-The Hindu Business Line Mehsana (Gujarat): A monocropping culture, driven by healthy returns, threatens to hurt cotton farmers in Mehsana and other districts in the country's largest cotton-producing State, say agriculture experts working in the region. As the price of cotton slips due to excess supply and China scaling back on purchases, farmers in north Gujarat risk mounting their losses and the likelihood of reduced sowing in May. They had increased cotton...

-Kafila.org With depressing regularity, the newspapers have been reporting farmers' suicides in many states. Recently, P Sainath wrote on BBC that around 296,438 farmers have committed suicide since 1995. He also mentions that cash crop cultivators of cotton, sugar cane, vanilla, pepper, groundnut etc account for the bulk of those suicides. According to a PIL heard by the Supreme Court in December 2014, around 3146 farmers in Maharashtra have committed suicide...

-Down to Earth For farmers, trust sells more than organic licence A FOOD SAFETY and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) official walked into Restore, an organic food store at Kottivakkam in Chennai. He picked up a packet of rice off the shelf and noticed some bugs in it. "How can you sell groceries with bugs?" he asked. The staff told him their customers buy their goods precisely because of the bugs in...

-Down to Earth The situation of India's farmers has only become grimmer in the past decade, according to the latest National Sample Survey Office report The lot of the embattled Indian farmer only keeps on getting worse with the passage of time. In the last 10 years, the voluminous debt of Indian agricultural households has increased almost four-fold whereas their undersized monthly income from cultivation has increased three-fold. Even the number of...

-Down to Earth The programme does not address challenges that farmers face in eastern states Farmers in Jharkhand have not derived significant benefits from the new Green Revolution programme initiated by the Centre in 2010-11, according to a report by non-profits working with the farmers in the state. The report claims that the government tried to implement the 1960s model of Green Revolution that increased agricultural production in Punjab and Haryana, without...