Letter to BS: Crop Care Federation of India's accusations are misleading

The CCFI advertorial clearly violates the 2019 guidelines on advertorials and advertisements of the Press Council of India, as also the codes of the Advertising Standards Council of India

We are a group of academics, teachers, activists and journalists working on issues of rural India and sustainable agriculture. We write to protest against the publishing of a full page, 'advertorial’ on July 29 by the pesticide-manufacturers’ lobby group called Crop Care Federation of India (CCFI), which makes misleading, unfounded, false and defamatory charges against a number of activists, journalists, and academics who have worked on food, agriculture, and the impacts of pesticide use.

For a page marked as ‘advertorial’, the page has nothing to advertise about the CCFI or its products. Instead, they have attacked critics of synthetic pesticides, perhaps