-PTI/Siasat.com Currently, more than 40 per cent of India's total workforce is employed in agriculture, according to the World Bank data released till 2019. Montreal: A numerical global target for pesticide reduction in the agriculture sector is unnecessary and must be left for countries to decide, India has said at the UN biodiversity conference here in Canada. Speaking during a high-level segment of the 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) to the Convention on...

-Deccan Herald One of the proposals under debate at Montreal is a call for slashing harmful subsidies by at least $500 billion annually from the estimated $ 1.8 trillion India has sought more public finance to protect its biodiversity and strongly opposed proposals to reduce subsidies on fertilisers and pesticides for the sake of biodiversity, asserting that the livelihood of hundreds of millions of farmers in the developing world depend on farming.  “Our...

-Business Standard Claims that GM mustard will lead to increased yield are incorrect; we must focus on other solutions. India is the fifth-largest producer and also the seventh-largest importer of edible oils in the world. Though significant progress has been made in the production and yield of oilseeds in India, our annual vegetable oil import has been about $10 billion in recent years. The Ministry of environment is allowing for genetically modified...

-The Hindu This is the first time that a Central ministry has endorsed the safety and benefits of the seed in Parliament Field trials of the transgenic mustard variety, DMH-11, revealed them to be higher yielding and they didn’t deter the pollination habits of honey bees, Union science minister Jitendra Singh said in Rajya Sabha in a written response to a query. Dhara Mustard Hybrid-11 (DMH-11) had recently been approved by the Genetic...

-The Hindu “It would have been better if seed production trials take place in a controlled rather than in an open environment so as to assess various risks before conducting open field trials,” read a statement by the AIPSN. Following the go-ahead for production and field testing of hybrid seeds of genetically modified (GM) mustard, All-India Peoples Science Network (AIPSN) has demanded that the open field tests, if any, be conducted with...