Women continue to reap less benefits from employment in agriculture than men in rural areas, and the recent global financial and food crises have slowed down progress towards gender equality in farming-related labour, three United Nations agencies said in a joint report unveiled today. According to the report, compiled by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the International Labour Organization (ILO), women...

That Indian firms, some of them backed by the government, have gone scouting for land abroad to farm crops for consumption back home is well-known. Reversing the trend, now many Gulf countries are getting a toehold in India that will allow them to farm here and export the food back. A Bahraini firm, the Nader & Ebrahim Group (NEG), recently tied up with Pune-based Sanghar Group to do exactly that....

Fundamentally, our current crisis in food supplies as well as food prices arises out of the sidelining of Jawahar Lal Nehru’s dictum “everything else can wait but not agriculture”. Unfortunately, the last twenty years have been characterised by very low rates of agricultural growth, averaging around one percent per annum. This is almost equal to the rate of GDP growth during the last half century of British rule. In effect, in...

Despite its slackening industry, the common perception of West Bengal as a backward state has little substance when one looks at the facts. Most of us are conditioned to view economic development in terms of industrialisation. While industrialisation is essential for economic transformation, it is not as if economic growth is not possible without it. The sectoral structure of India's gross domestic product (GDP) and its slow transformation makes a good...

The new era of price rise can be turned into a profitable proposition for the farmer. The decade that passed can safely be called agrarian. For good or bad reasons, the world spent the decade talking about agriculture. Food grain price rise was the talking point across the continents. To note a landmark, the decade ended an era of cheap food. After the food crisis in 1974 there was a continuous...