With higher sowing of wheat, pulses, sugarcane, cotton and oilseeds reported this rabi season, there are expectations of a bumper crop production this year. The total food grains output is expected to be 232.07 million tonnes, which is only marginally lower than the record production of 234.47 million tonnes in 2008-09. Announcing the second advance estimates of food grains production for the 2010-11 crop year last week, Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar...

Scale Up Nutrition coordinates global action to root out under-nutrition. This week in New Delhi, nearly 1,000 international officials, Scientists, advocates and development specialists are coming together to discuss how agriculture can be leveraged to improve nutrition and health. Nearly one-sixth of the people in our world are affected by chronic hunger. At any time, around a quarter of all children suffer from under-nutrition. Not only are they more likely to die,...

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the pioneer of supercomputing in the country, is now assisting the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) to establish a national agricultural bioinformatics grid. The initiative, the first of its kind in the country, will help Scientists enhance agricultural productivity and address problems of food security. Under the project, a three-day training-cum-workshop on ‘parallel and high performance computing’ began at C-DAC on Monday, with...

It is time for us to take a hard look at our agricultural system. We are not yet reliving the food crisis of 2007-08 , but food prices are surging, with global prices for wheat and maize rising by 75% and 60%, respectively, from June to December 2010. Meanwhile, nearly 1 billion people worldwide are going hungry. The obvious solution to many of our food-related ills is to accelerate agricultural growth....

Climate change is a serious global issue of great concern to different countries. So said Dr Manjit Singh Kang, PAU vice-chancellor, on the opening day of a three-day international conference on 'Preparing Agriculture for Climate Change' at Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) on Sunday. 'Green revolution is a path-breaking movement and Punjab has spearheaded it for over four decades,' said Punjab Agricultural Marketing Board chairman Ajmer Singh Lakhowal, the chief guest. Kang, who...