Shawdesh Desk: From the traditional kitchen markets to the high street shops, agricultural products are sold without labelling, leaving no means for consumers to know whether the products are genetically modified or hybrid or produced through traditional farming.

Even locally produced genetically modified eggplants are not tagged in gross violation of the existing marketing conditions.

Experts suspect that some of the imported crops widely marketed in Bangladesh for years now as human food or cattle feed ingredients are genetically modified, too, as there is no system in place for labelling them either.

The price of no-labelling could be fatal at times as Bangladesh experienced in 2002, 2008 and 2016 when toxic puffer fish sold by unscrupulous businessmen killed at least 30 people in Khulna, Sylhet and elsewhere in the country, according to studies.

‘This is true that the government does not care about labelling agricultural products,’ the Department of Agricultural Extension director general, Mir Nurul Alam, told New Age.

Top officials of the Department of Agricultural Marketing, Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council and Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation said that legal inadequacies and a lack of agricultural value chain are standing in the way of introducing labelling procedures.

Bangladesh has a labelling regulation for packaged food only, which defines labelling as a set of information giving consumers complete knowledge about a product, from its production to transportation to its inherent or added dietary qualities.

Section 11 of the regulation makes it mandatory for genetically modified food to be identified on its packet. Violators could get maximum two years in prison or be fined Tk four lakh for violating the law.

The production and sale of genetically modified aubergines, the 2nd major crop in the country after potato, increased astronomically since introduction of the technology in 2014 on condition that it is properly labelled before marketing.

First introduced only among 20 farmers, the four GM aubergine varieties were cultivated by 17 per cent of 150,000 aubergine farmers in the country in 2018.

The aubergines, the maiden GM crop in the country, are sold loose and never labelled, just like any other agricultural crop.

Both the shopkeepers and shoppers identify aubergine by its size and colour and mostly have no idea about what GM means.

They have never learned to identify aubergine by its varieties so they have never known that Uttara, Kazla, Nayantara and Ishwardi 006 aubergine varieties could be GM.

‘You may try but it is completely impossible in existing marketing system to single out GM aubergine,’ said Syed Salim Uddin Ahamed, senior manager, Lavender Super Store Ltd in the city.

He said that ‘uneducated’ wholesalers never cared about labelling and put all aubergine of the same colour or shape in the same sack as soon as they bought supplies from growers.

‘It would not make any difference had the growers labelled it,’ he observed.

The distributors of GM aubergine seeds, DAE, BADC, and Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute, have limited their activities to the distribution of the seeds only.

They said that though labelling of GM aubergine was mandatory no authorities were particularly assigned by the government to implement the order.

Bangladesh also imports large quantities of agricultural products without labelling every year. In the 2017-18 fiscal year Bangladesh spent $7,160 million in importing rice, wheat, spices, edible oil, pulses, sugar and oil seeds.

DAE’s plant quarantine wing director Mohammad Azhar Ali has admitted that the import takes place based on minimal information and it remains a responsibility of the importers to declare voluntarily if their products are GM or there are any other issues with them.

‘We only want to know the English and scientific names of the crops being imported,’ said Azhar.

Developed countries are very strict about labelling and they take special care in ensuring that the GM crops are properly labelled.

Most of the European countries do not allow GM crops to be marketed in their countries for their long-term health and environmental impacts are still unknown to scientists.

Even neighbouring India has resisted pro-GM lobbyists for over a decade and is now refusing to introduce GM technology in their agricultural system.

Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University’s biotechnology professor Tofazzal Islam said that people’s suspicion about new scientific technologies is rooted in many of the technologies, propagated completely safe initially but bearing disastrous consequences on health and environment later.

For instance, DDT, once a miraculous insect killer, which even earned its discoverer a Nobel Prize, became banned almost across the world for causing severe health and environmental damages, he noted.

‘That’s why people nowadays demand for remaining informed of the latest [relevant] data more than ever before,’ said Tofazzal.

Tofazzal believes that imported soya bean consumed in the form of edible oil and a protein source in animal feed is mostly GM.

‘The countries from where Bangladesh imports soya bean oil and oil seeds gave up non-GM soya bean cultivation long ago,’ he said.

The major source countries for soya bean in Bangladesh are the USA and Brazil, where herbicide-resistant GM soya bean is cultivated widely.

Bangladesh imported around a million tonnes of soya bean in 2017-18, according to the DAE.

A kind of enzyme widely used in the country to facilitate unusually fast growth in poultry birds is also believed to be GM, said Tofazzal.

‘Poultry birds should be labelled as well letting people know that GM technology was used for fattening them,’ he said.

He said that it is also highly likely that imported corn used in animal feed is GM. Bangladesh imported 13 lakh tonnes of corn in 2017-18, mainly from Brazil and Argentina.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation considers labelling a basic consumer rights that helps people make informed choice.

‘Besides giving direct information on a product, labelling carries indirect messages, too. For instance, the label ‘hybrid’ might imply heavy use of pesticides and fertilisers in farming of a particular product,’ said Tofazzal.

Hybrid technology has taken over 80 per cent of commercial agriculture since its adoption in the 1980s.

People still rely on relatively larger crop sizes to decide whether or not a particular product is grown via hybrid farming.

The lack of labelling has given rise to a new business: organic food.

While super stores have opened up organic food corners, online business of organic food is thriving, though no official system is in place to certify that these foods come from organic farming.

Super stores charge up to double the market price for their claimed organic crops.

BARC executive chairman Kabir Ikramul Haque has said that labelling is still a new idea in Bangladesh though many countries across the world have turned it into an effective tool for ensuring food safety for long.

‘Currently, we are discussing ways to regulate the organic food market,’ he said.

Former Bangladesh Food Safety Network chairperson Farida Akter says that it is a right of consumers to know certain basic information about the products they are paying for.

‘It is also about their health to know about the products’ ingredients or nature,’ said Farida.

Bangladesh Food Safety Authority member Mahbub Kabir said that they did not have a mechanism in place to bring unpackaged agricultural products under labelling.

‘We lack capacities for taking care of such a huge issue,’ said Kabir.