CCFI cannot buy public opinion

This is in response to the full page ‘advertorial’ published in this paper on 29th July 2020 by a pesticide industry association called Crop Care Federation of India (CCFI). The advertorial space was used for a scurrilous attack on activists and researchers and to spread misinformation.

CCFI i n this case put out a screaming headline: “Beware of Foreign Funded Environmental NGOS — They are paid to malign Indian agriculture”. The headline itself is wrong as the examples cited don’t consist of only (environmental) NGOS, or only foreign-funded organisations. It did not have a single case of those paid to malign Indian agriculture!

The advertorial insinuated that foreign funding is always a sinister thing. But the pesticides industry itself was created and grew out of foreign funding when the Green Revolution was ushered in. This red herring of ‘foreign funding’ or lack of it being a measure of patriotism and nationalism is questionable.

The advertorial says that spreading ‘fake news’ about ‘excessive agrochemical use’ and ‘high pesticide residues’ in our agricultural commodities is how these foreignfunded NGOS indulge in scare-mongering. CCFI might well accuse the Prime Minister too. On Independence Day in 2019, he gave a clarion call to farmers to phase out agrochemicals and save Mother Earth. State governments are asking for bans and rigorous regulation, and investing in non-chemical farming. Courts are taking suo-motu notice of the menace of pesticides. I invite CCFI to foolishly brand all of them as foreign funded NGOS out to malign Indian agriculture.

CCFI’S comparative picture of the volume of pesticide consumption in India vis-à-vis other countries ignores the conditions of use. In a country where farming operations are mostly manual, and where most consumers are in rural India, exposure to pesticides is more direct and through more routes (it is not j ust about contaminated food). If those pesticides are also known for their health and environmental effects, in the context of a largely malnourished population vulnerable to such toxins, there is a definite cause for concern.

My past association with Greenpeace India is presented as an accusation. Greenpeace has been instrumental in establishing environmental governance internationally and nationally. I am proud of my association with it for around 17 months, in 2002-03.

I am now associated with a volunteer-driven informal network, Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture (ASHA), which is not funded (leave alone foreign-funding). CCFI presumes that I gained access to the Pesticides Management Bill 2020 (PMB2020) through the Agriculture Ministry. As an advocacy platform, we keep an active watch on policy/legislation-making processes. A Bill accessed from Parliamentarians does not involve wrongdoing. This is what a healthy democracy is about.

There is the accusation that I indulge in half-truths, with reference to Indonesia’s decision to ban 57 pesticides in 1986. Pesticide use has indeed decreased after the ban, removal of pesticide subsidies, promotion of a new pest management science, and innovative extension through Farmer Field Schools, other than yields increasing, which was my main point around the ban. Scare-mongering around yield declines after such bans are unfounded.

CCFI is ignoring a large body of evidence on the benefits of organic farming, including on the yield front. This is about a sunset industry scared of losing its markets as public consciousness and policy-making shift away from it. What Nature, farmers, farm workers, and consumers need is non-chemical agro ecological farming, and there is large scale successful experience of the same all over the country. Kavitha Kuruganti

Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture (ASHA)

Letter Misleading accusations

We are a group of academics, teachers, activists and journalists working on issues of rural India and sustainable agriculture. We write to protest against the publishing of a full page, `advertorial’ on July 29 by the pesticide-manufacturers’ lobby group called Crop Care Federation of India (CCFI), which makes misleading , unfounded, false and defamatory charges against a number of activists, journalists, and academics who have worked on food, agriculture, and the impacts of pesticide use.

For a page marked as ‘advertorial’, the page has nothing to advertise about the CCFI or its products. Instead, they have attacked critics of synthetic pesticides, perhaps with an eye toward the proposal to ban 27 pesticides in the country. At this point, we will not get into the merits of the arguments for/against pesticide use, or the global evidence linking chemicalised agriculture with cancer and other ailments. We emphasise however that these issues cannot be debated via purchased ‘hit jobs’.

On July 30, you have carried a clarification distancing the newspaper from the so-called advertorial. This is hardly equivalent to the full page devoted to scurrilous and false charges. The CCFI advertorial clearly violates the 2019 guidelines on advertorials and advertisements of the Press Council of India, as also the codes of the Advertising Standards Council of India. Further, other reputed publications do take editorial responsibility for the content of advertorials — since the issue at hand is of public health and medicine, see the standards of the American Family Physician as an instance. A R Vasavi and others

On behalf of the Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies

Editor’s note

Apart from the response being published under the right of reply, the letter being published has been chosen from several received from NGOS and activists. The adverto - rial was published on account of an inadvertent error, and was a clear departure from established practice in the paper. We carried a front page correction, dissociating ourselves from the charges in the advertorial and expressing regret, the very next day.

Our columns remain open to anyone mentioned in the adverto - rial by Crop Care Foundation, to respond and have their say. We have initiated action on internal accountability for what has happened. And we have no intention of benefiting financially from an advertorial that was carried as the result of a mistake.