“THE world’s attention is back on your cause.” That was Bill Gates talking to agricultural scientists gathered recently to honour the late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution. The tycoon-turned-philanthropist was right. This week, the world—in the guise of 60-odd heads of state including the pope—held the first United Nations food summit since 2002. As the world’s attention turns from the receding financial crisis, it is switching to one...

IN 1974 Henry Kissinger, then America’s secretary of state, told the first world food conference in Rome that no child would go to bed hungry within ten years. Just over 35 years later, in the week of another United Nations food summit in Rome, 1 billion people will go to bed hungry. This failure, already dreadful, may soon get worse. None of the underlying agricultural problems which produced a spike in...

The three-day World Summit on Food Security (WSFS) that opened in Rome, Italy on 16 November, 2009 has ended with serious differences among participants. Among those expressing dissatisfaction with the final declaration was no less a person than Jacques Diouf, the head of UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Diouf criticised the declaration for not including exact targets to reduce hunger. There is no mention of a deadline for the...

The Nobel laureate Prof. Amartya Sen said on child domestic workers that “it is not economic poverty but rather political poverty that is depriving children their rights to education and pushing them to labour force. Our actions should aim at attacking this political poverty to bring education to the reach of children and free child domestic workers from the bondage.” The child domestic labour is common and traditional form of...

As an Indian, and one who has held high ministerial office, it is only right that I begin by portraying the reality of my own country before drawing comparisons with my South Asian neighbours. The World Food Programme tells us that half the world’s hungry live in India. Which is the more significant reality: Our being the second-fastest growing economy in the world, or that, notwithstanding that extraordinarily high growth...