-Hindustan Times While the government claims that these reforms will help farmers in getting a better price for their products, farmers’ groups have been agitating against these changes. In May this year, the government announced important reforms in agricultural markets. These included deregulation of farm foods from the Essential Commodities Act (ECA). Farmers were also allowed to sell their produce outside government-regulated markets, or Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMCs). Another set of...

-Centre for Science and Environment * Niti Aayog vice chairperson Rajiv Kumar releases the report, which provides the real picture of organic Farming in India: only 2 per cent of India’s net sown area organically farmed, and a mere 1.3 per cent of farmers registered to do organic Farming * Organic and natural Farming must be upscaled to make Indian agriculture sustainable, says the report * Needs to be turned into a mass...

-Down to Earth Exceptional growth in agriculture and acreage in kharif season precipitate a crisis like never before for farmers   In recent times, agriculture made headlines for all the wrong reasons: Farmers quitting cultivation; the sector turning into a perennial loss-making enterprise; and the country’s official policy to downsize the dependence on agriculture to reduce overall economic hardship among the poorest of the population. Agriculture’s fast-declining economic importance reached such an extent...

-Down to Earth National Crime Records Bureau report shows 2/3 of those who died by suicides earned less than Rs 278 a day Daily wage earners were the largest professional group who died by suicide in 2019, according to the latest report released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. India reported 139,123 suicides in 2019, an increase of 3.4 per cent compared to 2018. Daily...

-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...