-The Hindu Business Line Thiruvananthapuram: J Cherian, an MBA in biotech from Scotland, who took to farming on his ancestral property in central Kerala, watches in despair as a merciless March sun beats down on his young plants. “This is unlike anything that I've seen in my eight years in the fields,” he says with a shrug of his shoulders. The administration seemed to concur, with Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan declaring that artificial...

-The Indian Express Farmer producer organisations have truly taken off. Now’s the time to create their own lobbying platform. In the summer of 2011, as the managing director of the Small Farmers’ Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC), an autonomous society under the Union Agriculture Ministry, I addressed a group of Uttar Pradesh government officials in Lucknow. My hosts politely sat through my presentation and near-evangelical pitch, as I pushed the idea of promoting farmer...

-Hindustan Times India’s performance in the recently released Global Hunger Index (GHI) report is tragic. The country which is one of the largest producers of cereals, vegetables and fruits in the world, ranks 97 among 118 countries and is home to over 184 million undernourished people. India also pays a very heavy price for vitamin and mineral deficiencies, often called “hidden hunger”, as it loses $12 billion in gross domestic product...

-HuffingtonPost.in This is a way to force Aadhaar enrolment, not fix the scheme. Children will suffer. I am not usually an opponent of Aadhaar, India's controversial scheme to give a unique identification number to all residents of India, with their biometric information seeded into it. Any fears that I may have about privacy or surveillance or misuse are overridden by my experience that what the poor want is to be counted, not...

-Livemint.com According to NCDEX, over 25,000 small and marginal farmers from 13 FPOs have successfully hedged their crops on its trading platform in the past 10 months New Delhi: In a bumper crop year when farmers across the country have been battered by lower crop prices, farmers’ groups are using futures contracts to hedge against price dips during the harvest season. For instance, Samriddhi Mahila Crop Production Co. Ltd, a farmer-producer organization (FPO)...