The current food inflation is a result of food output growth not keeping pace with population growth Few recall that, just last month, there was a food security summit in Rome. In sharp contrast to the almost overwhelming coverage of the Copenhagen climate summit, it attracted far lesser attention from the heads of governments, as also from the media. This is somewhat strange as a food (and water) crisis can hit...

“Much more needs to be done to improve the living standards of the poor”  The decline in poverty has not been as fast as one would have wished and it remains a major challenge before the country because the poor are still too poor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Sunday. Inaugurating the 92nd conference of the Indian Economic Association (IEA) at KIIT University here, Dr. Singh said much more...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said the economic reforms initiated by him almost two decades ago had reduced the number of poor, though much more was still needed to be done. “There is no evidence that the new economic policies have had an adverse effect on the poor,” Singh said at the annual conference of the Indian Economic Association here today. “The percentage of population below the poverty line has certainly not...

Small and marginal farmers would be the worst sufferers of climate change, Union Minister for Agriculture and Food Sharad Pawar said here on Wednesday. “In the wake of water scarcity, erratic rainfall and changing temperature regimes, in addition to prevalent diseases and threat of new race of wheat stem rust Ug99, small and marginal farmers will be challenged. With the cost of cultivation already high, even a slight reduction in productivity...

This has been quite a decade for global corporate leaders, volatile not only in terms of their actual fortunes, but even more so with respect to the shifting perceptions of society. When the decade began, large corporations and those at their helm were at the peak of their power, flush with riches delivered by the dotcom boom in the US economy as well as the vast opportunities created by easier...