CHRISTIAN VASSIE’S views (Letters, December 11) of GM crops and Monsanto are misinformed.

Monsanto is successful when farmers chose to buy our products. Farmers make this choice when the price and performance of our seeds or other products offers them more than alternatives; they make a new choice each season based on experience. Sterile “terminator” seeds are a myth.

Monsanto has about four per cent market share in the Indian cotton seed market, we license our insect protection GM traits to other seed companies to make them available to most Indian cotton farmers.

These traits offer farmers the chance to stop using most of the insecticide previously sprayed on cotton. Monsanto’s technology is innovative and its popularity with farmers illustrates the value it provides: farmers smuggled GM cotton seeds in to Pakistan due to frustration with their government’s slow approval of the technology.

It is tragic that any farmer finds themselves in a situation where they contemplate or commit suicide; it is also scandalous that campaigners make propaganda out of tragedy.

A 2013 analysis of Indian farmer suicides by Manchester University concluded, “The data, although not ideal, and the modelling do not, however, support the claim that GM cotton has led to an increase in farmer suicide rates: if anything the reverse is true.”

GM technology is a boon for farmers that are able to choose it.

Mark Buckingham, Monsanto UK, Cambridge.