Heavy use of chemical fertilisers and harmful pesticides is ruining the natural fertility of farmland and putting people's health at risk, India's Union Minister of State for Agriculture, Ram Nath Thakur, told farmers in West Bengal as he urged them to return to natural farming.
He was speaking on Tuesday, 10 November, at a Khet Bachao Abhiyan ("Save the Fields campaign") event at Media in the Swarupnagar block of North 24 Parganas district. West Bengal's agriculture minister, Dudhkumar Mondal, and local farmers attended.
Thakur said the nationwide campaign was decided at a high-level meeting on 28 and 29 September with the Union agriculture minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, farm scientists and the vice-chancellors of agricultural universities. It runs from 22 October to 30 November. He came to West Bengal after Bihar and Jharkhand.
"If the land becomes poisoned, people cannot stay healthy either," he told the farmers. He called on farmers and agricultural officers to work together to protect soil health and the safety of the next generation, and told reporters that the campaign's main aim was to protect both farmland and human health.
Mondal said the state had begun encouraging farmers to stop overusing fertilisers and pesticides and to farm naturally. Without timely awareness, he said, the damage to farmland would grow and health risks with it. Farming without chemical fertiliser used to be the norm, he added, and the effort now is to bring farmers back to it.
He also spoke about women in farming: many women in Bengal now grow papaya, okra and beans naturally in their courtyards and meet their families' needs from them.
The campaign across the border raises a question Bangladeshi farmers also know well: how to restore soil health while using fewer chemicals. Agricare24 carried the report from ETV Bharat.
Photo: Biswarup Ganguly / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
Source: Agricare24
Comments
(0)