-The United Nations Given the right conditions and targeted support, small farmers can unleash a new and sustainable agricultural revolution, the United Nations environment agency a partner agricultural development organization reported today on the eve of World Environment Day. According to the report, Smallholders, Food Security and the Environment, an estimated 2.5 billion people who manage 500 million smallholder farm households provide over 80 per cent of the food consumed in much...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Congress' efforts to secure support for the food bill in its present form have run into trouble, with the Opposition seeking radical overhaul of its provisions and SP, which lends outside support to the ruling coalition at the Centre, asking the government to junk the proposed legislation. The National Food Security Bill is considered to be the world's largest experiment in ensuring food security to poor as...

-The Hindu Jaipur: The nondescript Jasauti village in Pahari tehsil of Bharatpur district, situated at the Rajasthan-Haryana border, has emerged as the "Bhindi Gaon" (village of lady's fingers), sending over a dozen vehicles with the popular vegetable everyday for six months in a year to Gurgaon and Delhi. Eighty per cent of agriculturists in the village are engaged in the farming of lady's fingers. The transformation in both the social and...

-The Hindu Business Line A mint-fresh working paper by the Reserve Bank of India once again trains the spotlight on a problem that, for five decades, every policy-maker has planned to snuff out, failed to, and then wished it would go away if ignored. But financial exclusion simply hasn't, and we now have the central bank applying its forensic skills to an examination of its magnitude. The title of Working Paper Series...

-The Hindu   Investment in a scheme that guarantees rural employment with minimum wages should be seen as complementary and not alternative to development activities A recent paper by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) has argued that the "push" factors of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) are not as important as the economic growth "pull" factors, for increasing agricultural wages. The paper has received wide media...