Nagpur orange’s survival hinges precariously on its return to sustainable cultivation. Farmers have woken up to this, but will the government? A beaming Uday Wath hugs the trunk of his sturdy, disease-free Nagpur orange tree. All around him are trees drooping with the fruit, large and healthy. The tree trunks are singularly free of both telltale gummosis wounds and bluish white bordeaux paste, the chemical meant to prevent them. Not more than...

HINDIYANKALAN, India – One afternoon last November, 10 people in this eastern Indian village sat in a circle on a dirt road and told us about their fight against hunger. We wanted to know: What would drive a person to eat a poisoned root? I was on a research assignment with my colleague Ankita Aggarwal from the Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi think tank. It was part of a...

-PTI Chairman of Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, C Rangarajan today said Agriculture Produce Marketing Committees (APMCs) have not helped the farmers in gaining higher level of income.  "The marketing arrangements with respect to agricultural products remain very archaic", he said, delivering the convocation address at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore.  "Some of the legislations such as APMC have also not helped the farmers. There is a big difference between what the...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...

The government should immediately announce a 10% increase in the floor price of cotton and rice to protect Farmer Incomes if it imposes a ban on the export of these commodities, India's two most economically significant cash crops, according to the Commission of Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), a body which advises the government on the pricing policy for major farm produce. "Any ban on export is an implicit tax on...