The World Food and Agriculture – Statistical Yearbook 2022, released in December 2022, provides its readers a plethora of useful statistics and data across the countries pertaining to agriculture and food security. The yearbook by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) primarily covers four themes -- Economic Dimensions of Agriculture; Production, Trade and Prices of Commodities; Food Security and Nutrition; and Sustainability and Environmental Aspects of Agriculture.  While going through the report,...

-India Spend India's transition to sustainable farming has to be calibrated and orchestrated well, drawing lessons from the successes of India's Green Revolution and the recent crisis in Sri Lanka, says sustainable farming expert P.S. Vijayshankar Bengaluru: The production-centric intensive agriculture brought about by India's Green Revolution in the 1960s, using high-yielding seeds, fertilisers and high levels of groundwater utilisation, helped India achieve food self-sufficiency by the 1970s, but has created a...

-Down to Earth Rise in demand for meat and dairy products was reconciled through the intensification of livestock systems Intensification of food production is gaining prominence in a world battered by climate change and food insecurity. Intensification aims to increase output for each unit of input (labour, land, time, fertiliser, seed, feed, or money). The need for intensification is more pressing when the supply of food needs to be augmented. For instance, in...

-The Telegraph Radhakamal Mukerjee: an ecological pioneer In 1922, a professor at Lucknow University named Radhakamal Mukerjee published a book called Principles of Comparative Economics. Reading the book one hundred years later, I was struck by the attention it paid to the impact of the natural environment on the social and economic life of Indian villages. Mukerjee was perhaps the first Indian scholar to recognise the vital importance of common property resources...

-The Hindu Business Line Millets such as ragi deserve higher support prices as they are important for nutrition and water efficiency  The CACP recommendations on Minimum Support Prices (MSP) for the mandated six Rabi crops — wheat, barley, gram, lentil, rapeseed and mustard, and safflower — are arrived by considering several factors. These include the cost of production, supply and demand situation of various crops in domestic and global markets, domestic and world...