INDIA has become the latest developing country to embrace genetically modified crops. But while several farmers’ groups are greeting the government’s approval of Bt cotton with jubilation, environmentalists have condemned it.
“This is like the fall of the Berlin Wall for Indian agriculture,” Sharad Joshi, founder of the Maharashtra-based farmers’ organisation Shetkari Sanghatana, told Â鶹´«Ã½. “Farmers have been deprived of new technology for a long time but now they will have access to it.”
“It’s a recipe for environmental and social disaster,” says Devinder Sharma of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security. “This will open the floodgates to genetically modified organisms.”…
