-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...

-Down to Earth Inspector General of Forests AK Mohanty sent letter to all states, alleging discrepancies About 70 per cent data on compensatory afforestation was “incorrect or incomplete”, according to a letter Inspector General of Forest, AK Mohanty. The letter, dated August 10, 2020, was sent to principal secretaries for forests of all states and Union territories. The data in question was for work done under the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016 and...

-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...

-TheWire.in As one village prepares to take the government to court, another claims panchayat land reserved for scheduled castes was auctioned by proxy to ‘upper caste’ families. Chandigarh: One-and-a-half months ago, Amrik Kaur, sarpanch of village Sekhowal in Ludhiana district, was asked to attend a meeting at the Ludhiana deputy commissioner’s office. There, she was asked to give her consent for the transfer of a portion of the village common (shamlat) land...

-The Indian Express Barring Mirzapur in UP, none of these districts is included in the official government list of 116 districts that received most returning migrant workers during the lockdown, and where the government had launched the PM Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan on June 20. New Delhi: At least 12 districts have exceeded their annual job creation targets by generating substantially higher numbers of person-days’ work between April 1 and July 21,...