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 finance ministry has asked public sector banks to devise products for Indian farmers to ensure they get adequate funding in emergencies. The government, the majority owner of such banks, wants them to roll out products such as emergency loans to farmers that will be linked to savings accounts, a weather index-based insurance product, and set up a credit guarantee fund that will aid farmers in the event of crop losses...

People with agricultural land that they do not wish to cultivate will soon have the option of depositing it in government land banks that will offer them consistent monetary returns. With an incentive system broadly on the lines of a bank account, the public land bank will offer payments based on the tenure and size of the holding with additional benefits if the land is leased out. "A lot of land is...