-CivilSocietyOnline.com WHEN the Sri Lankan economy collapsed with a sigh recently, prominently sticking out of the debris was a failed attempt to take the island nation into full-scale organic agricultural production. The Rajapaksa government had virtually overnight ordered a switch to organic agriculture to save foreign exchange on the import of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But going organic, instead of being the solution, became a bigger problem with food crops failing and the...

-Deccan Herald The country suffered a massive crop diversity loss during the British Raj; later, the green revolution eroded much of the native crops The UN World Food Programme says that 45 million people worldwide are on the brink of starvation. The hunger situation in India is no less alarming. The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) in its report, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, 2020” stated that...

-The Hindu ‘Healthcare as an optional public service’ would ensure the legal right to receive free, quality care in a public institution The lingering COVID-19 crisis is a good time to revive an issue that is, oddly, slow to come to life in India — universal health care (UHC). Meanwhile, UHC has become a well-accepted objective of public policy around the world. It has even been largely realised in many countries, not...

-Scroll.in It has come to a point that making debt payments is impossible, the country’s central bank governor said. Crisis-hit Sri Lanka on Tuesday said it would default on its entire external debt worth $51 billion (over Rs 3.88 lakh crore) till it receives a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, AFP reported. A country’s external debt pertains to the money borrowed by it from foreign lenders through commercial banks, governments, or international...

-TheQuint.com A new IPCC report wants the world to decarbonise. Sri Lanka was doing just that, albeit with shoddy planning. Yet another IPCC report is out that warns of dire consequences if the world doesn’t course-correct and pursue a low-carbon pathway. This means drastically cutting our dependence on fossil fuels, among a string of other hard-hitting measures. One country did try that by announcing a ban on chemical-based farming and its decision...