Draft report claims investor interest is focussed on countries with weak land governance. A leaked World Bank report into investors from rich nations buying up African farmland has intensified campaigners' fears that the growing trend is marginalising local producers. After a spate of investments in African land by sovereign wealth funds looking for gains on rising commodity prices and by countries such as China worried about their own food security, the World...

The goal of food for all can be achieved only through greater and integrated attention to production, procurement, preservation and public distribution. The President, in her address to Parliament on June 4, 2009, announced: “My Government proposes to enact a new law — the National Food Security Act — that will provide a statutory basis for a framework which assures food security for all. Every family below the poverty line in...

AS CONCERN for the ecosystem runs high all across the world, a small, mountainous state in India’s northeast — Sikkim, has taken a step ahead and declared to go completely organic by the year 2015. What this means is the total phasing out of chemical inputs from agriculture. Sikkim has long been an ecologically conscious state with initiatives such as a comprehensive ban on plastic, bio-medical and chemical waste in...

Following a hike in the prices of petrol, diesel, gas, milk prices have also gone up. Between January 2007 and March 2010 the price of milk rose seven times in Delhi. The story is similar elsewhere in the nation too. In the last one year, prices increased from Rs 17 to Rs 22 a litre. In some cities, like Mumbai, the rise has been steeper. Earlier, it was pulses that were burning...

A demand to reintroduce a universal Public Distribution System (PDS) in the country appears every now and then. Its proponents argue that universal access is necessary for ensuring food security, for better control on prices and for eliminating (at least partially) the evils of exclusion errors in the targeted PDS. The question is: what are the operational implications of access for all citizens to subsidised foodgrain? They are currently allocated as...