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Mumbai: While India mulls another free trade agreement (FTA) with Australia and New Zealand, its FTAs with European Union and Japan remains shrouded in uncertainty with its decisions regarding intellectual property (IP) rights likely to impact not just India, but other developing South East Asian countries as well.

According to people closely tracking the FTAs, there is strong pressure on India to join the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) -1991, which would make Indian farmers pawns of multinational companies engaged in crop research.

Joining UPOV-1991 would crush farmers’ privileges to share,
exchange, and sell plant variety protection (PVP) seeds to other farmers.

PVP guarantees IP protection to plant varieties developed by
agricultural multinationals. The objective of UPOV is to protect new varieties of plants by IP. Harmonisation of PVP across the Asia
Pacific region is the aim of developed economies through FTAs, say experts.

Read the full story at DNA India

SOHIAN, India—India’s Green Revolution is withering.

In the 1970s, India dramatically increased food production, finally allowing this giant country to feed itself. But government efforts to continue that miracle by encouraging farmers to use fertilizers have backfired, forcing the country to expand its reliance on imported food.

India has been providing farmers with heavily subsidized fertilizer for more than three decades. The overuse of one type—urea—is so degrading the soil that yields on some crops are falling and import levels are rising. So are food prices, which jumped 19% last year. The country now produces less rice per hectare than its far poorer neighbors: Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Agriculture’s decline is emerging as one of the hottest political issues in the world’s biggest democracy.

Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal

Last week, a blog I wrote entitled 1500 Farmers Commit Suicide: A Wake Up Call for Humanity was virally shared online, and was the featured story on the home page of Huffington Post. Referencing a story from The Independent that was vague on details and called them “mass” suicides, undoubtedly, I participated in the sensationalization of this story. But, for this I do not apologize.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau of India, 182,936 Indian farmers have committed suicide between 1997 -2007. It estimates 46 Indian farmers kill themselves every day – that is, roughly one suicide every 30 minutes. An estimated 16,625 farmers across India killed themselves in 2007, the last year that was reported. The numbers are horrifying, and they indicate the sense of despair that the poorest people in the world are facing today.

The current fate of farmers in India is a tangled hierarchy that involves politics, agro-business, multinationals, trade liberalization, global subsidies, the environment, water, ethics, and human rights. Activists point out the role of agrochemicals, particularly genetically engineered seeds, that have been aggressively marketed to Indian farmers by companies like Monsanto–an American multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation that also wields a powerful influence on the farming practices in America.

Read the full article at The Huffington Post

Most rice grows in wet environments, but too much water can be disastrous for rice crops. Plant biologist Pamela Ronald helped create a type of flood-resistant rice that is being introduced to India and Bangladesh. In Davis, California, we spoke with Ronald about her new rice and its promise for small farmers in South Asia.

Most rice plants will die if submerged for just three days, but the new variety can withstand two weeks of flooding. Ronald, a plant pathologist at the University of California, Davis, says it can make a crucial difference in a region where subsistence farmers grow rice to feed their families and four million tons of rice is lost each year to flooding. That is enough to feed 30 million people.

Pamela Ronald developed the new rice strain with a colleague at the International Rice Research Institute near Manila, David Mackill, and another scientist at the University of California Riverside, Julia Bailey-Serres.

Read more at VOA news

(From the Indian Society for Sustainable Agriculture)

Indian farmer leader, Dr Krishan Bir Chaudhary and his team at Bharatiya Krishak Samaj (Indian Farmers’ Organisation) recently busted the dangerous racket of leading pesticide and insecticide companies in selling sub-standard pesticides to farmers. Here are some of the clippings from country’s leading newspapers —–

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On a recent afternoon, Seetabai Atthre heard a faint cry from the edge of a vineyard that her family has cultivated for more than 40 years. Through the furrows, she found her husband, Vishal, smoldering on the ground next to an empty can of kerosene. He had lit himself on fire and died three days later in a local hospital

Read the full article at the San Francisco Chronicle