-The Hindu Nobel laureate Venkataraman ‘Venki' Ramakrishnan on Monday came down heavily on those opposed to genetic modification of agricultural crops. In an exclusive interview to The Hindu, he said there was definitely a need to be careful while dealing with GM crops with proper regulatory mechanism, but one should not ignore the tremendous potentials on offer such as in terms of developing drought resistant varieties and crops with more nutrients and...

-The Indian Express Food inflation owes largely to agricultural markets being regulated by outdated laws. The RBI governor, Raghuram Rajan, has a difficult task this week. He has to decide whether to keep interest rates constant or raise them - bearing in mind the possible taper of the US Fed's bond buying programme, a decline in industrial production and a rise in inflation. The sharp increase in consumer price-based inflation, to more...

-Live Mint By giving in to pressure from the US and EU, India has landed itself and the developing world in a bad trade deal The stenographic cacophony in the Indian media had a singular triumphalist message from the ninth World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meet in Bali: India had secured a major victory by safeguarding its food security programme and stood its ground against the US and the European Union...

-eSocialSciences.com   This piece analyzes the implications of the National Food Security Act for India's commitments under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) in the context of widespread concern that they might be mutually incompatible. An analysis of support to rice and wheat for the period 1995-2012 suggests that the current scale of operations are at levels implied by the NFSA and that it is possible to leverage existing provisions in the...

-The Indian Express India faces no risk of violating its commitments under WTO The Indian delegation, led by commerce minister Anand Sharma, is approaching the WTO Ministerial in Bali with a ‘begging bowl'. The government has agreed to the so-called ‘peace clause'-a euphemism for not taking any penal action for violating commitments under Agreement on Agriculture (AoA)-proposed by WTO Director General but with the caveat that this will remain in place until...