Although finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had promised food security and inclusive growth in his budget speech last year, hunger continues to stalk over 300 million citizens of the country. India slipped to 67th place in the Global Hunger Index 2010 rankings of 122 countries prepared by International Food Policy Research Institute. An Oxford University report said that 410 million Indians live in poverty. While there may be nit-picking over the...

Fifty million "environmental refugees" will flood into the global north by 2020, fleeing food shortages sparked by climate change, experts warned at a major science conference that ended here Monday. "In 2020, the UN has projected that we will have 50 million environmental refugees," University of California, Los Angeles professor Cristina Tirado said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). "When people are...

In an address to the Berlin Agriculture Ministers meeting last month, World Trade Organisation (WTO) Director General Pascal Lamy said export restrictions are a prime cause of recent surges in global food prices, and countries should find other ways of securing domestic supplies (“WTO chief: Alternatives to food export curbs needed”, Business Standard, January 23). Though export restrictions are an important contributor to rising food prices, they are by no...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has imposed a gag on India’s poverty data, saying no information must go out until it is vetted by the Planning Commission. The gag order applies to all central ministries and departments and is apparently triggered by the embarrassment over multiple data on Indians falling under the socially damning Below Poverty Line (BPL). The official line is that the government wants to have uniformity on all data and...

Marie Antoinette, the liberal and concerned queen of France, on seeing the poor and hungry masses demanding bread, said in a fit of charity — “let them eat cake”. Member of the prestigious National Advisory Council (NAC) Jean Dreze surveyed the performance of the existing National Food For Work Programme (NFFWP) in July 2005 and concluded that the performance was “alarming”. The work guidelines were not being enforced, and the...