One-third of food produced globally every year does not reach human mouths - it is either lost in transit or wasted by consumers themselves. This amounts to a staggering 1.3 billion tonnes every year. These chilling figures are contained in a report called 'Avoiding Future Famines' released by the United Nations Environment Programme at the recently held Rio+20 summit on sustainable development. Consumers throw away 222 million tonnes of food in...
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New UN report shows record 800,000 people became refugees in 2011
-The United Nations Ahead of World Refugee Day, the United Nations refugee agency reported today that a record 800,000 people were forced to flee across borders last year, more than at any time since 2000. The new refugees are part of a total of 4.3 million people who were newly displaced last year, owing to a string of major humanitarian crises that began in late 2010 in Côte d'Ivoire, and followed by...
More »Foreign farms in Africa bring investment and controversy
-AFP JOHANNESBURG: Foreign farms are spreading across Africa to grow food and biofuels for global markets, bringing much-needed investments but also new troubles for a continent struggling to feed itself. China, Malaysia, Singapore and Bangladesh are just some of the countries spending billions of dollars in what critics have dubbed a new "scramble for Africa", a reference to Europe's 19th century colonisation drive. But Africa holds an estimated 60 percent of the world's...
More »A message of gloom in Rio
—AFP U.S. President Barack Obama heads a list of high profile absentees for the Rio sustainable development summit this week where U.N. leaders say some tough decisions will have to be taken for the future of the planet. Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and China's President Hu Jintao will also go to the Group of 20 rich nations' summit in Mexico but then head straight home before the...
More »A ban on the use of crops with transgenic traits is unscientific and India needs new technologies to raise farm yields-Deepak Pental
Science and technology hold the key to developing low-input, high-output agriculture. The challenge is to use new technologies creatively and to make evidence-based decisions on the deployment of new technologies. Crop breeding is carried out to meet two broad objectives: one, to increase yields of a crop per se and, two, to protect the yield potential by developing crops resistant to diseases, pests and environmental extremes. Both yield-enhancement and yield-stabilisation are...
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