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

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 with an eye toward the proposal to ban 27 pesticides in the country. At this point, we will not get into the merits of the arguments for/against pesticide use, or the global evidence linking chemicalised agriculture with cancer and other ailments. 

We emphasise however that these issues cannot be debated via purchased ‘hit jobs’.
 

On July 30, you have carried a clarification distancing the newspaper from the so-called advertorial. This is hardly equivalent to the full page devoted to scurrilous and false charges. 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. Further, other reputed publications do take editorial responsibility for the content of advertorials — since the issue at hand is of public health and medicine, see the standards of the American Family Physician as an instance.

A R Vasavi and others  

On behalf of the Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies

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Editor’s note

Apart from the response being published under the right of reply, the letter being published has been chosen from several received from NGOs and activists. The advertorial  was published on account of an inadvertent error, and was a clear departure from established practice in the paper. We carried a front page correction, dissociating ourselves from the charges in the advertorial and expressing regret, the very next day.

Our columns remain open to anyone mentioned in the advertorial by Crop Care Foundation, to respond and have their say. We have initiated action on internal accountability for what has happened. And we have no intention of benefiting financially from an advertorial that was carried as the result of a mistake.