Mystery seeds: TN’s seed certification directorate on precautionary mode

COIMBATORE: For around one week now, Tamil Nadu’s directorate of seed certification has been on a precautionary mode against ‘mystery seeds’, which have been cropping up in parcels across the globe.
Officials of the directorate said they had asked deputy directors and seed inspectors from their enforcement wing to inspect seed selling points across the state, to identify mystery seeds, if any.However, they said they had not come across them thus far.
Over the past weeks, parcels containing packets of unidentified ‘mystery seeds’ have been surfacing in the US, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Japan and European countries, raising fears and concerns that they could be those of alien invasive species or might be an attempt to introduce pathogens. The Union ministry of agriculture said the seeds ‘can be a threat to the bio-diversity of our country’.
On August 6, the ministry sent a memorandum to all state departments of agriculture, and state seed certification agencies and asked the bodies to be ‘vigilant about the suspicious seed parcels’.
The memorandum cited the US Department of Agriculture’s terms — ‘brushing scam’, and ‘agricultural smuggling’ — for the phenomenon.
Following this, from August 7, a total of 15 deputy directors of seed certification and 70 seed inspectors of the enforcement wing of the state’s directorate of seed certification had been inspecting seed selling points in all districts to find whether the mystery seeds have made their way here, said M Subbiah, director of seed certification and organic certification.
They have inspected a total of 1,766 selling points across the state “So far no such incident has been reported,” he said
“Apart from these inspections, we have also taken up creating awareness about the mystery seeds among farmers, and public,” he said.
There are 11,282 licensed seed selling points in the state, which sell notified varieties of seeds, which have a seed certificate, and non-notified varieties which must have enrolment certificates. All around the year, personnel of the enforcement wing of the directorate inspect these selling points.
Since April, they have conducted 25,436 inspections at these selling points. “Our target this year is to conduct a minimum of 68,500 seed selling point inspections,” he added.