-PTI NEW DELHI: Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Saturday asked the states ruled by the party to implement in 'letter and spirit' the food security scheme which it sees as a 'game changer' in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. She held deliberations with Congress chief ministers on how to implement the food scheme seeking to provide cheap foodgrains to 82 crore people, for which an ordinance was promulgated last week. Party sources said...

-NDTV A lawyer has challenged the contentious Food Security Ordinance in the Supreme Court, terming it as "illegal". The Centre's ambitious welfare programme is now a law after receiving President Pranab Mukherjee's assent on Friday; the scheme provides subsidised food to nearly 800 million or 67 per cent of the population and is being viewed as a major vote-getter in the national elections, due by May. Advocate ML Sharma today filed a...

-The United Nations Small-scale farmers - who produce the majority of food in the developing world - need to be better integrated into markets to reduce global hunger and poverty, the United Nations food and agricultural agency today reported urging more nuanced policymaking for smallholder farmers. "Policy interventions that aim at encouraging greater levels of smallholder production for sale in markets need to take better account of the heterogeneity of smallholder households,"...

-Outlook As the Manmohan Singh government makes evident its unfriendliness to villages, the nation hurtles towards disaster. It's a danger no one wants to face. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been trying for years to make us believe that agriculture is a vast marshland in which a huge population is stuck ankle- to neck-deep and it is his duty to rescue them. "Our salvation lies in moving people out of agriculture," he...

-IPS News ROME: The growing consensus, momentum and commitment to eradicate world hunger may seem overly ambitious in view of the slow progress in reducing the number of hungry people in the world in recent decades. After all, declining food prices in the second half of the 20th century, thanks to increasing production, were not enough to eliminate poverty and hunger in the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, many governments invested a...