In our frantic search for solutions to our water crisis, we tend to overlook the self-evident relationship between water, food, and energy. It is still not too late. As my colleague Tony Allan, a Stockholm Water Prize laureate says so pithily, the three are the corners of a triangle with politics and emotion at its center. About 80 percent of accessible freshwater in Asia is used for agriculture; the rest...

Commission agents to start procuring for Central agency from today Bowing to the pressure exerted by the powerful lobby of commission agents, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) has decided to withdraw its directive to make direct payment to farmers in Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh. Union Agriculture and Food Minister Sharad Pawar, who was in Chandigarh on Monday, had a meeting with Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and Food and...

While global food prices declined for the first half of this year, they have spiked in recent months, according to a new World Bank publication, and this volatility could in turn push up the local food prices of the world's poorest and most malnourished countries. The Bank's grain price index had declined by 16 percent over the first six months of 2010 before rising that same amount between mid-June and August....

Apni kheti, apna khaad / Apna beej, apna swaad (Our own farm, our own fertiliser / Our own seeds, our own taste) -- Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi. A farmer from Tandia village in Varanasi has a solution to India's burgeoning food crisis. In a land where poverty, hunger, malnutrition and farmer suicides are rampant, Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi's innovation could work wonders. He has single-handedly developed a number of high yielding, nutritious...

RAM KARUTURI, the world’s largest rose grower, calls it a situation that needs immediate intervention. Else, he is sure the rush of Indians to Africa will ebb to a trickle, which, in turn, could have serious implications as ethnic tensions with the locals are slowly, but steadily, rising in some parts of the continent. The hub of the crisis is Gambela, one of Ethiopia’s nine states, for long starved of investment....