Senior United Nations officials today called for urgent steps to rein in the rising prices for basic farm produce, petroleum and raw industrial materials whose volatility hits the world’s poorest people the hardest.     “Such volatility has huge negative impacts on vulnerable groups, such as low-income households in developing countries, for whom food expenditure can account for up to 80 per cent of household budgets,” UN Conference on Trade and Development...

The debate over food security is becoming an exercise in callow dissimulation, where we devote our energies to ensure that food security remains a mirage. The core objective should be simple. It is a scandal that after two decades of high growth, India still does not make adequate nutrition available to large sections of the population. There is simply no financial, technological or production related reason why this should be...

The world economy may have turned around from one of the worst economic recessions that left it scarred in 2009 but things still look far from being radiant as global unemployment remains at a record high for the third consecutive year. If Global Employment Trends 2011, published by International Labour Organisation, is anything to go by, then low job creation remains a major stumbling block in the global economic recovery....

Billions of dollars are being made by investors in a speculative "food bubble" that's created record food prices, starving millions and destabilising countries, experts now conclude. Wall Street investment firms and banks, along with their kin in London and Europe, were responsible for the technology dot-com bubble, the stock market bubble, and the recent U.S. and UK housing bubbles. They extracted enormous profits and their bonuses before the inevitable collapse of...

South Asian countries, led by India, registered a rapid economic growth in 2010 and their unemployment rates dipped marginally from the previous year, says the latest annual Global Employment Trends (GET) report of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Globally, however, it was a bad year for jobs for the third successive year. The annual employment trends survey points to a highly differentiated recovery in labour markets, with persistently high levels of...