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BBC reports:

Professor Satbir Kaur said the study ruled out other factors such as age, alcohol intake and smoking, concluding that the probable cause of this fundamental change in the building block of life was use of pesticide sprays.

"We found significant change in the DNA, so the cancer risk is greatly increased when the extent of DNA damage is very high," he said.

Salil Singhal of the industry trade association, the Crop Care Federation of India, said that this causal link could not be possible.

"There is no pesticide in use today which can cause cancer," he said.

Mr Singhal said farmers use sprays only a few times each season.

But this correspondent found farmers who needed to use them far more than that in order to keep ahead of the pests.

The link between use of pesticides and cancer may not have been established but it has been already established that pesticides, chemical fertilizers is getting into our food chain and affecting human body. This problem is multifaceted and more serious. There are many farmers who are not highly educated and believe that using too much pesticide or chemical fertilizers is good for crops. On the other hand, the population is growing around the world but the land has not increased at the same rate. So the pressure upon existing crop land is growing. Farmers need to grow more crops to feed the growing number of people and how they are doing it? by using new breed of crops and using fertilizers to artificially increase the land's production capability. In the end, it can be established that harmful chemical is getting into our body. It is not the farmers only that are getting affected from chemicals but also the consumers who are eating those foods.

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