All India Kisan Sabha launched a tirade against the UPA Government for not protecting the interests of peasants in the country and not implementing any tangible solution for their suffering.
At the 32nd AIKS Conference, which got off to a colourful start, Sabha president S. Ramachandran Pillai took strong exception to the US-India Agriculture Knowledge Initiative of the UPA, which would tighten the stranglehold of multi-national companies over Indian Agriculture.
Giving a call for sustained increasing of direct and indirect subsidies to the farming community, he criticised the Government for reducing them at the alleged behest of conditionalities of funding agencies like IMF and also gave examples of China and United States, where the subsidies were on the rise.
Demanding a white paper on performance of the 1994 WTO agreement and initiating a national debate, he suggested UPA of cautious treading of the path in case it proposed any new agreement related to WTO.
"The WTO negotiations were not working, hence India was entering into individual Foreign Trade Agreements, which may prove disastrous," he added in his presidential address. The packed Vignana Mandiram in Guntur came to life with the arrival of Koratala Satyanarayana Jyothi from Repalle in the district.
Condolences were paid to Harkishan Singh Surjeet and 15 other Communist and farmer leaders all over the country at the beginning of the meeting. The AIKS general secretary K. Varadarajan presented the AIKS annual report.
The West Bengal Health and Family Welfare Minister Suryakanta Mishra received the first copy of a book on Survey of Socio Economic Survey of Three Villages in Andhra Pradesh.
