-The New Indian Express MYSURU: Drought showers miseries. Soaring vegetable prices are one of them. With crops drying up, the supply has slackened, increasing the prices by 25-50 percent in the last couple of weeks. An increased demand for salads has also contributed to the rising prices. Tomato which was sold for less than Rs 4 a kg last month now costs Rs 15-20 as the standing crops in parts of Panadavpura, Srirangapatna...
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India needs sound policy to battle weather shocks
-Hindustan Times About 330 million people are affected by drought in 10 states as 256 districts reel from severe water shortages and poor farmers suffer crop losses. The current dry spell is partly because of two back-to-back years of bad monsoons. Policy makers have no control over fickle weather whims. As credit rating and research agency Crisil points out, the rising frequency of weather shocks amid higher vulnerabilities has compounded agrarian...
More »Crop insurance: new dawn for farmers? -Rajalakshmi Nirmal
-The Hindu Business Line The new scheme offers lower premium, more risk cover and hassle-free settlement Crop insurance schemes have not been a hit with Indian farmers in the past. High premia, limited coverage, complicated ways of assessing losses and delayed payment of compensation have kept farmers away from them. Given the high risk of crop damage in India, with significant loss in food grain production in 18 of the last 54 years...
More »Did climate change cause those floods? -Sujatha Byravan
-The Hindu Determining whether extreme weather events are caused by climate change is crucial in planning for risks. Else, we will reach a situation in which corrective action may not be enough to protect us Over the past several years, headlines on weather-related extreme events have included heavy downpours followed by floods, droughts, storms, heat and cold waves, and wild fires. Such events typically destroy lives, property and ecosystems while stretching the...
More »Crop insurance revisited
-The Hindu Business Line India should fine-tune its scheme to make it WTO-compliant The fact that the Centre’s new crop insurance scheme has hit a WTO speedbreaker does not really surprise. The EU, Canada, Australia and Thailand have implicitly said that in its present form, insurance payouts cannot readily be placed in the ‘green box’ — one that exempts certain expenditures from farm subsidy calculations for WTO purposes. They have, in effect,...
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