-The Hindu Business Line At an organic market in Odisha, middle-class consumers get to interact with the producers of their food and appreciate traditional knowledge systems One Sunday morning in January, I visited an organic produce market located amidst dense bougainvillea creepers and rows of trees, on the grounds of the six-decade-old Christian Hospital in Bissamcuttack, a town in western Odisha’s Rayagada district. In policy and public imagination, Odisha, particularly its western districts...
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MS Swaminathan, father of India's Green Revolution, interviewed by Vidya Venkat (The Hindu)
-The Hindu Fifty years since the Green Revolution, the architect of the reform highlights the crisis facing Indian agriculture today It is 11 years since agronomist M.S. Swaminathan handed over his recommendations for improving the state of agriculture in India to the former United Progressive Alliance government, at the height of the Vidarbha farmer suicides crisis, but they are still to be implemented. To address the agrarian crisis and farmers’ unrest across...
More »Food and farming: Two futures -Vandana Shiva
-Deccan Chronicle The slogan was that there would never again be scarcity of food because we can now make “bread from air”. There are two distinct futures of food and farming. One leads to a dead end. A dead planet: poisons and chemical monocultures spreading; farmers committing suicide due to debt for seeds and chemicals; children dying due to lack of food; people dying because of chronic diseases spreading due to nutritionally empty, toxic...
More »Punjab Cotton Farmers' Dilemma: Despite More Crop Yield, Profit Is Meagre -Nikhil Pandhi
-NDTV This year, the Punjab government claims farmers are likely have a bumper cotton harvest, with cotton acreage doubling in the Malwa region to about 3.9 lakh acres -- against last year's 2.4 lakh acres -- and the government's awareness and action-against-whitefly campaigns in place Punjab: Baldev Sharma, 39, from Bathinda's Talwandi Sabo is a third generation cotton farmer. This year he sowed cotton on 12 acres of land compared to...
More »Kerala Passes Resolution Against Genetically Modified Mustard -Uma Sudhir
-NDTV The Kerala assembly resolution has listed out reasons why they opposed GM mustard. It says it is not proved that genetically-modified crops give more yield than normal varieties and that GM crops attract new Pests and controlling them needs the use of highly hazardous and expensive chemical pesticides. Thiruvananthapuram: The Kerala Legislative Assembly today unanimous passed a resolution rejecting genetically modified or GM Mustard seed. Just a little over a...
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