One of the key demands of the Right to Food Campaign for the National Food Security Act is to re-introduce nutritious millets to government food programmes like the public distribution system. Millets like bajra, jowar, kodo, kutki and ragi among hundreds of other varieties have sustained communities for close to 10,000 years in India. Yet, they have been marginalized as food crops since the days of the Green Revolution in...

THERE is a need for a large-scale publicly funded biotechnology programme in agriculture to end the monopoly of the private sector, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has said in view of widespread opposition to genetically-modified Bt brinjal. “I think public sector investment in strategic areas particularly in genetically modified (GM) agriculture is absolutely crucial for instilling public confidence because of the seed issue. We don’t want the GM food to end...

Biodiversity drives sustainable and climate-resilient farming and the biotechnology industry. Everything should be done to spread bio-literacy for an era of bio-happiness in rural and urban India through the conversion of bio-resources into jobs and income.  Biodiversity provides building blocks for sustainable food, health and livelihood security systems. It is the feedstock for the biotechnology industry and a climate-resilient farming system. Given its importance, a Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)...

Biotech technicians neither have the knowledge of gene ecology nor the expertise in multiple disciplines.    After the minister of environment Jairam Ramesh announced a moratorium on Bt brinjal, article after article in the media has denounced the decision, saying such decisions should be left to ‘scientists.’ The issue is however not science vs anti-science. It is reductionist science vs systems science. The moratorium took into account the best of science. Many...

Saying that the biotech bill is all 'wrong and retrogressive', Communist Party of India (CPI) leader D. Raja has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cautioning him not to introduce the 'draconian' bill in parliament. In the letter dated March 11, of which IANS has a copy, the party's national secretary vehemently criticised the bill's main proposal to set up the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) under the ambit of...