Spurious seeds marketeers warned by Jana Sakti

Anand · Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2006 4:07 am Post subject:

A few months ago, I saw this in Hindu:
State to file case against Mosanto:
http://www.hindu.com/2005/12/29/stories/2005122919960100.htm
Does anybody know what happenned to the case. I understand that now Monsanto will be in the advisory committee under the new Indo-US cooperation scheme.
For more information on Monsanto, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto
and
http://www.thecorporation.com/
Even the USA seems powerless against some of these
companies and Monsanto products banned in Canada and Europe are still
being sold in the USA.

ved · Telugu Veera Joined: 26 Feb 2006 Posts: 2024

Where are the seed growers that Monsanto procures from? Are they in India or outside India? The seed market really baffles me. May be I'm out of touch with latest farming, compared to my farming days 25 years ago. Though cotton and cotton seeds are foreign to me, I'm familiar with other pulse seeds that we used to produce ourselves. At the most we used to go to the neighboring village. Now it appears there is this huge market for seeds and so many of them are bogus and very unreliable. What changed? Is it a demand for more selective seeds to increase production? Are we the victims of our own greed?

Anand · Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2006 8:06 am Post subject:

Sorry; my local knowledge goes back to 50 years. I have read a bit about this in news papers and news about DDS (deccan development society) agitations. My vague remembrance is that the trade is done with the help of local traders and I am not sure where the seeds were actually produced. I think some of the cotton seeds were banned after a lot of agitation by DDS and later Monsanto came with a different (?) variety.
May be local participants can tell us more about it.
Swarup

ved · Telugu Veera Joined: 26 Feb 2006 Posts: 2024

One of the problem with seed market is that it is making the farm products monolithic. What I mean is that the minor variations in the genetic structure of the crops are being lost. For instance, India boasts more varieties of rice than any other rice producing nation. I could say even within the vicinity of my village, we used to grow many variations.

One theory is that once these variations are eliminated, it will be a lot easy for the mutated pests to take over hundreds or thousands of acres of these crops without any resistance. Where as, in olden days such a possibility was remote. That is the danger of some of these genetically modified hybrids and mass usage of a particular genetic variation. On top of this, we have problems with adulterated seeds full of weeds. It is time for farmers to procure these through cooperative societies with their own production, rather than from unscrupulous brokers.