“Governments and international agencies urgently need to boost ecological farming techniques to increase food production and save the climate,” said UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, while presenting the findings at an international meeting on agroecology held in Brussels on 21 and 22 June. Along with 25 of the world’s most renowned experts on agroecology, the UN expert urged the international community to re-think current agricultural...

For years now, at least since India passed amendments to the Patent Act to allow product patents in 2005, patents on drugs have coloured and overwhelmed the debate on health issues in the country. Now, the issue of patents on seeds and agriculture inputs promises to become the hot new topic. An indication is the response to a news report “Battle royal over Bt cotton royalty” (May 28, Business Standard)...

Rising food prices and economic crisis have eaten into the gains made by India and the world in reducing poverty during the first half of this decade, a United Nations report released on Wednesday said. "Newly updated estimates from the World Bank suggest the crisis will heave an some 64 million into extreme poverty by end of 2010, principally in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia," the Millennium Development Goals, 2010 report...

India is expected to reduce its poverty rate from 51 per cent in 1990 to 24 per cent in 2015, slashing the number of extremely poor by 188 million. But progress in the rest of South Asia is not sufficient to halve the level of poverty by that target date, according to a United Nations report on the Millennium Development Goals for 2010. The sharpest reductions worldwide continue to be recorded...

Even before the food and financial crises hit the world, prevalence of hunger in South Asia was increasing instead of decreasing, taking the region further away from the goal of reducing hunger by half by 2015, according to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals report, 2010. The report says in 2005-2007, the proportion of undernourished people in South Asia had swelled to levels last seen in 1990. The prevalence of...