-The Hindu Business Line The risk of water availability is a painful reality in south Asian agriculture including India. Any deviation from the monsoon causes problems for the farm community and poses threat to food security in the region. The variability in precipitation in India has actually increased in recent years. While comparing the variability of precipitation (given by standard deviation) between two phases, 1950-75 and 1976-2010, in two geographically dispersed districts...

-Deccan Herald Instead of reducing the usage, molecular breeders are conveniently dovetailing pesticides tolerance into GM crop varieties. It's a strange paradox. While the demand for organic food is rising unequivocally in the rich and developed countries as well as in the major developing countries, the use of chemical pesticides in agriculture is also growing at a phenomenal pace. The organic food industry in the US is relatively new. At a time when...

-The Indian Express Agricultural GDP is underestimated due to inaccurate non-cereal data. It started with a mundane question: what is the chicken population in India? There are glaring inconsistencies in the available data. The National Sample Survey Organisation's (NSSO's) surveys show a 20 per cent annual growth of chicken consumption between 2005 and 2010. But according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the production of chicken meat only rose 10 per...

-The Times of India KOLKATA: You must have been complaining about rise in prices across categories - food or non-food. What you have not realized is West Bengal has become one of the most expensive states in India. Consumer price indices for October this year, filed with the Parliament barely a fortnight back, shows that Bengal's figure is now the second highest. Consumer price indices (CPI) for the rural Bengal during October...

-The Hindu Appachi eco-logic cotton project is a unique organic cotton contract farm model in the Western Ghats region of Kabini Reservoir. The project covers nearly 1,200 farmers spread over 1,875 acres. Over 17 per cent of the area comes under reserve forests of both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and exposing the cultivation fields to wild animal attacks is forcing farmers to start cotton cultivation on a mono cropping basis instead of...