-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...

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,...

-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...

Science and technology hold the key to developing low-input, high-output agriculture. The challenge is to use new technologies creatively and to make evidence-based decisions on the deployment of new technologies. Crop breeding is carried out to meet two broad objectives: one, to increase yields of a crop per se and, two, to protect the yield potential by developing crops resistant to diseases, pests and environmental extremes.  Both yield-enhancement and yield-stabilisation are...

-Down to Earth WHO agency says there is compelling evidence to classify diesel fumes as deadly carcinogen along with tobacco, asbestos The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a part of the World Health Organization, gives its scientific verdict that diesel engine exhaust can cause lung cancer in humans. In its report released on June 12, IARC has reclassified diesel exhaust from its group 2A list of probable carcinogens to its...