-The United Nations   The prices of grain and milk in the drought-hit Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia have risen to record highs, exacerbating hardship for the estimated 12.4 million people in the region who are facing severe food shortages and famine in some parts of Somalia, the United Nations reported today. According to the August food price monitor of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the high prices of cereals...

Reforms in the supply-chain system can help India tackle the demand-supply mismatch in essential food items Food inflation may have dropped to single digit but since that fall is set against last year’s elevated double-digit base, it continues to hurt the poor — 65 per cent of their disposable income goes towards food. The government often defends its failure to tame inflation by arguing that it has no magic wand to...

Its facets include concentration of media ownership and the transformation of news into a commodity. THE last two decades have witnessed a dramatic transformation of India's ‘mediascape' – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the United States, to describe how visual imagery impacts the world and to describe and situate the role of the mass media in global cultural flows. While there...

Draft Bill on land acquisition pegs compensation on market value but how government agencies will reach this value remains a concern In response to farmers’ agitation in the last few years over faulty land acquisition and poor compensation—the Tata-Singur fiasco in West Bengal, Posco in Orissa or the recent farmers’ agitation in Noida—the ministry of rural development is planning to replace the archaic Land Acquisition Bill, 1894. It has come up...

Steelmakers and mine owners, reeling under a ban on mining in Karnataka, are keeping their fingers crossed about the Supreme Court hearing scheduled on Friday. The uncertainty in iron ore and the resultant rise in ore prices have led the steel industry to actively consider an upward revision in prices, just days after most companies mentioned of keeping product price levels unchanged. "Iron ore spot prices have been rising by $1-2 daily...