As India rapidly industrialises, the government and private firms are seeking large tracts of farm land to build factories, power plants and highways, sparking off violent protests by farmers and others. Here are some questions and answers on the issue: WHY IS LAND A BIG ISSUE? For many Indians, land is the only asset or social security that they possess and is a mark of social standing. Nearly 60 percent of India's 1.2...

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,...

India has discussed the possibility of ethanol production with Brazil during the current visit of the Indian Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar to the South American giant. A press release issued here by the agriculture ministry Tuesday said that the minister held bilateral meetings with his Brazilian counterpart, Minister for Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply Wagner Rossi. 'Both sides discussed the matters of mutual interest including the possibilities of cooperation in production of...

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...