A big push to develop agriculture in the poorest countries is needed if the world is to feed itself in future decades, a report warns. With the world's population soaring to nine billion by mid-century, crop yields must rise, say the authors - yet climate change threatens to slash them. Already the number of chronically hungry people is above one billion. The report was prepared for a major conference on farming...

UNLESS THE prices of vegetables skyrocket and become a scandal — as they have over several weeks now, or as did the price of sugar last year — little in the out-of-sight world of Indian agriculture excites the imagination of the city folks, who influence, rather disproportionately, everything from government policies to newspaper content. Few of those who enjoy a hearty meal and wax lovingly on their favourite dishes can...

Biotech technicians neither have the knowledge of gene ecology nor the expertise in multiple disciplines.    After the minister of environment Jairam Ramesh announced a moratorium on Bt brinjal, article after article in the media has denounced the decision, saying such decisions should be left to ‘scientists.’ The issue is however not science vs anti-science. It is reductionist science vs systems science. The moratorium took into account the best of science. Many...

Saying that the biotech bill is all 'wrong and retrogressive', Communist Party of India (CPI) leader D. Raja has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cautioning him not to introduce the 'draconian' bill in parliament. In the letter dated March 11, of which IANS has a copy, the party's national secretary vehemently criticised the bill's main proposal to set up the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) under the ambit of...

The revelation by the developer of pest-protected Bt cotton Bollgard, Monsanto-Mahyco, that pink bollworm pest has developed resistance to the killer Bt gene, Cry1Ac, in parts of Gujarat, and the rebuttal of this by a government-funded cotton research institute have created a fresh, albeit avoidable, controversy around genetically modified (GM) crops. The Monsanto statement had claimed that during field monitoring of the 2009 cotton crop in Gujarat, the company’s scientists...