CCFI claims Greenpeace bent on derailing Indian agriculture 

The Crop Care Federation of India (CCFI) furthered its stand against foreign funded NGOs in India at an event here on Wednesday where controversial ecologist and former Greenpeace member Dr. Patrick Moore shared the stage with officials from the body. CCFI had decided to file a Rs. 50 crore defamation suit against Greenpeace’s “baseless” report on pesticide residues in tea (‘Trouble Brewing’) earlier this month.

When asked by Business Line (BL) about the rationale behind filing a lawsuit against the environmental NGO, especially when none of the tea companies had done so, the response was pivoted on Greenpeace’s secrecy about data. “Some of these NGOs want to create a problem for the country. We believe Greenpeace has cooked their data so we have asked them to show it to us. The report was published to spread panic,” said Rajju Shroff, chairman, CCFI.

Neha Saigal, senior campaigner for Greenpeace India’s sustainability campaign, refuted Shroff’s claims and said that the organisation was not legally obligated to provide any data to CCFI. “When tea companies have asked us for data and even the raw material we have shared it with them. If they’re interested in sharing it with CCFI then that’s their decision to take. The legal notices they have served us have no basis but we’ve responded to them,” she told BL.

Saigal also alluded to Tata Global Beverages’ (TGBL) recent commitment towards conducting research on non-pesticide management under the Sustainable Plant Protection Formulation (SPPF) project to promote ecological agriculture and stated that “when 60% of tea giants including TGBL are taking up our concerns in the report, it obviously shows that it has scientific credibility.”

Dr. Moore, however, dismissed such commitments and said it was what large companies did on a regular basis to get Greenpeace off their backs. “That’s a typical response. Let’s watch what they do over the next few years. It’s like Walmart saying they’ll phase out PVC from their packaging 10 years ago but they’re still using it. Many companies take that stand. They’ll go out of business if they try to grow tea without pesticides,” he believed.

The Greenpeace report, which had found pesticide residues including DDT in a number of tea samples, has been available in the public domain since August.

“We had been engaging with tea companies for the last six months. We let them know that it was our responsibility to publish the report publicly because tea is a public commodity. All relevant data including chromatograms have been given to the two or three tea companies which asked for it,” said Saigal who also questioned the timing of the CCFI event.

Shroff said that CCFI was planning to file the case at the Bombay High Court. Such report, he claimed, tarnished the reputation of pesticide companies and farmers alike and was confident that NGOs’ motives would be exposed on applying legal pressure.

“Even if our sales are not affected, our reputation is hit. Our data does not support their findings. We are not in the business of poisoning the environment. We are not targeting just one NGO but all those derailing Indian agriculture. It’s unacceptable to not provide data,” said S Ganesan, Advisor (Public & Policy Affairs), CCFI.

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