The Standing Committee on Chemicals and Fertilizers presented its report on ‘Insecticides and Pesticides – Promotion and Development including Safe Usage – Licensing Regime for Insecticides’ on December 19, 2023. Pesticides are broadly of four types: insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and bio-pesticides. Herbicides kill/control the growth of weeds, and have the …
pakistan is under siege. Hordes of tiny pests that have developed a penchant for defying the commonly used pesticides are swamping the nation, ticking away like a time bomb in the soft underbelly of the country's economic system. These hordes have been generated
Has the fear about a stolen future really hit us legislators? Till the end of May, the debate over what is surely the most controversial book of the year (The Stolen Future, by Theo Colborn and others) had been acrimonious. The book had said that pesticides and persistent organic compounds …
GENETICS could come to the rescue of cotton farmers in Australia. A genetically engineered pesticide will be introduced in the country to battle the pests which have devastated cotton crops. The enemy is the long-standing predator of cotton crops, the boll caterpillar, which has developed such a powerful resistance to …
Bangalore-based scientist C N Sastri has developed a non-toxic eco- friendly insecticide called bugsac. The insecticide -which is prepared from purely herbal ingredients - acts at both the cerebral and cellular levels. It causes the coagulation of the body fluid system of insects, resulting in immediate death. Bugsac is effective …
THE Germans may have stopped importing Indian tea treated with chemical fertilisers; and pesticides, but the use of these cannot be entirely prohibited because farming is the mainstay of an estimated 70 million people in our country. The film is an effort to educate farmers on the safe use of …
Johnson Wax, a US based company, has come up with a microbe-based insecticide that, it claims, will be able to put off the most persistent of cockroaches. Two varieties of the microbe, Bacillus thuringiensis, have been identified that can give cockroaches lethal cases of indigestion, Different strains of the microbe …
Genetic engineers at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, have developed a new variety of cotton which is capable of destroying its insect pests. A gene from a soil bacterium, Bacillus thurengensis - which is a naturally occuring insecticide -is incorporated into the cotton varieties. The gene encodes a …
A DELICATE plant, producing yellow flowers -Calceolaria andina is proving to be the nemesis for a notoriously high-resistant variety of tobacco whitefly, Bemisia tabaci. Two chemicals from the plant, which grows high on the Andean slopes, has been found to be fatal for the B- biotype species of the pest. …
SCIENTISTS are calling attention to a grave threat that faces plant breeding - the declining number of pollinators like insects, bees, moths, bats, flies and birds. These organisms do a world of good to most plants in land-based eco- systems, by helping ,them reproduce by means of pollination. And when …
A BEETLE known as tpe coffee borer (Hypothenemus hampei) is the major insect pest bothering the coffee growers of the world today. Together with some other close relatives, the creature leads what -by normal standards -can be called a strange life. The cycle begins and ends with a single female …
The government's decision to change the way of distributing urea aimed at achieving self-sufficiency in rice production, has boomeranged. There is wide-spread food shortage and some rural areas are facing the threat of malnutrition. Indonesia's rice farms. ravaged by wrong -policies It all began with the government deciding to promote …
MALARIA, the dreaded killer disease, is staging a comeback with a vengeance. Thought to have been controlled to a large extent if not eradicated altogether, its recurring presence today, has put a formidable question mark on the methods used to eliminate it. The spotlight has returned to the well-known but …
INDIA's first home-made, environment-friendly biopesticide promises a bountiful harvest for both manufacturers and farmers. The biopesticides, Trichoderma harzianum and Gliocladiuni virens, have been prepared from soil-based micro-organisms and fungi, through university-industry collaboration, said A N Mukhopadhvay, dean, G B Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar, UP, during a presentation …
Deadly pesticides pose a serious hazard to the environment in the developing world. These countries continue to import banned pesticides from the West. At least $72.5 million of 12 banned pesticides, called the-Dirty Dozen, were exported from the US between 1991 and 1994. Worse, these dangerous chemicals end up in …
PESTICIDES: universally derided for being the bane of today"s environment. Used worldwide without adequate checks and safeguards, they infiltrate soil, air and water, ravage food chains and play havoc with human as well ecological health. India accounts for one-third of the total pesticide poisoning cases in the world. The us …
FROM rendering aroma to curries and pickles to warding off mustard pests - the common spice fennel or Foeniculum vulgare (popular name saunf) has come a long way indeed. At the Lucknow- based Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (CIMAP), experiments demontrated that saunf grown in between rows of …
EARUER this year, the German multinational, Hoechst, found itself the target of a fierce confrontation, the battle lines being drawn between the greens and the scientific community. All that the company wanted to achieve was to test *a effectiveness of a new weed killer, but instead had to face the …
THE Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has formulated quality specifications for neem-based pesticides as no specific quality control standards had hitherto been fixed. The growing demand for the ecofriendly pest control agents worldwide prompted them to come up with the two new standards - is 14299:95 and is 14300:95. These …
