Food-price inflation in India, Asia’s third-largest economy, may accelerate in the second half as farmers are paying 20 percent more to grow crops, according to the commission that helps set minimum farm-product prices. “The cost of production is going up very fast,” Ashok Gulati, chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “The labor cost has gone up dramatically in the past one year...

The GM crops debate rages, but pressure is on to end the moratorium Actively On Hold? Well...     * GEAC meets experts in late April, butthrows no light on safety reviews     * Second report by national science academies supports limited release     * GEAC chairman rejects limited release; assures further discussions     * No decision on further tests or studies to justify Bt Brinjal     * Civil society groups meet GEAC in May, seek...

The National Agro Foundation is on a mission to improve yield and income, especially for small farmers. Anyone planning to improve the lot of farmers in the country would do well to begin with these wise words: “Fallowness is in one's mind and not in the soil.” This was constantly uttered by C. Subramaniam, the architect of India's agricultural policies that led to the Green Revolution. While his policies and high-yielding varieties...

The dominant approaches to development have failed the world’s poorest citizens and now the paradigm must change. This is the strong message coming from over 2,000 non-governmental organisations gathered at the civil society forum for the Fourth U.N. Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC-IV) in Istanbul, Turkey. Arjun Karki, spokesperson for the forum, told the gathering that the failure to see more LDC countries graduate from this most vulnerable classification...

The upsurge in the use of the toxic pesticide endosulfan, targeted for prohibition by the international community, illustrates one of the dilemmas of intensive agriculture in Argentina and Latin America in general. "There is always a natural solution," insists farmer Alicia Alem, a member of an Argentine cooperative that produces cereal and forage crops without chemical fertilisers or pesticides. "In terms of wheat, for example, the cooperative gets exactly the same yield...