World Bank president Robert Zoellick recently listed nine measures that the G20 should adopt under its current French presidency. These range from improving information about grain stocks and developing better weather-forecasting methods to strengthening social safety nets for the poor and helping small farmers benefit from tenders from humanitarian purchasers such as the World Food Programme . These measures tackle only the symptoms of the global food system's weaknesses, leaving the...

Governments rarely shy away from showering farm sops but Karnataka’s BJP government hopes to reap gains with a debatable claim: that its policies have helped reduce farmer suicides. State agriculture minister Umesh Katti recently reeled off in the Assembly suicide figures (see chart) that show a declining trend since 2008-09, when the B.S. Yeddyurappa cabinet took power. The assertion that the slide is because of the government’s efforts follows an agriculture...

The Union budget writes off Rs.240 crore in corporate income tax every single day on average — the same amount leaves India each day in illicit fund flows to foreign banks. In six years from 2005-06, the Government of India wrote off corporate income tax worth Rs.3,74,937 crore — more than twice the 2G fraud — in successive Union budgets. The figure has grown every single year for which data are...

Another name for Chhattisgarh is ' Dhan ka katora' or 'Rice Bowl'. There is an amazing variety of rice being grown across the region in Central India, largely dominated by tribal communities. This is a land blessed by the bounty of nature and has a combination of soil, water and temperature, which lends itself well to the cultivation of this all-important foodgrain. Yet all this amounts to very little today and...

Dr Howarth E Bouis, director of HarvestPlus, is a doctorate from Stanford University. He is promoting biofortification within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, agricultural research and nutrition community in various countries. What is biofortification of crops? Biofortification is a process where plant breeders explore crop genetic diversity in seed banks and create a crop that is rich in specific micronutrients. There are two ways to biofortify crops—conventional plant breeding and...