Agriculture Minister Mullakkara Ratnakaran said on Wednesday that Kerala’s target for achieving total organic farming could be advanced.
The Minister was inaugurating a seminar on ‘Endosulfan: Issues and Safe Alternatives to Chemical Pesticides’ organised by the Farm Information Bureau here.
Mr. Ratnakaran said that Kerala had drawn up an organic farming policy and had set a ten-year target for total switch-over to organic farming. It would be possible to speed up the process. In places like Onattukara, farmers had taken the initiative to return to traditional farming practices without the use of pesticides.
He said that the State would be able to save large sums in health costs if it reduced the use of pesticides. Keralites, who was only 3.25 per cent of the population in the country, was now consuming 20 per cent of the medicines marketed in the country.
Refuting the Central government’s contention that there were hardly any alternatives to endosulfan, the Minister asked whether agriculture had been hit in Kerala because of the ban on endosulfan. The Centre had been forced to notify a ban in Kerala because of court verdict.
Karnataka could impose only a temporary ban because the State had powers only to order temporary ban on health grounds. As agriculture was a State subject, Kerala had been demanding that the States should be given powers to regulate use of pesticides.
Referring to the Central government’s stand that a national ban on endosulfan could be imposed only if other States too demanded it, Mr. Ratnakaran asked whether India had signed international agreements affecting the agriculture sector after all the States had asked for that. “Did it curtail the public distribution system because the States had demanded that?” he asked.
The seminar saw presentations on various alternatives to pesticides
and ways to achieve food safety.
