"Bangalore,KARNATAKA President of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha Basavaraj Tambaki on Tuesday demanded that the United Progressive Alliance Government at the Centre to table the report of the M.S. Swaminathan Committee on Farmers Problems and Solutions in Parliament, so that it could take up remedial measures to prevent suicides in the farm sector..." (The Hindu, November 2, 2011)

JAMMU, Nov. 3 -- Consortium of Indian Farmers Association (CIFA) has demanded immediate implementation of Dr M S Swaminathan committee report on Agriculture to provide remunerative prices to the farmers for" agriculture produce, separate budget Oil agriculture on the pattern of railway budget and providing seeds, fertilizers and other agriculture inputs to the farming community on subsidized rates for the overall socio economic development of the farmers... (Early Times, November 4, 2011)

‘exploitative
agriculture offers great dangers if carried out with
only an immediate profit or production motive. The
emerging exploitative farming community in India should
become aware of this. Intensive cultivation of land without
conservation of soil fertility and soil structure would
lead, ultimately, to the springing up of deserts. Irrigation
without arrangements for drainage would result in soils
getting alkaline or saline. Indiscriminate use of pesticides,
fungicides and herbicides could cause adverse
changes in biological balance and lead to an increase in
the incidence of cancer and other diseases, through the
toxic residues present in the grains or other edible parts.
Unscientific tapping of undergroundwater will lead to the
rapid exhaustion of this wonderful capital resource left to
us through ages of natural farming. The rapid replacement
of numerous locally adapted varieties with one or
two high-yielding strains in large contiguous areas would
result in the spread of serious diseases capable of wiping
out entire crops, as happened prior to the Irish potato
famine of 1854 and the Bengal rice famine in 1942.
Therefore the initiation of exploitative agriculture without
a proper understanding of the various consequences
of every one of the changes introduced into traditional
agriculture, and without first building up a proper scientific
and training base to sustain it, may only lead us, in
the long run, into an era of agricultural disaster rather
than one of agricultural prosperity.’ (Svaminathan, 1968, proponent indické zelené revoluce, in Kesavan et al 2010:908)

A drawback of the intensification of rice production has been negative externalities
associated with increasing chemical use (Cleaver 1972, Byerlee 1992). These include
pest resistance and, subsequently, pest resurgence (Barbier 1989, Conway and Barbier
1990), negative human health impacts (Kishi et al. 1995, Murphy et al. 1999, Pawukir and
Mariyono 2002, Kishi 2005) and environmental contamination (Bond 1996, Pretty and Hine
2005). These externalities are the publicised justification for the Indonesian Government’s
gradual shift away from promoting chemical intensive agriculture to more environmentally
sound agricultural practices (Rolling and van de Fliert 1994), in particular, integrated pest
management (IPM).
IPM comprises a package of technologies that utilise natural predators and the careful
timing and dosage of chemical pesticides to control pests. The adoption of IPM was
one of the most important contributions to decreased use of pesticides in Indonesian rice
agriculture. An IPM programme was established to disseminate knowledge of IPM to
farmers, using the ‘learning by doing’ method through sending farmers to farmer’s field
schools (FFS) (Feder et al. 2004a). A major stimulant for the widespread dissemination of
IPM technology was the prohibition of 57 problematic pesticide brands and the removal of
subsidies on pesticides by 1990 (Untung 1996).