A scientific and public scrutiny of the methodology used by the expert panel will only add to the efforts to save the Western Ghats. On May 23, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) posted the report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) on its website honouring a landmark judgment of the Central Information Commission triggered by an activist seeking access to the material. In this judgment, the CIC...
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A ban on the use of crops with transgenic traits is unscientific and India needs new technologies to raise farm yields-Deepak Pental
Science and technology hold the key to developing low-input, high-output agriculture. The challenge is to use new technologies creatively and to make evidence-based decisions on the deployment of new technologies. Crop breeding is carried out to meet two broad objectives: one, to increase yields of a crop per se and, two, to protect the yield potential by developing crops resistant to diseases, pests and environmental extremes. Both yield-enhancement and yield-stabilisation are...
More »Rio+20: What Is at Stake By: T Jayaraman, Divya Singh Kohli & Shruti Mittal
There are major issues at stake in the Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development to be held on 20-22 June. Yet governments of developing countries have not given adequate importance to the run-up to the conference. As has happened in the climate change negotiations, the outcome draft now under negotiation shows a concerted move to rewrite the terms of global environmental governance. There is an attempt to push through the decidedly...
More »Equity at top of India's Rio agenda; targets to be avoided by Priscilla Jebaraj
Union Cabinet approves negotiating brief India will head to the Rio+20 summit in Brazil with a negotiating brief focussed on defending the principle of “common but differentiated responsibility” (CBDR) and preventing any attempt to pin down specific goals or targets regarding Sustainable Development. On Thursday, the Union Cabinet approved the strategy to be followed by Indian negotiators at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, popularly known as Rio+20 due to the...
More »Many treaties to save the earth, but where's the will to implement them?-John Vidal
-The Guardian Governments spend years negotiating environmental agreements, but then willfully ignore them – it's a dismal record It's global agreement time again. In two weeks, 120 world leaders and 190-odd countries will go to the Rio+20 Earth summit and – unless the talks collapse – sign up to new international goals, pledges, targets, protocols and treaties, and promise to commit to Sustainable Development, protect the earth and use resources more wisely....
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