Basagonda adopted INM system to cultivate papaya Around three years ago when Basagonda Muttappanavar decided to join his father in farming, he had a dream: to bring about a radical change in farming methods. Confident Being the son of a farmer, the 27-year-old agriculture graduate was confident of turning the not-so-profitable land into a dividend-rich farm. Basagonda decided to cultivate Taiwan-786 variety of papaya on 4 acres of their 45-acre farm at Managuli village,...

-The Hindu The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) is set to take place on June 20 at Rio de Janeiro, 20 years after the 1992 Earth Summit on Environment & Development. World leaders, experts, and U.N. agencies are expected to take stock and reaffirm global commitment to sustainable development. The summit is taking place against the backdrop of threats of catastrophic climate change, unprecedented environmental degradation and widespread market...

-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...

-The Times of India No survey official has visited the village of Phisami, not far from India's border with Myanmar in Nagaland, or parts of the Andaman and Nicobar islands as the sheer remoteness of these areas made them off limits for enumerators.  This will change in July, when the 69th round of the National Sample Survey Organization's (NSSO) enumeration of socio-economic indicators gets under way as all of India will be...

-The United Nations On the occasion of World Day Against Child Labour, two United Nations independent human rights experts today highlighted that of the 215 million children working throughout the world, more than half are subjected to the worst forms of child labour, including sexual and labour exploitation. “One of the most abhorrent forms of child slavery is found in mining and quarrying, where children start work from the age of three,”...