Almost one in every five suicides in the world is committed by self-poisoning with pesticide, which mostly occur in rural, agricultural areas of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), states a new publication entitled 'Preventing Suicide: A resource for pesticide registrars and regulators'. Published jointly by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the booklet says that the adoption of green revolution technology...

-TheWire.in Scientists have found that, compared to rice, alternative grains experienced smaller declines in yield under climate extremes. However, there is a catch. Alternative grains like millets and sorghum could help India cope better with the impact of global heating on agriculture and variations in supply than continuing to rely on rice and wheat alone. This is the heartening conclusion of a new study, but it also cautions that the cultivation area...

-The Hindu Business Line Shift of focus to maize, sorghum, millets would help: Research Hyderabad: Excessive focus on cereal production and the resulting pressure on groundwater in some States is no news. But this, a UK-based researcher contends, means that some States are actually ‘exporting’ their scarce groundwater when they market the cereals. A study by a group of researchers from academic and research institutes from the UK, Germany and India has suggested...

-The Financial Express When several NGOs and others protested against the GEAC report, the UPA's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh decided not to give the final go-ahead. As farmers under the umbrella of the Shetkari Sangathana start their civil disobedience movement and plant the banned Herbicide Tolerant (HT) GM seeds as well as Bt brinjal, chances are the authorities will treat this as yet another law and order issue and will arrest them;...

-Firstpost.com The sensitivity of agricultural productivity to climate depends strongly on crop selection. India is a vast country with disparate climate variability and change signals from north-to-south and east-to-west. The mix of field crops like rice, wheat, jowar, corn and soybean, as well as speciality products like vegetables, flowers, nuts, fruits, etc, are also vastly different across the subcontinent. To understand the climate sensitivity of agriculture across such complex terrain that has...