-CivilSocietyOnline.com WHEN the Sri Lankan economy collapsed with a sigh recently, prominently sticking out of the debris was a failed attempt to take the island nation into full-scale organic agricultural production. The Rajapaksa government had virtually overnight ordered a switch to organic agriculture to save foreign exchange on the import of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But going organic, instead of being the solution, became a bigger problem with Food Crops failing and the...

-Deccan Herald The country suffered a massive crop diversity loss during the British Raj; later, the green revolution eroded much of the native crops The UN World Food Programme says that 45 million people worldwide are on the brink of starvation. The hunger situation in India is no less alarming. The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) in its report, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, 2020” stated that...

-Business Standard Experts feel this could keep prices of major farm commodities and products dependent on them, such as poultry and meat, at an elevated level for quite some time By the end of this financial year or perhaps even earlier, depending upon the crop cycle, India might be staring at a multi-year low closing inventory levels of several key farm commodities. Stocks of sugar, wheat, cotton and oilseeds both, with traders and...

-NITI Aayog Working Paper, ISBN: 978-81-953811-7-3 Abstract -  The importance of agriculture in an economy usually declines as it climbs the development ladder. Raising agriculture productivity has been known to be an important precursor. Labour productivity in agriculture can either be increased by higher land productivity or higher land availability per farmer and mechanisation. In India, however, the dramatic increase in land productivity through industrial farming has caused severe environmental damage and...

-Financial Express Crop loss, lower procurement to deplete FCI stocks; local supplies may suffice for PDS, free-ration schemes At Punjab’s Rajpura mandi, private traders are busy buying the wheat crop brought in by farmers at marginally above the minimum support price (MSP). Traders have been super-active in the mandi, one of the largest centres of wheat trade in the country, and their daily purchases often exceed the official procurement by the state-run...