 |
Kathmandu Friday February 23, 2001 Falgun 12, 2057.
|
Brighter side of hybrid seeds
Iwould like to make a few comments on the
news report "Hybrid seeds steadily replacing indigenous variety" (TKP, Feb
21,2001)
First of all, the "indigenous
variety" denotes a single variety. In fact, within Nepal there are more than hundred
varieties of different crops developed and recommended for cultivation.
The growing use of hybrid seeds is not at all
a threat to food security in the long run as was reported. Take countries like India and
China, the use of hybrid seeds have shown immense possibility of many-fold production of
foods like rice. The use of hybrid seeds is the only solution to feed our ever growing
human population.
It cannot be agreed that the continuous use
of hybrid seeds will lead to widespread use of genetically engineered seeds. You cannot
outrightly describe the genetically modified seeds as "suicidal" or
"terminator", as these seeds will help produce a large quantity of foods without
killing their potentialities, and recently the plan for inducing terminator gene has been
abandoned.
Not all hybrid seeds grow out of the season
have a shorter growing season or fetch better price without providing special cultivation
techniques that entail additional costs.
Varieties of rice - Masuli and Kanchhi Masuli
- reported as hybrid varieties are not the hybrid types. The information was attributed to
Nanu Jha. This wrong information needs to be corrected.
Ajambar Rai
Kathmandu - 9 |
