-The Hindu Business Line   A device that literally makes light of the rice parboiling process Bhuvani Devi, a frail-looking woman in her early thirties, has taken up a new challenge - to produce a tonne of parboiled rice in Baarwan village in Jharkhand's Deoghar district. Unlike what the region's paddy farmers did until now, she wants to process and sell parboiled rice rather than paddy itself. "We used to sell paddy at...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Nearly 90 lakh farmers in Maharashtra have been impacted by the drought that has devastated the kharif crop, official data shows. The figure is almost on a par with the population of Sweden. Maharashtra is already known for its farm crisis and reports the highest number of farmer's suicides in the country. The drought - brought on by a delayed and inadequate monsoon - is set to...

-The Hindu The Shanta Kumar Committee's recommendations to unbundle the Food Corporation of India are in tune with U.S.-led demands raised in the World Trade Organization The Shanta Kumar Committee report, released last week, on a range of issues relating to procurement, storage and distribution of food grains is not only deeply flawed in its reading of the situation on food security, but also short on facts. It was prepared under the...

-Business Standard The Shanta Kumar Committee on restructuring FCI has suggested the reach of the National Food Security Act be curtailed to 40 per cent of the population The National Democratic Alliance government set up the high-level Shanta Kumar Committee to restructure and reform the state-owned Food Corporation of India. Instead, the panel ended up providing a road map to restructure the entire farming and food security policy of the government. In...

-Business Standard The central government's price stabilisation fund for potatoes and onions proposes to take on only half of any losses incurred by agencies of state governments in this regard, such as civil supply corporations. The draft guidelines for the Fund, creation of which was announced in the 2014-15 Budget by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, say if any central government agency (such as Nafed or SFAC, the Small Farmers Agri-Business Consortium)...