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 Economic Times Fertiliser will continue to be a key input in the crop production system as there are no alternatives to meet nutritional requirement of crops. Post-Independence, a substantial increase in indigenous production and consumption of urea and a range of P and K fertilisers made the country self-reliant both in fertiliser and food grain production. But farm production is stagnant though fertiliser use has been rising. The bone of...

The northern region of Gujarat State in western India is semi-arid and prone to droughts, receiving almost all of its rain during the monsoon season between June and September. But for the past three decades, many crop and dairy farms have remained green—even during the dry season. That's because farmers have invested in wells and pumps, using massive amounts of electricity to extract water from deep aquifers. The government has artificially propped...

-PTI The government's foodgrains stock rose by 21 per cent to 53.4 million tonnes as of April 1 from 44.3 million tonnes the year-ago period, according to the Food Corporation of India (FCI). Wheat inventory jumped to 19.95 million tonnes from 15.4 million tonnes a year earlier, the FCI said on its website. Similarly, rice stock rose to 33.35 million tonnes from 28.82 million tonnes the year-ago period, it said. Wheat and rice reserves...

-The Wall Street Journal These days, Indian policymakers are debating how to create a vast new food entitlement program. There is talk of poor households struggling to cope with high food prices and malnourishment among their children. What you don’t hear much about, however, is the most tragic and outrageous consequence of India’s failure to feed its people adequately: starvation deaths. India is a nation that prides itself on having been self-sufficient in...