Farmers in Madhya Pradesh have demanded a subsidy for practising eco-friendly measures to tackle India's soil degradation crisis, environmental group Greenpeace India said Saturday. The farmers held a public hearing in this Madhya Pradesh town to review the major soil health management support systems of the central government and its capability to solve the soil degradation crisis. Several agriculture experts, government officials, politicians and representatives of civil society attended the hearing held...

A recent report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, provides a damning indictment of the role of speculation in food commodities in fuelling the global food crisis. The report – 'Food Commodities Speculation and Food Price Crisis – was released on the eve of an emergency meeting of the UN-FAO on the instability in agricultural markets. The global food crisis in 2007-08 led to...

The department of food and public distribution has rejected both proposals of the National Advisory Council (NAC) to provide food security, saying the government risked running up against supply constraints and taking on an unsustainable fiscal burden. The rejection by the ministry of consumer affairs, food and public distribution means that both NAC, headed by Congress party president Sonia Gandhi, and the government will have to go back to the drawing board...

Natural disasters, conflict and weak institutions have thrust 22 countries into recurring food crises and high prevalence of hunger, two United Nations agencies said today in a report on food insecurity around the world, calling for longer-term solutions to help those States recover their productive capacity. Chronic hunger and food insecurity is the most common characteristic of a protracted crisis, according to the report, the “State of Food Insecurity in the...

In our frantic search for solutions to our water crisis, we tend to overlook the self-evident relationship between water, food, and energy. It is still not too late. As my colleague Tony Allan, a Stockholm Water Prize laureate says so pithily, the three are the corners of a triangle with politics and emotion at its center. About 80 percent of accessible freshwater in Asia is used for agriculture; the rest...