-Down to Earth An ecologist has been guarding seeds of more than 750 rare rice varieties for over a decade Lit by a kerosene lamp, the two-room hut just outside a sleepy hamlet in Odisha’s Rayagada district can easily pass off as any other farmer’s house in this tribal region. Step inside it, and one is taken aback by the hundreds of earthen pots labelled with coded stickers stacked in a corner...

-The Hindustan Times India's food problem is bifocal. A fast growing democracy cannot continue to live with any more deaths due to hunger and malnutrition. Simultaneously, it has to resolve the problem of meeting the rapidly rising food needs of a growing economy or what is called food inflation, basically an inability to grow and deliver food adequately and efficiently to meet the rising and diversifying demand. Indians are good demand modelers....

-The Indian Express Farmers welcome the stand of the government of India on the outright rejection of the recommendations of the technical expert committee to the Supreme Court, which suggested that a moratorium be imposed on field trials of GM crops. The SC shot down the proposal of an interim moratorium that would have strangled technology and innovation in the country. The moratorium would have also prevented Indian scientists and companies...

-The Indian Express Economy Govt drafts plan to boost farming, allied sectors with Central fund. Kolkata: To boost the state’s economy, the Trinamool Congress government has set up an ambitious target of 8 per cent growth rate in agriculture and allied sectors for the next fiscal year. The current growth rate in agriculture is a mere 2.6 per cent. A draft proposal prepared by the Agriculture Department on the ways to achieve the...

-Down to Earth Rice cultivation has led to waterlogging and soil salinity in Haryana’s Jhajjar district CASTE-BASED khap panchayats of Haryana are usually in the news for passing regressive and, often, controversial orders in the name of honouring social customs. But this year in January, the Jhakkar khap panchayat of Jhajjar district gave a rather unusual order in the larger interest of the farming community. It ordered that all the 36...