-The United Nations The international fish trade is breaking records, the United Nations today reported, but benefits from the trade are not trickling down to the small-scale fishing communities which make up the majority of the sector's global workforce. "The proportion of fish production being traded internationally is significant, at around 37 per cent in 2013," said Audun Lem, Chief of UN Food and Agricultural Organization's (FAO) Products, Trade and Marketing Branch....

-The Business Standard Making the agriculture growth story sustainable Finance Minister P Chidambaram's claim in his interim Budget speech of "stellar performance" of the agriculture sector is based on numbers, though it needs to be analysed from different perspectives to get a true picture. There is no doubt that agricultural gross domestic product may grow by 4.6 per cent this year. The past 10 years' average, too, may work out close to...

-The Hindu With the era of cheap, bountiful water having been replaced by increasing supply-and-quality constraints, many international investors are beginning to view water as the new oil There is a popular, tongue-in-cheek saying in America - attributed to the writer Mark Twain, who lived through the early phase of the California Water Wars - that "whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over." It highlights the consequences, even if...

-Oryza.com "Golden Rice will certainly be accepted one day. We are only trying to put pressure so it will be accepted earlier than later. Each second of the day a child dies unnecessarily." These are the words of Dr. Patrick Moore, Canadian ecologist and former director of Greenpeace, who is leading a campaign to make Golden Rice acceptable in the EU and across the world. What's surprising about Dr. Moore's words...

-Deccan Herald Instead of reducing the usage, molecular breeders are conveniently dovetailing pesticides tolerance into GM crop varieties. It's a strange paradox. While the demand for organic food is rising unequivocally in the rich and developed countries as well as in the major developing countries, the use of chemical pesticides in agriculture is also growing at a phenomenal pace. The organic food industry in the US is relatively new. At a time when...