Seven rounds of trade talks between the EU and India have been concluded without any negotiating texts or positions of either party being made public.  The widespread optimism about the possible signing of the India-European Union (EU) Free Trade Agreement (FTA) sometime in 2010 fails to take into account the many thorny issues that remain to be resolved. Not the least of them are the tariff negotiations on goods and...

Reversing a downward trend, childhood immunization rates are now at their highest ever, but due to a funding gap of at least $1 billion life-saving vaccines still do not reach some 24 million children – one in five born each year – who are most at risk in the poorest countries, according to a new United Nations report released today. “The stakes are high. The WHO has estimated that if...

Government policies in many developing countries which promote the planting of a narrow base of agricultural crops may hurt farmers in the long run, a United Nations human rights expert warned today. As a result of the global food crisis, developing countries “have massively reinvested in agriculture and have sought to provide farmers with the means of production they need to produce food,” Olivier de Schutter, the Special Rapporteur on...

Global economic and financial crisis (2007-2008) coupled with food and fuel crises (2006-2008) has pushed the number of undernourished in the world to 1.02 billion during 2009, This has happened despite international food commodity prices declining from their earlier peaks, finds a newly released report of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO, www.fao.org) titled: The State of Food Insecurity in the World Report 2009: Economic Crises-Impacts and Lessons Learnt....

Energy security is a major objective of all countries. Some are proactive and aggressive in this pursuit, like China; others like India are slow and procrastinate on major decisions and allow hope to overtake realistic assessments. This makes energy security in the foreseeable future an uncertain goal for India. Any discussion of energy security must keep in mind the Indian realities. Although in overall terms of commercial energy use to...