-The Indian Express We need to make goat farming organised, tie it to agriculture and animal husbandry. This is an apocryphal story, but it is bizarre enough to be true. Once every four or five years, we have a livestock census. The latest one is the 19th, for 2012. This anecdote is about the 2007 version. In a village in West Bengal, there were 31 geese — 17 male, 14 female. An...

-The Hindu Business Line A creeping crisis in soyabean in Madhya Pradesh has given rise to this contradiction. Different policies are called for The Indian policymaker seems to suffer from the musk deer syndrome. The musk deer is a rare species that produces musk in its own body. But it does not realise this and searches endlessly for the source of the aroma. India faces a similar dilemma. On the one hand, the...

-Livemint.com   The main focus of the survey was to find out if the drought and adverse weather over the past few years is turning into a famine    New Delhi: Even as half of India is reeling under a second consecutive drought year, a survey of the chronically drought-striken Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh has unearthed grim details of crop loss, disputes over water, starvation, and deaths due to hunger and malnutrition. The...

-Hindustan Times A ban on slaughter doesn’t automatically lead to a flourishing cow population, an HT analysis of government data has found, with states like Madhya Pradesh — where cow killing is outlawed — reporting a more than 40% decline in their numbers in rural areas over a decade. Between 2003 and 2013, at least nine states registered a significant decline in the ownership of cows by the rural households, according to...

-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...