooking oil.

But even if it were not genetically engineered, is soyabean oil really beneficial to the health of the Indian people? To begin with one cannot trust the large cereal merchants, such as Minnesota-based Cargill Inc., who are notoriously only concerned with the `bottom line'. For one thing it is an established fact that Cargill indulges in what has been euphemistically referred to as 'purposeful contamination' or 'blending' and, if they can get away with it, with any kind of dirt, cracked grain, high moisture or anything that is handy and cheap. If the moisture content of a consignment exported by Cargill is down to 12 per cent and the contract allows for 14 per cent, they will add water to it so as to bring it up to the maximum allowable level. As David Senter, the Washington representative of the American Agricultural Movement notes, `all the grain companies operate in the same way.' Indeed, as a Cargill superintendent stated in a story published in 1982 in the Kansas City Times: `If we have got a real clean load of grain we make sure we hold it until we can mix it with something dirtier, otherwise we would be throwing money away.' In addition, whereas the oil extracted using cold pressing indigenous methods is fresh, nutritious, unadulterated, and retains all its natural flavour, oil from soyabeans, because of their low oil content, is extracted in large solvent extraction plants and requires very much more chemical processing, among other things with the use of volatile solvents, a method which was first applied in the US for the recovery of grease from garbage, bones, cracking, and other packing-house waste. The main solvent used is food-grade hexane. It is supposed to be extra pure, but some believe that it is often adulterated with much cheaper, commercial, hexane, which is not pure and contains various hazardous substances such as the toxic benzene.

In any case soyabean products, by their very nature, contain a number of toxic substances at concentration levels which pose significant health risks to humans and animals. They contain trypsin inhibitors, which inhibit the pancreatic proteases of animals, causing an increase in pancreatic size and weight and proliferation of pancreatic acinar cells. The stress on the body due to an overactive pancreas leads to growth depression, and can also lead to pancreatic cancer. Soyabeans contain lectins, some toxic, which bind with simple and complex carbohydrates, and can interfere with the microbiology of the gut and with the proper functioning of the immune system.

Soyabeans contain phytic acid which can reduce the bioavailability of essential minerals such as calcium, magnesium, zinc, copper and iron. They also contain phytoestrogens which are above the levels required and are established carcinogens. They can have an impact on the foetus which can lead to the abnormal formation of reproductive organs, to sterility, and to the inhibition of sexual maturation.

Calculations have shown that an infant fed with soyabean-based formula is ingesting oestrogen equivalent to that obtained from 8 to 12 contraceptive pills per day. When the soyabeans are genetically modified they can lead to a host of health problems that have now been well documented. All this makes it clear that the substitution of imported soya oil for locally produced mustard oil and other vegetable oils has not been done for the purpose of improving people's health. Hygiene was clearly but a pretext; the motive was quite different.

Fortunately, the Indian people are reacting to this outrage. A coalition of over 25 women organisations from diverse backgrounds held a demonstration in the shopping district of Connaught Place, in Delhi, demanding free and easy access to mustard oil and rejecting the imported soyabeans. The women came from many different parts of India. They demanded that the government ensure that the poor have access to affordable, pure, and safe mustard oil, and not be forced to consume expensive, culturally inappropriate and hazardous alternatives, such as soyabean oil. Each of these women's groups stressed that the mustard oil adulteration was part of a calculated conspiracy to destroy the food economy in which women play a predominant role. To drive this message home they dumped a bag of soyabeans to underline their rejection of the imports, in particular US genetically engineered soyabean.

Let us hope that this is just the beginning of what will prove to be a powerful movement. It is time to force the Indian government to fulfil its duty in genuinely seeking to assure the health and welfare of the Indian people who elected it to power, rather than the short-term interests of a few American multinationals.

Vandana Shiva is Director of the Research foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, in New Delhi, India. She is also a writer, lecturer and prominent environmental activist.

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