-PTI WASHINGTON: The International Monetary Fund today described India's National Food Security Act as a landmark legislation which is an important effort to ensure that a majority of the population has access to adequate quantities of food at affordable prices. "The legislation is a landmark, representing the largest food security programme in the world, involving the distribution of subsidised grain to two-thirds of India's population of 1.2 billion," the IMF said in...

-Press Information Bureau (Ministry of Agriculture) The Government formulated a Model Act on Agri-Marketing reform in 2003 and Model Rules in 2007. The Government has since been pursuing the State Governments to adopt the Model Act and Rules. The Model Act inter-alia provides for alternative models through which farmers can access larger markets viz. setting up of markets in private and cooperative, contract farming, farmer consumer market and direct marketing. License...

-Down to Earth Japan's Sapporo brewery patents Indian barley gene without giving benefit to farmers Ballia district, the easternmost part of Uttar Pradesh, is a flood-prone area that extends towards Bihar from the confluence of the Ganga and the Ghaghra. Over decades, its farmers, mostly marginal and small, have been cultivating barley, exchanging its seeds, improving the varieties and giving these to a government project to cull the best of the lot....

-IANS There is an urgent need for recognising people engaged in domestic work within an employment relationship as workers and to bring them under labour legislation, said Tine Staermose, Director India, International Labour Organisation (ILO), Wednesday. "There is a urgent need for the recognition of the people engaged in domestic work within an employment relationship as workers and to bring them under the labour legislation so they can access services and benefits...

-The Hindu With the era of cheap, bountiful water having been replaced by increasing supply-and-quality constraints, many international investors are beginning to view water as the new oil There is a popular, tongue-in-cheek saying in America - attributed to the writer Mark Twain, who lived through the early phase of the California Water Wars - that "whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over." It highlights the consequences, even if...