BKU, Greenpeace join to battle GM rice

Greenpeace, the environmental activist group, has joined hands with the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) to campaign against field experiments of genetically modified (GM) rice in Haryana.

While releasing a report, "Rice Industry in Crisis", a Greenpeace spokesperson said here that rice exports had been severely hit "due to the contamination by GM rice" all over the world, and that India should refrain from such experiments.

Greenpeace and BKU activists said the GM rice was persuading the less-educated farmers in the Indo-Gangetic plains to look only at high returns,at the cost of sustainable agriculture and the environment.

They also alleged that crossing GM rice with traditional rice could begin a chain reaction to "contaminate" traditional crops.

The BKU Haryana president, Gurman Singh, said his party and Greenpeace had begun contact programmes with sarpanches of 6,000 villages in the state, to educate the farmers about the risk of GM rice cultivation.

Last October, BKU-led farmers set a testfield near Karnal on fire to protest against cultivation of GM rice.