-Down to Earth   Buy an Indian breed from Australia In June last year, we visited Malaysia on the invitation of the country’s oldest and most active consumer action group, The Consumer Association of Penang, to study the livestock production systems and to advise on how these can be transformed into more sustainable and less industrial farming systems. The past 40 years of aggressive industrial growth in Malaysia has seen small-scale peasant agriculture and...

-The Telegraph The second wife of a realty firm managing director, on the run for months for being part of a housing hoax that deprived hundreds of Jharkhand residents of crores, surprised investigators today by surrendering in the court of a judicial magistrate. Anamika Nandi, the second wife of Sanjeevani Buildcon Private Limited managing director and prime accused J.D. Nandi, turned up at the court of S. Kumar around 11.30am and dramatically...

-World Watch Institute An estimated 70.2 million hectares of agricultural land worldwide have been sold or leased to private and public investors since 2000, according to new research conducted by the Worldwatch Institute (www.worldwatch.org) for its Vital Signs Online service. The bulk of these acquisitions, which are called “land grabs” by some observers, took place between 2008 and 2010, peaking in 2009. Although data for 2010 indicate that the amount of...

The proposed National Food Security Bill (NFSB), under consideration of Standing Committee of Parliament, may be reviewed for procurement and distribution of maize or corn (under coarse grains scheme) at Rs 1 per kg to intended beneficiaries. Without going into the merits and demerits of ever-increasing subsidies under NFSB, corn for human consumption is highly vulnerable to impermissible limits of fungal toxicity — called “aflatoxins (B1, B2, G1, G2)”. There are...

-AFP JOHANNESBURG: Foreign farms are spreading across Africa to grow food and biofuels for global markets, bringing much-needed investments but also new troubles for a continent struggling to feed itself.  China, Malaysia, Singapore and Bangladesh are just some of the countries spending billions of dollars in what critics have dubbed a new "scramble for Africa", a reference to Europe's 19th century colonisation drive.  But Africa holds an estimated 60 percent of the world's...