Faced with rising world hunger and “unacceptable” poverty, members of the Food and Agriculture Organisation Committee on World Food Security (CFS) have agreed on a wide-ranging reform, the FAO announced on Tuesday. The reform aims at making the CFS an “inclusive” international and intergovernmental platform dealing with food security and nutrition, and its being a central component in the evolving global partnership for agriculture, food security and nutrition. In addition...

South Asia will be badly hit by declining crop yields stemming from climate change, a report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (Ifpri) has found ahead of a food security summit next month. Another study, released by the Food and Agricultural Organization on Thursday, also said that farm yields will be adversely affected by global warming. The Ifpri report—made public on Wednesday—analysed 32 crops and livestock commodities in 281...

Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has brought out an excellent compilation titled Climate Change, Politics and Facts. The government is planning legislation with targets for greenhouse gas emissions. Perhaps to bolster this, the Ministry of Environment and Forests has published results of five studies - NCAER/Jadavpur, TERI/MoEF, IRADE, TERI/Poznan and McKinsey - and findings have been contrasted and collated by CSE. As per all these models except for TERI/Poznan,...

NEW DELHI — When the United Nations convened its summit meeting on climate change last month, China and the United States, the two most important countries at the negotiating table, hewed to mostly familiar scripts, making promises without making too many specific commitments. Less familiar was the script followed by the third most important country at the table, India. India’s public stance on climate change is usually predictable — predictably obstinate...

The draft agreement being discussed ahead of December’s crucial Copenhagen summit is long, confusing and contradictory.  It is a blueprint to save the world. And yet it is long, confusing and contradictory. Negotiators have released a draft version of a new global agreement on climate change, which is widely billed as the last chance to save the planet from the ravages of global warming. Running to some 200 pages, the...