-TheWire.in Indian agriculture is in the grip of a crisis and needs to move away from the 'cereal trap' towards alternatives. Deregulation of marketing should come second, not first. At the Indian Express’s e-Adda on March 21, Punjab’s chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh asked a question that has still not received an answer: Why did the Central government feel it had to change a marketing system that has existed for a hundred...
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Let’s strengthen and not dilute the National Food Security Act -Himanshu
-Livemint.com * We must widen its coverage to feed the needy instead of letting subsidy reductions get the better of it * Subsidy reduction is a key aim of Niti Aayog’s proposal to reduce food-security coverage, but our subsidy level is not as high as it looks and the move could thwart efforts to achieve nutrition goals A recent discussion paper by the Niti Aayog has suggested a reduction in the coverage of...
More »Markets have failed to prop up farm incomes -Devinder Sharma
-The Tribune The economic argument in support of market reforms, claiming that farm incomes go up when the number of farmers recedes, has turned out to be untrue. America has lost more than 5 million farms in less than 100 years, and Australia 25 per cent of its farms between 1980 and 2002. The speed at which farmers across the globe have got out of agriculture hasn’t increased farm incomes, but...
More »What India’s farm crisis really needs -Christophe Jaffrelot and Hemal Thakker
-The Indian Express To solve India’s deep agrarian crisis, more public investment and government support are needed, not the new farm laws The farmers’ movement invites us to revisit the trajectory of India’s agriculture so as to understand its real problems. Beginning in the mid-1960s, India and, especially, Punjab experienced a massive productivity boom as a result of widespread adoption of Green Revolution technologies. This transition was driven by public investment in...
More »Worrying spike in Global Food Prices -CP Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh
-The Hindu Business Line Having recovered from their lows touched early or mid-2020, food prices are rising fast. At $574.8 a metric tonne in February 2021, the price of soyabean was 53 per cent higher than the corresponding month of 2020, when the effects of the Covid pandemic were yet to be felt (Chart 1). Over that period, the price of maize had risen from $168.71 to $245.24 a metric tonne...
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