-The Hindu When Sreenivasan took up Farming, the thumb rule was that pesticides would not be used Kochi: As we go about Farming the fields using fertilisers and pesticides, who’s tending the dense and diverse vegetation in forests — which have more fruit-bearing trees and edible roots? The question by Subhash Palekar, noted propounder of zero-budget Farming, got actor Sreenivasan thinking about modern Farming practices. “Everything that’s there to nurture vegetables and fruits...

-Livemint.com Water availability has not deteriorated only because of the poor monsoon Amartya Sen showed in his seminal work on famines that mass starvation is not necessarily the result of inadequate food supply. He opened up new areas of inquiry that focussed on what have come to be known as entitlement failures. Sen has famously argued that human mistakes forced people into starvation in Bengal in 1943 even though food production in...

-The Hindu Business Line A valuable account of how holistic, small-farmer based agriculture can show the way MS Swaminathan is well known as the key architect of India’s Green Revolution in the mid-1960s and an all-time crusader against hunger and food insecurity. His latest book, entitled Combating Hunger and Achieving Food Security, broadly shows the road map for a hunger-free and food-secure India. The book has 30 chapters, each suggesting some sweet...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Fifteen years since farmers in the state's Marathwada and Vidarbha regions started taking their own lives, the state on Friday announced the first psycho-social health plan to check the epidemic of suicides. The plan hinges on community health workers — the accredited social health activists (ASHAs) and anganwadi workers — carrying out a questionnaire-based screening test to assess the mental health of farmers. "We carried out an audit...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's food safety regulator has slashed the maximum allowed limit of transfats in cooking oil and fat by half to five per cent in a move that experts are calling an important step to safeguard public health. But nutrition scientists have cautioned that the government will also need to tweak oilseed crop policies to draw the food processing industry and consumers away from unhealthy but inexpensive transfats to...