NEW DELHI: At a two-day meeting on "Food Safety and Food Rights: Emerging Challenges to Health, Nutrition and Farmers Livelihood", farmers' organisations, environmental groups, scientists and health and nutrition experts have decided to launch an action plan to defend the country's food security.

Addressing a joint press conference here on Thursday, Director of Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology Vandana Shiva and farmers' representative Krishnavir Chaudhary said the plan intended to defend India's food and farming from the threat of genetically modified organisms (GMO), processed and junk foods, the Indo-U.S. Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture and the proposed Integrated Food Law.

On April 8 — the day of global resistance against GMOs — a movement for GMO-free, patent-free villages would be launched. Navdanya, Bhartiya Krishak Samaj, Khethi Virasat and other sustainable agriculture and farm organisations would participate.

On May 10, to coincide with the 149th anniversary of the first movement of Independence of 1857, action would be taken to boycott Monsanto's Bt cotton seeds and launch "Asha Yatras" (Pilgrimages of Hope) in regions where Bt Cotton aggravated farmers' suicides.

"Farmers would be offered hope through distribution of open-pollinated varieties of diverse crops and training on ecology and organic farming," Dr. Shiva said.

The participants at the conference also decided to launch a People's Initiative in agriculture as an alternative to Monsanto-Walmart-led Indo-U.S. Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture, "which was reducing India's food and farming systems to a market for U.S. agribusiness, threatening farmers' livelihood, biological and food diversity, food safety and health safety."

The People's Initiative would monitor the U.S.-India Agreement, spread knowledge about GMOs, defend farmers' rights to seed and food sovereignty and defend citizen's right to safe, healthy, nutritious, adequately affordable and culturally-appropriate food.

Task forces were being set up to undertake research and build campaigns for spreading knowledge of food and farming that protects environment, farmers' livelihood and public health.

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