5 months ago
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The Karnataka Rajya Raita Sangha (KRRS) and Green Brigade person expressed beardown interest implicit the projected India-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and has cautioned that it volition person a debilitating interaction connected tiny farmers and dairy sector.
Addressing media persons present connected Thursday, elder leaders of KRRS and Green Brigade said that signing of FTA volition devastate Indian agriculture and hitch retired agrarian employment isolated from pushing millions of tiny farmers retired of agriculture and dairy farming.
In a missive addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a memorandum to the PMO done the Deputy Commissioner, the KRRS and Green Brigade said the FRA is tailored to payment U.S. agribusiness giants astatine the outgo of Indian farmers, and the U.S. would usage India arsenic a dumping gait for its cultivation produce.
The signatories to the memorandum included elder leaders and patrons of the farmers’ question successful the State, including Chukki Nanjundawamy, girl of M.D. Nanjundaswamy, Ramanna Kenchallera from Haveri, Prof. Ravi Varma Kumar, elder advocate, K.T. Gangadhar and others.
The signatories questioned whether firm farmers successful the U.S. were much important than the Indian farmers, and warned that the duty-free import of U.S. maize would crush India’s largest maize-producing states similar Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra.
“India presently produces 422.81 lakh tonnes of maize, portion the U.S. unsocial grows 31% of planetary corn,” said the KRRS. It pointed retired that adjacent earlier the signing of the FTA, the maize prices had plunged from ₹2,200 per quintal past twelvemonth to ₹1,400 this twelvemonth and faulted the authorities for not opening procurement centres.
“If this is the information adjacent earlier the agreement, ideate the script erstwhile shiploads of duty-free maize are imported from the U.S.,” said the KRRS and Green Brigade.
Pointing retired that the dairy assemblage successful India supported much than 8 crore families, the FTA would jeopardise its future. Karnataka unsocial employs implicit 60,000 workers done KMF and its unions, according to the KMF, which warned that importing of U.S. dairy products would wipeout millions of women and tiny farmers who predominate the dairy assemblage successful India.
Urging the authorities not to succumb to the U.S. unit to motion the 1961 normal of the Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, the KRRS and the Green Brigade said that it would criminalise Indian farmers’ age-old rights to save, reuse, and speech seeds and unfastened the flood gates for genetically modified crops.
The copies of the missive and the memorandum were sent to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Union Agriculture Minister Shivaraj Singh Chouhan and others.
