-Tehelka Are we eating sugar which small kids are producing as bonded labour? FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Mahendra Singh used to live with his parents and two siblings in the Jahangirpuri slum area of New Delhi until the morning he was abducted, trafficked and then callously ‘sold’ to a sugarcane farmer of Haryana’s Karnal district. Mahendra was made to work as a bonded labourer in the sugarcane fields for three-and-a-half long years, until he finally...
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Waiting for rain-PK Joshi
-The Indian Express As drought pushes up food prices, India must invest in new irrigation methods The speculation on the delay of the monsoons and below-normal rainfall this year is not new to India. But the drought in the maize belt of the United States — that is, in the Midwest — was unexpected. The impact of the drought will be felt on wheat and soya bean production. This will eventually lead...
More »Inflation, poor monsoon hit consumption in eastern India-Shine Jacob & Nirmalya Behera
-The Business Standard Consumers say they cannot buy branded FMCG items in mobile phones, customers opt for low-end handsets while retaining brand loyalty Last year, Ashok Das, a farmer-cum-fisherman from the small industrial town of Rishra in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, had promised his younger son a branded television. But last year’s bad crop output and this season’s deficient monsoon made him change his plans and finally settle on a...
More »UN official calls on academics to step up their efforts to fight hunger
-The United Nations A United Nations top official today called on academics to get involved in essential research to help reduce rural poverty and assist small-scale farmers as part of the global fight against hunger. “One of the great challenges we have today is to use academic knowledge to understand and improve the life of rural populations throughout the world,” said the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), José Graziano...
More »Farmers increasingly using weather insurance to mitigate risks from climate change-Rituraj Tiwari
-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: More farmers are using weather insurance to mitigate risks from climate change. Top two weather insurers -- Agricultural Insurance Corporation (AIC) and ICICI Lombard -- say business is growing at 25% annually and now covers more than 200 districts across 21 states. "The growth has been so spectacular over the past five years that as many as 12 million farmers, growing crops on over 15 million hectares...
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