-The Indian Express For the last 10 years, farmers in India benefited from both increased production and higher price realisations - leading to rising rural incomes and declining poverty rates. That happy story may now be near its end - which could be the precursor to a renewed crisis in agriculture. The main reason is declining global prices for most agri-commodities (see Table 1). Over the last five-six months, corn, wheat and...

-IANS Kolkata: Climate change is causing toxic metals trapped in the sediment beds of the Hooghly estuary in the Indian Sunderbans to leach out into the water system due to changes in ocean chemistry, say scientists, warning of potential human health hazards. They predict that after about 30 years, increasing ocean acidification - another dark side of spiked atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide - could in fact unlock the entire stock of...

-The Business Standard The NDA is using the discretionary powers allocated by the UPA government to either chip away at or metastasize social sector programmes The NDA government has found two ways to deal with the social sector programmes and policies it has got from UPA as legacy. Some of these the NDA wants shrunk or diminished and it's doing so through executive fiat, often in stealth mode. Then there are others...

-The Hindu Business Line Output data is unreliable, which leaves us unprepared for shortages. And, farming practices are primitive The price of potatoes is once again moving up, largely due to the demand-supply gap in the market-place. The National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (Nafed) that was asked by the Ministry of Civil Supplies to explore the possibility of importing potatoes from Russia, China and Egypt, procured 3,500 tonnes of potatoes...

-PTI Chandigarh: Experts at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) meeting on agriculture here today raised concern over high water consuming crops after the advent of green revolution. They pitched in favour low water consuming, heat-resistant high-production crops. On the second day of the session on impending food crisis of the world due to explosion of population, they stressed on finalising a blueprint to enhance agriculture production by at least 50 per cent by...