-Down to Earth The food most associated with biodiversity loss also tends to also be connected to unhealthy diets across the globe As the global population has doubled to 7.8 billion in about 50 years, industrial agriculture has increased the output from fields and farms to feed humanity. One of the negative outcomes of this transformation has been the extreme simplification of ecological systems, with complex multi-functional landscapes converted to vast swaths...

-The Indian Express Current economic contraction is different from previous ones. Governments should borrow and spend India has never experienced negative economic growth since 1979-80, and before that in 1972-73, 1965-66 and 1957-58. All these were drought years with 1957-58 also registering a significant balance of payments (BOP) deterioration and 1979-80 witnessing the second global oil shock following the Iranian Revolution. The real GDP decline of 5-10 per cent that various agencies are...

-The Financial Express In part one of this article (Secondary agriculture is of primary importance; August 10; https://bit.ly/31H0h0E), the need to expand the market range both horizontally (territorial extension) and vertically (functional expansion), as also the role of agro-processing in achieving the latter in particular, were discussed. In this part, the article dwells upon promoting secondary agriculture on the shoulders of food and non-food processing. Current status of agro-processing The processing sector in...

-Livemint.com In 1961, the per capita income of India and South Korea was similar at $85.4 and $93.8. In 2019, there was a huge difference as they stood at $2,104.1 and $31,762, respectively. How did that happen and what can India learn from it? Mint explains * What has happened between 1950s to now? As Arvind Panagariya, the first vice-chairman of NITI Aayog, writes in India Unlimited: “In the early 1950s, South Korea,...

-Livemint.com * The pandemic-induced global pause resulted in several visible environmental gains. Will they last? * A controversy is brewing over the government’s efforts to push through radical changes to the country’s environmental laws, which seek to further dilute environmental protections NAGPUR: Teeming wildlife; cities breathing fresh air; and clearer rivers. Those were all small signs of hope amid a dire, once-in-a-century pandemic. Nature was supposedly healing. At one point in April, an...