Research Articles - Kisan Mitra

Does ‘No Pesticide’ Reduce Suicides?

Lakshmi Vijayakumar
SNEHA and Voluntary Health Services, Adyar, Chennai, India,dr_svk@vsnl.com

R. Satheesh-Babu
Mamata Medical College, Khammam, India

Abstract

Introduction: Ingestion of pesticides is the most common method of suicide, particularly in China, Sri Lanka and India. Reported pesticide suicides in India numbered 22,000 in the year 2006.z

Method: Four villages in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India that had stopped using chemical pesticides in favour of non-pesticide management (NPM) were visited to assess any change in suicide incidence before and after discontinuation of chemical pesticides. Four similar villages in the same region that continued to use chemical pesticides were used as controls for comparison.

Results: In the pesticide-free villages there were 14 suicides before introduction of NPM and only three suicides thereafter. The percentage of suicides not reported to authorities was 47%.

Conclusion: Restriction of pesticide availability and accessibility by NPM has the potential to reduce pesticide suicides, in addition to psychosocial and health interventions.

New farming practices can increase yields and lower pollution in China, Stanford study shows

An integrated approach to managing soil and crops could help meet the demand of rapidly rising population while reducing greenhouse gases that drive climate change.

BY LAURA SEAMAN

Hector Garcia/Creative Commons

A new study compares current farming practices in China for staple crops including wheat to alternative approaches that can increase yield and lower environmental damage.

Farming practices in China could be designed to simultaneously improve yields and reduce environmental damages substantially, according to a new study by Stanford biology Professor Peter Vitousek and a team of his colleagues at China Agricultural University.
The research paper, published in Nature,compared current farming practices for staple crops corn, wheat and rice in Eastern and Southern China to three alternative approaches:

Incremental improvements of the current method, aimed at boosting crop growth and improving environmental quality
A yield-maximizing approach with no regard to either financial or environmental cost
An integrated soil-crop system management” (ISSM) approach that used crop models to redesign the production system

The integrated soil-crop system approach aims to tailor decisions like crop selection, planting, sowing and nutrient management to each field’s conditions in order both to enhance yields and to minimize environmental damage.
Nitrogen fertilizer is used extensively in modern agriculture – and nowhere more than in China. Overall, Chinese farmers overuse fertilizer, with much of it ultimately polluting the air and water and contributing to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year. The production and transport of fertilizer also contributes significantly to agriculture’s share of greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change.
In total, the team tested the four farming methods in 153 site-years of experiments between 2009 and 2012 in widely distributed sites within China’s regions of intensive agriculture. Of the four methods, the yield-maximizing approach produced the highest yields of corn, wheat and rice. Yields from ISSM treatment were a close second, reaching 97 to 99 percent of the levels seen in yield-maximizing fields. Crops grown in the ISSM approach also required much less fertilizer, and used it much more efficiently, resulting in nearly no wasted nitrogen and significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions.
“This is exciting work, because the joint challenges of increasing agricultural yields and reducing the environmental costs of agriculture are particularly stark in China – which has less farmland than the United States, a population that’s four times greater and really horrendous levels of air and water pollution,” Vitousek said. “If we can combine much higher yields with much lower environmental consequences in China, there is real hope that those challenges can be met around the world. It’s globally significant that agricultural science in China is meeting these challenges in fundamental ways, and it’s a pleasure to collaborate with our colleagues there.”
The authors predict that if farmers can reach even 80 percent of the yields seen in the study’s ISSM test fields by 2030 (when China’s human population is expected to reach its peak) on the same amount of land that Chinese farmers cultivated in 2012, grain production could then meet demand for both human and animal consumption.
This would help ensure food security in China and make China’s role in global food markets more deliberate and predictable. At the same time, nitrogen losses could be cut by nearly half, thereby saving many lives, and total greenhouse gas emission could fall by one quarter. Moreover, the ISSM approach could be applied in other areas of the world, where it would boost global yields of major grain crops on existing farmland, while simultaneously reducing nitrogen use, greenhouse gas emissions and economic costs to farmers.
Vitousek is the Clifford G. Morrison Professor in Population and Resource Studies in the Department of Biology and is a faculty affiliate of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford. He also is a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and is a professor, by courtesy, in the Department of Environmental Earth System Science, School of Earth Sciences.

Media Contact

Peter Vitousek, Biology: vitousek@stanford.edu, (650) 725-1866
Dan Stober, Stanford News Service: (650) 721-6965, dstober@stanford.edu

Land and Income Inequalities in Rural Andhra Pradesh

C. SAMBI REDDY, K. JOJAIAH,
N. VENUGOPALA RAO, I. NARASAIAH
http://www.cpim.org/marxist/201202-Land-Inequalities-AP.pdf

Effect of Different Nutrient Management Options on Rice under System Method of Cultivation – A review

Author(s): P. Sri Rajitha and K.I. Reddy | International Journal of Plant, Animal and Environmental Sciences | January – March 2014
Rice (Oryza sativa (L.)) is one of the most important stable food crops in the world. In Asia, more than two billion people are getting 60-70 per cent of their energy requirement from rice and its derived products. In India, rice occupies an area of 44 million hectare with an average production of 90 million tonnes with productivity of 2.0 tonnes per hectare. Demand for rice is growing every year and it is estimated that in 2010 and 2025 AD the requirement would be 100 and 140 million tonnes respectively. To sustain present food self-sufficiency and to meet future food requirements, India has to increase its rice productivity by 3 per cent per annum [21]. Rice cultivation requires large quantity of water and for producing one kg rice, about 3000 – 5000 litres of water depending on the different rice cultivation methods such as transplanted rice, direct sown rice (wet seeded), alternate wetting and drying method (AWD), system of rice intensification (SRI) and aerobic rice. Owing to increasing water scarcity, a shifting trend towards less water demanding crops against rice is noticed in most part of the India and this warrants alternate methods of rice cultivation that aims at higher water and crop productivity. There are evidences that cultivation of rice through system of rice intensification (SRI) can increase rice yields by two to three fold compared to current yield levels.
Download link: http://www.ijpaes.com/admin/php/uploads/447_pdf.pdf

Low Economic Efficiency of Irrigation Water Resource in Krishna Western Delta of Andhra Pradesh Demanding Water Management Interventions

Low Economic Efficiency of Irrigation Water Resource in Krishna Western Delta of Andhra Pradesh Demanding Water Management Interventions
Author(s): Dr. A. Siva Sankar, Dr. B. Ravindra Reddy and N. Nirmal Ravi Kumar, Journal of International Academic Research for Multidisciplinary | February 2014
The story of food security in the 21st century in India is likely to be closely linked to the story of water security. Today, the water resource is under severe threat. The past experiences in India indicated inappropriate management of irrigation has led to severe problems. Considering the importance of irrigation water resource efficiency, Krishna Western Delta (KWD) of Andhra Pradesh was purposively selected for this in depth study, as the farming community in this area are severely affected due to severe soil salinity and water logging problems and hence, adoption of different water saving crop production technologies deserve special mention. It is quite disappointing that, canals, tube wells and filter points and other wells could not contribute much to the irrigated area in KWD. Due to fewer contributions from these sources, the net area irrigated also showed declining growth at a rate of –3.98 per cent. Chilly is the most profitable crop cultivated in KWD. Regarding paddy, it was highest for System of Rice Intensification (SRI) technology (1.16) than semi-dry and transplanted technologies. The reduction in irrigation cost in SRI and semi-dry paddy production technologies is significant, as indicated by the decline to a tune of 45 and 55 percents respectively over transplanted technology. This clearly indicates that, by less water usage, paddy returns can be boosted by adopting SRI and semi-dry production technologies. Both the system-level and field-level interventions should be addressed to solve the issues / problems of water management. The environment in the State of Andhra Pradesh in general and in KWD in particular, with reference to the execution of water management aspects is congenial for planning various technological interventions. The enabling environment, institutional roles and functions and management instruments are posing favourable picture for executing the water management interventions in KWD. This facilitates the farming community to harvest good crop per unit of water resource used in the production programme.
Download link: http://www.jiarm.com/Feb2014/paper10642.pdf

Rhythms of the herd: Long term dynamics in seed choice by Indian farmers

Glenn Davis Stone, Andrew Flachs,
Scholars in many disciplines have approached the question of how humans combine environmental learning (or empirical assessments) and social learning (or emulation) in choosing technologies. As both a consumer item and the subject of local indigenous knowledge, commercial crop seeds provide a valuable window into these processes. Previous research on seed choices by cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh, India, uncovered short-term seed fads, or herding, indicating agricultural deskilling in which environmental
learning had broken down. Unknown was if the faddism (and the underlying deskilling) would continue or even be exacerbated by the spread of genetically modiﬁed seeds. Data covering 11 years of seed choices in the same sample villages are now available; we
combine analysis of this unusual data set with ethnographic observation. We ﬁnd that herding has continued and intensiﬁed. We also ﬁnd an unexpected emergent pattern of cyclical fads; these resemble classic models of successive innovation adoption where
periodicity is introduced from outside the system, but we argue that it periodicity is actually generated by an internal dynamic.
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/research/stone/Rhythms_of_the_Herd.pdf

Myths and realities of Gujarat Agriculture: various articles

[img]2013 agril growth [img]2013 agril output

Agriculture_in_a_High_Growth_State_Case_of_Gujarat_1960_to_2006
Agriculture_in_Gujarat gujaratEconomic_Liberalisation_and_Indian_Agriculture_A_Statewise_Analysis
Growth_and_Structural_Change_in_the_Economy_of_Gujarat_19702000
Labour_and_Employment_in_Gujarat
Labour_and_Employment_under_Globalisation_The_Case_of_Gujarat
Modis_Gujarat_and_Its_Little_Illusions
Regional_Sources_of_Growth_Acceleration_in_India
Gujarat’s_agricultural_growth_story_IRAP_2010 Secret_of_Gujarats_Agrarian_Miracle_after_2000
Gujarats_Growth_Story
Secret_of_Gujarats_Agrarian_Miracle_after_2000
Sources_of_Economic_Growth_and_Acceleration_in_Gujarat
Temporal_and_Spatial_Variations_in_Agricultural_Growth_and_Its_Determinants

Pesticides ‘making bees smaller’

Bumblebees exposed to a widely-used pesticide produced workers with lower body mass, scientists
theguardian.com, Monday 20 January 2014 10.01 GMT

Bumblebees could be shrinking because of exposure to a widely-used pesticide, a study suggests.
Experts fear smaller bees will be less effective at foraging for nectar and carrying out their vital task of distributing pollen.
Scientists in the UK conducted laboratory tests which showed how a pyrethroid pesticide stunted the growth of worker bumblebee larvae, causing them to hatch out reduced in size.
Gemma Baron, one of the researchers from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, said: “We already know that larger bumblebees are more effective at foraging.
“Our result, revealing that this pesticide causes bees to hatch out at a smaller size, is of concern as the size of workers produced in the field is likely to be a key component of colony success, with smaller bees being less efficient at collecting nectar and pollen from flowers.”
Pyrethroid pesticides are commonly used on flowering crops to prevent insect damage.
The study, the first to examine the pesticides’ impact across the entire lifecycle of bumblebees, tracked the growth of bee colonies over a four month period.
Researchers exposed half the bees to a pyrethroid while monitoring the size of the colonies as well as weighing individual insects on micro-scales.
They found that worker bees from colonies affected by the pesticides over a prolonged period grew less and were significantly smaller than unexposed bees.
Findings from the study, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc), appear in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
Professor Mark Brown, who led the Royal Holloway group, said: “Bumblebees are essential to our food chain so it’s critical we understand how wild bees might be impacted by the chemicals we are putting into the environment.
“We know we have to protect plants from insect damage but we need to find a balance and ensure we are not harming our bees in the process.”
Currently a Europe-wide moratorium on the use of three neonicotinoid pesticides is in force because of their alleged harmful effect on bees.
As a result, the use of other types of pesticide, including pyrethroids, is likely to increase, say the researchers.
Dr Nigel Raine, another member of the Royal Holloway team who will be speaking at this week’s national Bee Health Conference in London, said: “Our work provides a significant step forward in understanding the detrimental impact of pesticides other than neonicotinoids on wild bees.
“Further studies using colonies placed in the field are essential to understand the full impacts, and conducting such studies needs to be a priority for scientists and governments.”
The scientists sprayed the pesticide on the bees’ pollen feed at the concentration recommended for oilseed rape.
Colony growth and reproductive output were monitored for up to 14 weeks.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/20/pesticides-making-bees-smaller
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1365-2664/earlyview

The Trials of Genetically Modified Food: BT EGGPLANT AND AYURVEDIC MEDICINE IN INDIA

Chithprabha Kudlu
Washington University
Glenn Davis Stone
Washington University
Abstract
Although planting of genetically modified (GM) crops has topped 148 million ha.
worldwide, direct consumption of GM foods remains extremely rare. The obstacles to GM
foods are highly varied and they can provide windows into important cultural dynamics.
India’s heated controversy over its would-be first GM food—Bt brinjal (eggplant)—is
driven not only by common concerns over testing and corporate control of food, but by
its clash with the Ayurvedic medical establishment. GM brinjal may outcross with wild
relatives commonly used in Ayurvedic medicine, and claims that outcrossing would not
affect medical efficacy miss the point. Ayurveda emphasizes polyherbal treatments and
has developed an epistemology oriented towards complex combinations of compounds.
As such it does not recognize the authority of specific studies of transgene effects. The
conflict is not with genetic modification per se, but with the reductionism that is central
to the biotechnology approvals process. This opposition has played a significant role in
the government moratorium on the plant.
Keywords: biotechnology, genetically modified food, Ayurveda, India, regulation
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/research/stone/Kudlu%20and%20Stone%202013.pdf

How Roundup weedkiller can promote cancer, new study from India reveals

1. How Roundup weedkiller can promote cancer, new study reveals
Sayer Ji
GreenMedInfo, 11 Nov 2013
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/how-roundup-weedkiller-can-promote-cancer-new-study-reveals-1?page=1
[Links to sources and graphics included at weblink above]
Roundup herbicide (glyphosate) is in our air, rain, groundwater, soil and most food in the U.S., and an increasing body of research reveals it has cancer-promoting properties.
Researchers from the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research have recently confirmed the carcinogenic potential of Roundup herbicide using human skin cells (HaCaT) exposed to extremely low concentrations of the world’s best selling herbicide.
The researchers previously reported on glyphosate’s tumor promoting potential in a two-stage mouse skin carcinogenesis model[i] through its disruption of proteins that regulate calcium (Ca2+- ) signaling and oxidative stress (SOD 1), but were unable in these investigations to identify the exact molecular mechanisms behind how glyphosate contributes to tumor promotion.
The new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal ISRN Dermatology,[ii] sought out to clarify the exact mode of tumorigenic action, finding the likely mechanism behind glyphosate’s cancer promoting properties is through the downregulation of mitochondrial apoptotic (self-destructive) signaling pathways, as well as through the disruption of a wide range of cell signaling and regulatory components. Cell proliferative effects were induced by concentrations lower than .1 mM, and as low as 0.01 mM, which is four orders of magnitude lower than concentrations commonly used in GM agricultural applications (e.g. 50 mM). The fact that lower concentrations were more effective at inducing proliferation than higher concentrations (which suppressed cell growth), indicates that Roundup is a potent endocrine disrupter, and further highlights why conventional toxicological risk assessments are inadequate because they do not account for the fact that as concentrations are reduced certain types of toxicity — e.g. endocrine disruption — actually increase.
The researchers used the product Roundup Original (glyphosate 41%, polyethoxethyleneamine (POEA) ≅15%—Monsanto Company, St. Louis, MO, USA), and observed the following changes to human skin cells induced through exposure to this chemical mixture:
*Significant increases in cell proliferation (via disruption of CA2+ levels, i.e. decreased levels)
Increases oxidative stress, as measured by levels of ROS (reactive oxygen species)
*Cell-cycle dysregulation, marked by an accumulation of cells in S-phase (hallmark feature of cancer)
*Increased proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA), a marker for increased cell proliferation
*Increased Bromodeoxyuridin (BrdU), a marker for increased cell proliferation
*Decreases in the level of the protein IP3R1, an indication of resistance to cell death
*Increases in Bcl-2 protein, a tumor promoter gene product
*Decreases in Bax proteins, a tumor suppressor gene product
*Caspase suppression (associated with prevention of cell death)
*Changes in the expression of the Ca2+- binding family of proteins (S100 family) S100A6/S100A9, associated with various cancers.
It is important to emphasize that while the researchers observed cell proliferation-associated changes in the expression of the Ca2+- binding proteins S100A6/A9 following glyphosate exposure to human skin cells, the implications of these findings reach beyond the skin cell lineage. They explained that related modifications of the expression pattern of S100A6/A9 protein have also been found in “hepatocellular carcinoma [15], lung cancer [16], colorectal cancer [17], and melanoma [18].”
The study included a diagram (shown below) representing graphically the multiple ways in which glyphosate disrupts cellular structure/function to contribute to uncontrolled cell proliferation.
The researchers summarized their findings as follows:
“In conclusion, in this study, we demonstrated that glyphosate may possibly exert proliferative effect in HaCaT cells by activating Ca2+ binding proteins to promote the imbalance of intracellular Ca2+ homeostasis and lessen SOD1 to increase ROS generation. This effect was partially reversed by treatment with antioxidant NAC indicating connections between oxidative stress and hypocalcaemia. Reduced Ca2+ levels enhance Bcl-2 and decrease Bax, subsequently leading to decrease in cytochrome c to stimulate further decrease of caspase 3 via the downregulation of IP3R1 level, thus halting apoptosis. The present study for the first time provides insight into the mechanism of glyphosate-induced neoplastic potential in mammalian skin system.”
It should be noted that their observation that the carcinogenicity of Roundup may be suppressed by the antioxidant n-acetyl-cysteine (NAC), which is a precursor to the cellular detoxifier and antioxidant known as glutathione and a readily available dietary supplement, has important implications, owing to how widespread exposure to Roundup herbicide has become, both through environmental exposures in air, soil, rain and groundwater, as well as in the tens of thousands of unlabeled products containing GM ingredients contaminated with physiologically significant levels of this chemical.
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2. Emptying of Intracellular Calcium Pool and Oxidative Stress Imbalance Are Associated with the Glyphosate-Induced Proliferation in Human Skin Keratinocytes HaCaT Cells
Jasmine George and Yogeshwer Shukla
ISRN Dermatology
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 825180, 12 pages
Full text available free at:
http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/dermatology/2013/825180/
Proteomics Laboratory, Indian Institute of Toxicology Research (CSIR), Mahatma Gandhi Marg, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh 226001, India
Abstract
We demonstrated that glyphosate possesses tumor promoting potential in mouse skin carcinogenesis and SOD 1, calcyclin (S100A6), and calgranulin B (S100A9) have been associated with this potential, although the mechanism is unclear. We aimed to clarify whether imbalance in between levels and oxidative stress is associated with glyphosate-induced proliferation in human keratinocytes HaCaT cells. The levels, ROS generation, and expressions of G1/S cyclins, IP3R1, S100A6, S100A9, and SOD 1, and apoptosis-related proteins were investigated upon glyphosate exposure in HaCaT cells. Glyphosate (0.1 mM) significantly induced proliferation, decreases , and increases ROS generation in HaCaT cells, whereas antioxidant N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC) pretreatment reverts these effects which directly indicated that glyphosate induced cell proliferation by lowering levels via ROS generation. Glyphosate also enhanced the expression of G1/S cyclins associated with a sharp decrease in G0/G1 and a corresponding increase in S-phases. Additionally, glyphosate also triggers S100A6/S100A9 expression and decreases IP3R1 and SOD 1 expressions in HaCaT cells. Notably, Ca2+ suppression also prevented apoptotic related events including Bax/Bcl-2 ratio and caspases activation. This study highlights that glyphosate promotes proliferation in HaCaT cells probably by disrupting the balance in between levels and oxidative stress which in turn facilitated the downregulation of mitochondrial apoptotic signaling pathways.

Category Archive Research Articles