BANWARA, India – In the fall of 2006, Gita Devi was pregnant with her sixth child when her family fell on hard times. A severe drought made it more difficult than ever to find farm work here in India’s northeastern plains. The family couldn’t afford food. It was unable to get a government ration card to buy grains and rice at steep discounts, even though it clearly was poor enough to...

-The Telegraph   Farmers in Bengal left around 2.8 lakh hectares uncultivated in the just-concluded boro crop season, a silent expression of no-confidence in the state government’s paddy procurement process and a fallout of rising fertiliser prices. The area cultivated in the boro season (January to end-February) can be considered a barometer for man-made farming systems because farmers largely depend on irrigation during this phase. The bigger aman crop (June to August) still...

-Bloomberg   World food prices will drop this year as increase in unemployment in developing and developed countries slows growth in demand, the United Nations said.   “We have started to see a decline in food prices,” Jose Graziano da Silva, director general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, said at a conference in Hanoi on Thursday. World economic expansion will slow to 3.3% this year from 3.8% in 2011, according to the International...

In December 2011, CAG tabled a well-analysed audit report in Parliament claiming a loss of 1,200 crore, or $250 million, on the import of subsidised pulses through 2006-11 under the supervision of department of consumer affairs (DCA) of the food ministry. The government's intention to introduce such a scheme cannot be faulted: during 2005-08, seven million tonnes of wheat was imported at high prices, chana (chickpeas) values spiked from 21...

Water is the most critical of all natural resources on which modern economies depend. Water scarcity and rapid economic advance cannot go hand-in-hand. Yet, with its per-capita water availability falling to 1,582 cu m per year, India has become water-stressed.  In 1960, India signed a treaty indefinitely setting aside 80% of the Indus-system waters for downstream Pakistan - the most generous water-sharing pact thus far in modern world history. Its 1996...