-Livemint.com In 1986, Italian journalist Carlo Petrini was outraged when McDonald’s opened its first outlet in Rome. He saw this as a threat to Italy’s culinary culture. He led a protest against the global industrialization of food, which culminated in the slow food movement. Starting in Rome, the movement is now a worldwide phenomenon. Edited excerpts from an interview at the Indigenous Terra Madre in Shillong: * What are the key achievements...

-The Telegraph Nagpur: Maharashtra's BJP-led government has put on hold confined field trials for genetically modified (GM) crops "until all doubts are cleared", following "objections from reputed members of society" including RSS affiliate Swadeshi Jagran Manch. No time bar has been specified for the restrictions, which come days before the onset of the monsoon and the start of the sowing season. The state agriculture department wrote to private and public sector companies on...

-Livemint.com The prospect of weak monsoon is never good news, but this time it comes on top of a rabi harvest destroyed by unseasonal rainfall, and a spate of farmer suicides The prospect of a sub-normal monsoon is never good news, but this time it comes on top of a rabi harvest destroyed by being rained on at the wrong time, and a spate of farmer suicides. The only option is...

-PTI NGOs like Greenpeace are opposing genetically engineered 'Golden Rice' without any basis, green activist Patrick Moore alleged today while pitching for its cultivation. Interestingly, Moore himself was a co-founder of Greenpeace International but later disassociated with the NGO in 1986 due to differences of opinion. He alleged that the Greenpeace is "raising money to oppose 'Golden Rice' without any basis and offering alternatives to address malnutrition". He claimed that the Golden Rice'...

-The Hindu Business Line Radha Mohan Singh, the Union Agriculture Minister, lent vocal support to genetically modified (GM) crops on Friday stating that technologically enhanced seeds could help India realise its food security ambition and believed it held great promise in minimising productivity losses particularly on account of abiotic stress factors like floods and drought. "While agriculture feeds the nation, seeds feed agriculture... Bt Cotton in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and...