Extracts: CCFI in this case put out a screaming headline “Beware of Foreign Funded Environmental NGOs – They are paid to malign Indian agriculture”.
1. CCFI as a non-profit association is probably supported by business revenues earned in foreign lands. Let us not forget that the Indian pesticide industry has a larger foreign market than a domestic market!
2.it lists out funded organisations and individuals along with non-funded ones without making a distinction between the two, other than clubbing foreign-funded ones with Indian-funded.
3, it does not limit its objectionable tirade to just NGOs but begins naming scientists in public sector research bodies which are not foreign funded or environmental NGOs.
4, the names listed have people who, far from maligning Indian agriculture, are working closely with farmers to provide sustainable livelihoods to them. Farmers who are associated with Kheti Virasat Mission in Punjab stand as silent testimonies to this for instance.
CCFI, as it usually does, presented comparative picture of volume of pesticide consumption in India forgetting that activists are not talking about ‘excessive agro-chemical use’ but about the adverse impacts of deadly pesticides. So, it is about quantities as well as which pesticides, the conditions of use, which exposure routes for farmers and consumers