The neo-colonial rush for global farmland has gone exponential since the food scare of 2007-2008. Last week's long-delayed report by the World Bank suggests that purchases in developing countries rose to 45m hectares in 2009, a ten-fold jump from levels of the last decade. Two thirds have been in Africa, where institutions offer weak defence. As is by now well-known, sovereign wealth funds from the Mid-East, as well as state-entities from China,...

Jagdishji Vaghela is one of hundreds of thousands of farmers standing in the way of India's breakneck economic expansion. Determined not to give up his land for an industrial park in the western state of Gujarat, the 55-year-old farmer scorns at talk of how the benefits of industrialization in Asia's third-largest economy will trickle down to people like him. Despite a nearby plant producing what is touted as the world's cheapest car,...

Mayawati's quick reflexes after the setback over land acquisition in Aligarh has put Congress in a spot, with the Centre fearing it may be dubbed the villain for farmers' woes if it does not prevail upon Trinamool Congress to relent on the bills for Land Acquisition amendment and R&R. After Uttar Pradesh brought its liberal Resettlement and Rehabilitation policy to win over farmers riled by "low land rates" for Yamuna...

The office bearers of the Yavatmal Zilla Shetkari Sangharsh Samiti have flayed the state and Central governments for their anti-farmer policies and programmes. The coalition of farmers has threatened a mass agitation across the state if their long pending demands are not met immediately. General secretary Ashok Bhutada said at a press conference on Monday that the governments at the state and Centre have failed to curb farmers' suicide, as...

All eight of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are critical to development, but numbers four and five on child and maternal health are the real priority areas for this year. That was the main takeaway from a series of briefings with U.N., NGO and country officials in which IPS participated this week. When the MDGs were agreed in September 2000, they laid out a clear pathway to the often vague...