Madhya Pradesh Agriculture Minister Ramkrishna Kusumaria has said that the proposed Bio-Technology Regulatory Authority and Agriculture Bio-Security Bill, both of which would deal with genetically modified (GM) crops, will make Indian farmers a slave to the multi-nationals.
“US and European nations will enslave our farmers as they will capture the country’s agriculture sector,” State Agriculture Minister Ramkrishna Kusumaria said in a letter to social worker Anna Hazare, other MPs and all Chief Ministers.
The letter urges them to use their influence to block the passage of the bill and the formation of the authority. Kusumaria claimed that with this Bill, India would once again become a slave of European countries.
Countries such as France, Germany, Austria, Peru and Spain had already banned GM crops while Hungry recently destroyed standing GM maize crop over nearly 1,000 acres, he claimed.
US and European countries, with the help of multinationals, had wiped out traditional methods of seed procurement, changed the crop-cycles and ended the traditional manufacturing of fertilisers, he alleged, adding that farmers had already become dependent on MNCs for BT cotton.
GM seeds initially give a higher yield, but it goes down later and input costs keep increasing, he has said.
He stated that agriculture was the backbone of India and any country that captures farm resources would have control over 64 per cent of Indian population.
He further said that earlier the Central government had also made efforts to bring genetically modified (GM) BT brinjal, but the Supreme Court had banned the experiment.