Half a million Indian farmers sign petition urging Ban on Terminator
March 20, 2006
About half a million from Southern states of India have urged the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh to protect country's agro biodiversity against the new and serious threat from the Terminator seeds technology. The Government of India has a ban on Terminator and the farmers are urging the government to remain strong in defending this ban.
The representation by the South Against Genetic Engineering, a coalition of 50 South Indian networks of farmers, civil society groups, consumer movements, scientists and academicians has been made at a time when the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is in meeting in Brazil. SAGE plans to submit a memorandum to the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, on March 20 with five lakh signatures from people across Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu urging him to continue the ban on Terminator seed technology.
The UN meeting in Brazil is to take a decision on the technology. Significantly India is the leader of the Group of Like Minded Megadiverse Countries (LMMCs). At the press conference in Hyderabad P.V. Sateesh, the coordinator of SAGE said that the attempts by the biotech industry to make entry into the developing countries like India pose a grave threat to the farming communities dependent on agrobiodiversity.
The petition has been signed by over half a million farmers and concerned citizens across Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. "Terminator, the popular terminology used to describe Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURTS) is the ultimate in killing the freedom of seed saving practices of farmers in India which is in vogue since millennia," he said.
Stressing that seed and agriculture has always represented life in India, Mr Sateesh said that Terminator completely contradicts this image and brings death through seeds."Seed is the symbol of reproduction for us. But Terminator seeds offer sterility. This is a diabolical science which subverts the basic reproductive function of nature," he said.
Mr Satheesh said though it was banned, Australia, Canada and New Zealand had regrouped under the backing of the US - a country that is not even a signatory to the CBD.
At CBD meeting in Granada, Spain, in January 2006, he said the Terminators were successful in watering down the current moratorium on the technology to a "case-by-case" consideration by different Governments.
The recent US-India agriculture agreements also provide another frightening context to the introduction of the terminator technology into India.
The US is aggressively pushing its genetic engineering industry all over the world and India is its latest, he said.