‘Without electricity, social and economic development is much more difficult.' More than $36 billion a year is needed to ensure that the world's population benefits from access to electricity and clean-burning cooking facilities by 2030, the International Energy Agency said on September 21. In a report prepared for the U.N. Millennium Development Goals meeting in New York, the agency said the goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2015 would be possible only...

With more than 400 million Indians going to bed hungry each day, food security has become a crucial issue. On June 4 last year, the president made an announcement: “My government proposes to enact a new law — the National Food Security Act — that will provide statutory basis for a framework which assures food security for all. Every family below the poverty line in rural as well as urban...

Gowthami limps into the all-women police station in the Export hub of Tirupur with tears in her eyes. The 23-year-old mother of a little boy attempted to end her life swallowing a packet of powdered mosquito repellent coil, but miraculously survived. ''I don't want to be alive. My husband says I look like a fat pig... he thrashes me quite often,'' she says. Every day, at least a dozen young...

While global food prices declined for the first half of this year, they have spiked in recent months, according to a new World Bank publication, and this volatility could in turn push up the local food prices of the world's poorest and most malnourished countries. The Bank's grain price index had declined by 16 percent over the first six months of 2010 before rising that same amount between mid-June and August....

“If countries impose Export ban, import duty, there will be an inflationary trend” The outlook for global wheat production is still positive Restrictions can cause inflationary trend on food prices in 2011 and 2012 The drought in Russia and the floods in Pakistan that have affected wheat production will impact food prices as in 2007-08, says a senior official of the World Food Programme. WFP Deputy Executive Director Ramiro Lopes da Silva says: “The...