Fast-growing emerging nations are taking increasingly aggressive actions to beat back rising food prices as they grow more worried of threats to stability if prices don't start to retreat. Developing-market governments have unveiled a laundry list of measures—including price caps, export bans and rules to counter commodity speculation—to keep food costs from disrupting their economies as price spikes that some had hoped were temporary have stretched into the new year. Some...

That Indian firms, some of them backed by the government, have gone scouting for land abroad to farm crops for consumption back home is well-known. Reversing the trend, now many Gulf countries are getting a toehold in India that will allow them to farm here and export the food back. A Bahraini firm, the Nader & Ebrahim Group (NEG), recently tied up with Pune-based Sanghar Group to do exactly that....

Everyone agrees that there is a food crisis. As ordinary members of the public we know there’s one every time we go out shopping for vegetables. My mother knows there’s a crisis because, after recently sacking her cook, she discovered the lady had left with all the onions in the house. The media agrees there’s one, and sends more TV crews to talk to onion farmers, even though the TV reporters...

The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council has decided to take its battle with the government on the now-controversial issue of food security into the public domain. Eight days after the Rangarajan panel, appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, rejected its recommendations on food security, the NAC has decided to dig in its heels, reflecting, council sources said, “Ms. Gandhi's determination to go ahead.” Indeed, on Friday, the NAC, at its ninth...

National Advisory Council has asked the government to provide highest priority to the inclusion of SC/ST families among beneficiaries of the proposed food security legislation. The Sonia Gandhi-led council decided on Friday to write to the rural development ministry, urging it to include the socially vulnerable section in the 'priority group' in the BPL survey to be conducted by the ministry. The council's draft legislation has recommended providing 35kg foodgrain...