A crop-killing fungus is spreading out of Africa towards the world’s great wheat-growing areas IT IS sometimes called the “polio of agriculture”: a terrifying but almost forgotten disease. Wheat rust is not just back after a 50-year absence, but spreading in new and scary forms. In some ways it is worse than child-crippling polio, still lingering in parts of Nigeria. Wheat rust has spread silently and speedily by 5,000 miles in...

Warmer nights may spoil the aroma of basmati and cause the rice to become sticky when cooked, scientists have warned after a study of how climate change may affect the quality of rice. Field experiments by scientists at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi, suggest that high temperatures could hurt the quality of rice through loss of aroma and changes in starch leading to higher stickiness. Several previous studies have...

India's food inflation accelerated in mid-June, maintaining pressure on the Reserve Bank of India to tighten monetary policy at a faster pace. India's food price index rose 16.90 per cent in the year to June 12, higher than the previous week's annual reading of 16.12 per cent, government data released on Thursday showed. The fuel price index remained unchanged at 13.18 percent in the year to June 12. The yield...

An analysis of the remote sensing data collected by Nasa satellites on the changes in vegetation in India during the last 25 years has confirmed the bad news: The growth rate of foodgrain production in India has been stagnant in the last decade, which crop statisticians have been aware of for some time now. A nine-member team of scientists from Nasa, the Boston University and the Indian Institute of Tropical...

In India, of the total cultivated area of around 140.30 million hectares only 60.86 million is irrigated and remaining 79.44 million hectares is rain-fed. Rain-fed crops account for 48 percent area under food crops and 68 percent of the area under non-food crops. Irrigated land accounts for nearly 55 percent of food production while rain-fed contributes just about 45 percent. Rain-fed farming is risk prone and is characterized by low...