-Live Mint Our food procurement policies may be lopsided but there is no link between the food security law and free trade The upcoming World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Bali has attracted considerable attention in India because of its repercussions on our food policy. It is feared that the recently passed food security law will breach the negotiated limits on the aggregate measure of support (AMS) to farmers. AMS is...

-The Telegraph Kolkata: The Mamata Banerjee government should have calculated the costs of possible retaliation by other states before banning potato export from Bengal, agriculture experts have said. For now, no state has threatened a payback for the ban, clamped despite pleas from the chief ministers of Odisha and Assam after a shortage pushed up potato prices in Bengal. As the Bengal administration grapples with the problem, importers of essential foodstuff have sounded...

-PTI NEW DELHI: Farmers have planted wheat in 15.19 lakh hectares so far in the ongoing rabi (winter) season, more than double the area covered a year earlier, the Agriculture Ministry said today. Wheat was sown in 6.46 lakh hectares in the same period last year, latest government data showed. Sowing of wheat, the main rabi crop, starts at the end of October and harvesting begins in April. "Area under the crop is...

-The Business Standard India has to come to terms with a growing obesity problem that is rapidly becoming a crisis Obesity, an epidemic often thought to be exclusive to wealthy countries, is becoming a rapidly growing crisis for India. The National Family Health Survey of 2006 revealed that roughly one in four urban Indians was overweight or obese, and several more recent studies indicate that these numbers are increasing. A new study...

-The Economic Times That India has had an excellent monsoon is a given, as is the prognosis that it will more than double agricultural growth from the lowly 1.9% seen in the last fiscal year. The happy tidings on the farm front won't end there. The joy could actually multiply by the last quarter of this fiscal year because abundant rains will benefit the increasingly important winter rabi crop more than...