Development models that focus attention on the poor while expanding job opportunities, increased government spending on social services and aid flows from affluent nations are all successful strategies for alleviating global poverty, the United Nations says. Access to low carbon energy and mobilizing domestic capital by, for example, improving tax collection, are the other factors the UN Development Programme (UNDP) identifies in a new report as crucial factors for the...

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy told trade delegates in a fax on 12 May that cotton has become a “litmus test” for the “development dimension” of the Doha Round. At a recent review of the issue’s standing in WTO talks, some countries, such as Tanzania, alleged that no progress has been made since 2005. Leonce Kone, the trade minister from Burkina Faso - a cotton-exporting Least Developed Country (LDC) - joined Geneva-based...

THE Centre could make changes to the new Nutrient-based Subsidy (NBS) for fertilisers, as part of a concerted move to prune its subsidy bill after global prices of fertiliser nosedived recently. Under the NBS, subsidies for nutrients are currently fixed for a whole year but could now be reviewed every six months to take into account changes, especially price drops, in import prices. The Union Cabinet, while approving the NBS...

The growth rate of agriculture was three per cent and that of manufacturing was 4.5 per cent during the first three decades after independence. The growth rate for agriculture has slipped to 2.8 per cent while that for manufacturing has increased to 6.4 per cent during the last 15 years. Farmers continue to commit suicides across the country. The groundwater level is declining. The country has to import wheat, edible...

A meticulously researched book by A. Vaidyanathan, Agricultural Growth in India: Role of Technology, Incentives and Institutions, is an illuminating scholarly work. Thinking about it one realizes the dismal and declining state of Indian agriculture and the poor governance at both Central and state government levels that has brought it to this sorry pass. A valuable compendium of data and analysis of Indian agriculture since Independence, it is a valuable...