-Down to Earth Lowest amount of rainfall in the last decade; climate change to blame, says Met Paddy cultivation in Jharkhand this Kharif season has taken a huge hit, with most farmers expecting a meagre yield. Monsoon 2022 saw a massive deficit in rainfall — the lowest in the last 10 years. “I doubt I can harvest even a kilogramme of yield this year,” Mahendra Prasad told Down To Earth. The farmer in...
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Plight of the small peasantry in Punjab is affecting their mental health, highlights field-based study
Door-to-door and village-to-village surveys carried out by researchers of the Department of Economics and Sociology, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana detected a total of 9,291 suicides that were committed by farmers in six districts of Punjab during the period from 2000 to 2018. Situated in the Malwa region of Punjab, which is known for cotton farming and the prevalence of cancer among its population, Sangrur (2,506) witnessed the highest number of...
More »UN Report: Global hunger numbers rose to as many as 828 million in 2021
-Press release by FAO dated 6 July 2022 The latest State of Food Security and Nutrition report shows the world is moving backwards in efforts to eliminate hunger and malnutrition Rome/New York: The number of people affected by hunger globally rose to as many as 828 million in 2021, an increase of about 46 million since 2020 and 150 million since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic (1), according to a United...
More »The poor are bearing the brunt of inflation -Krishna Raj
-The Tribune The prices of essential food items have increased by 50% in seven years, whereas the real wage rate has risen by 22%. These figures show that inflation has outsmarted the real income of the poor, making their lives miserable as the food basket constitutes a substantial proportion of the total expenditure on the poor. The net effect is that the poor earn less and take loans to maintain the...
More »Why India is unlikely to double farmers' income by the end of this fiscal -Sanjeeb Mukherjee
-Business Standard The current growth in the Indian cultivator's real or inflation-adjusted income, at about 3.5 per cent, is barely a third of the growth rate required to achieve this goal Earlier this month, the Central government said in a reply in Parliament that it has taken several measures to double farmers’ income by 2022 and that the progress made so far indicates that it is ‘on the right track’. However, a closer...
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