-The Business Standard   Demand-side control cannot be an answer beyond a point to India’s persistently high food price inflation, the World Bank said on Monday. Consumer price-based food inflation in India has been at 10-20 per cent for quite a long while, noted its report on ‘Food inflation in South Asia’. The Bank’s chief economist for the region, Kalpana Kochhar, said controlling inflation in India was a difficult job for the Reserve Bank...

The global 'farmland grab' in Ethiopia and the rest of Africa has become competitive, with companies from Asia, including India and China, joining it. AN extraordinary new process has been at work in the past few years: the aggressive entry of Indian corporations into the markets for agricultural land in Africa. At one level, this process is simply following the hoary old tradition in global capitalism of firms (often supported...

Residents of the state capital, who had planned to binge on non-vegetarian food after Sawaan, will have to go slow because of an increase in the price of onions, a common ingredient in meat and fish dishes. Ironically, vegetarian dishes, too, will cost more as the prices of greens have also shot north. Though you and I have to shell out more, there has been only a marginal increase in the wholesale...

-The United Nations   Signs of ozone depletion are again appearing over the Antarctic, the United Nations reported today, adding that prevailing temperatures and polar stratospheric clouds indicate that the degree of ozone loss this year will most likely be about average in comparison to the past decade. However, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) noted that it is still too early to make a definitive statement on the level of depletion of ozone...

Garhwali villagers resist new central farming plans, stick by age-old ways attuned to nature Jardhargaon is a sprawling cluster of villages tucked away in the Himalayan folds in Tehri district of Garhwal. A panoramic view of pine- and sal-covered mountains, green and freshly showered, surrounds us, as little streams spout out of boulders at every turn of the winding hill roads and clouds hang like a dark cover overhead. But...