-The Hindu ‘Governments must protect interest of producer, consumer’ The controversy regarding India’s permission to allow foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail and growing “land grab” in Africa by multinational corporations are being closely watched globally by agriculture experts, researchers and donors. At a workshop here on ‘Supporting Policy Research to Inform Agricultural Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia’ — which a few journalists from both regions were invited to attend —...

-The Economic Times The results of the UN climate-change conference that closed in Doha, Qatar, last Saturday show once again that the international negotiations are progressing, albeit slowly. At the heart of these negotiations is the most challenging energy transformation the world has ever seen. Past energy transitions have taken a long time to unfold. Firewood was not displaced by coal until the 18th century. It took one century for oil to...

-IANS London: Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are projected to rise by 2.6 per cent by the end of 2012, reaching a record high of 35.6 billion tonnes, or 58 per cent above 1990 levels, the baseline year for the Kyoto Protocol, says a study. The findings of Global Carbon Project (GCP), co-led by researchers from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia (UEA), say the biggest...

-Farmlandgrab.org Oxfam’s Phil Bloomer reports on the shocking scandal of (mostly) secretive land-grabbing, usually from those least able to defend their rights Land grabbing has fast become a major threat to poor communities in Africa, Asia and South America. Poverty-stricken women and men are being driven from their homes and the land they rely on to grow food to eat and make a living, usually without compensation. In many cases this is...

-The Economic Times After Mahatma Gandhi, Jairam Ramesh is the only national leader to be genuinely concerned that 65 years after Independence, some 600 million Indians in the 21st century continue to use open skies as their latrines. While Lee Kuan Yew continues to exhort Singaporeans to have cleaner loos, our ministry of railways thinks depositing human excreta all along the country's length and breadth, including deep into the cities -...