-Down to Earth Tough new conditions emerge in the compromise deal to ease WTO intellectual property barriers to production of COVID-19 medical tools We are back to square one. Back to the beginning after 18 months of a wearying, tortuous series of negotiations that carried on while millions of lives hung in the balance — and still do. The waiver of intellectual property (IP) rights on medicines, vaccines and diagnostics to fight the...

-Livemint.com Painful food inflation has stoked political unrest in many countries before and could do so again In order to understand the political and economic repercussions of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, analysts and economists have been concentrating on the rise of crude oil and natural gas prices, among other things. This isn’t surprising given that Russia is the world’s second largest exporter of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas. But...

-The Hindu Ensuring government support for financial incentives, upgrading technologies and reskilling labour are key challenges South Asia became a major player in the global textiles and clothing market with the onset of the third wave of global production. Bangladesh joined the league in the 1980s, owing to the outbreak of the civil war in Sri Lanka. Supportive industrial policy was an instrumental factor in the 1990s, with zero duty on raw...

-Press release by Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy (IATP)* dated March 4, 2022 A new evaluation has exposed the serious failures of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) — in its attempt to address hunger and farmer poverty. Funded by Gates, USAID, and western governments, for 15 years AGRA has promoted high-input agriculture, synthetic fertilizers, commercial seeds and subsidies to "catalyze a farming revolution in Africa." This evaluation...

-The Hindu Business Line Indian farmers gain as local wheat, maize, soyabean and mustard prices rise Prices of agricultural commodities, particularly wheat, maize, soyabean and palm oil, dropped significantly in the global market during the weekend, after having surged on February 24 when Russia ordered its troops into Ukraine.  The rates of most of these commodities dropped by over five per cent as members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led by...