{"id":41260,"date":"2018-12-04T06:56:36","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T11:56:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41260"},"modified":"2018-12-04T06:56:36","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T11:56:36","slug":"agrarian-crisis-father-of-green-revolution-in-india-rejects-gm-crops-as-farmers-demand-justice-in-delhi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41260","title":{"rendered":"Agrarian Crisis: Father of Green Revolution in India Rejects GM Crops as Farmers Demand Justice in Delhi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Agrarian Crisis: Father of Green Revolution in India Rejects GM Crops as Farmers Demand Justice in Delhi<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

Genetically modified (GM) cotton in India is a failure. India should reject GM mustard. And like the Green Revolution, GM agriculture poses risks and is unsustainable. Regulatory bodies are dogged by incompetency and conflicts of interest. GM crops should therefore be banned.<\/p>\n

You may have heard much of this before. But what is different this time is that the claims come from distinguished scientist P.C. Kesaven and his colleague M.S. Swaminathan, renowned agricultural scientist and geneticist and widely regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India.<\/p>\n

Consider what campaigner and farmer Bhaskar Save\u00a0wrote in his now famous open letter<\/a>\u00a0in 2006:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou, M.S. Swaminathan, are considered the \u2018father\u2019 of India\u2019s so-called \u2018Green Revolution\u2019 that flung open the floodgates of toxic \u2018agro\u2019 chemicals, ravaging the lands and lives of many millions of Indian farmers over the past 50 years. More than any other individual in our long history, it is you I hold responsible for the tragic condition of our soils and our debt-burdened farmers, driven to suicide in increasing numbers every year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in 2009, Swaminathan was saying that no scientific evidence had emerged to justify concerns about GM crops, often regarded as stage two of the Green Revolution. In light of mounting evidence, however, he now condemns GM crops as unsustainable and says they should be banned in India.<\/p>\n

In a new\u00a0peer-reviewed paper<\/a>\u00a0in the journal Current Science,\u00a0Kesaven and Swaminathan\u00a0state that Bt insecticidal cotton has been a failure in India and has not provided livelihood security for mainly resource-poor, small and marginal farmers.\u00a0These findings agree with those of others, many of whom the authors cite, including Dr K.R. Kranthi,\u00a0former Director of the Central Institute for Cotton Research in Nagpur and\u00a0Professor\u00a0<\/a>Andrew Paul Gutierrez and his colleagues<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Agrarian Crisis: Father of Green Revolution in India Rejects GM Crops as Farmers Demand Justice in Delhi Genetically modified (GM) cotton in India is a failure. India should reject GM mustard. And like the Green Revolution, GM agriculture poses risks and is unsustainable. Regulatory bodies are dogged by incompetency and conflicts of interest. GM crops […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20,13900,5493,299,1912,5608,371,373,1370,422,23337,23336,1091,1536],"class_list":["post-41260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-agriculture","tag-colin-todhunter","tag-counterpunch","tag-farming","tag-food-production","tag-genetically-modified-organisms","tag-gm-crops","tag-gmos","tag-green-revolution","tag-india","tag-ms-swaminathan","tag-pc-kesaven","tag-soil","tag-soil-fertility"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41260"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41261,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41260\/revisions\/41261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}