-The Indian Express Food inflation owes largely to agricultural markets being regulated by outdated laws. The RBI governor, Raghuram Rajan, has a difficult task this week. He has to decide whether to keep interest rates constant or raise them - bearing in mind the possible taper of the US Fed's bond buying programme, a decline in industrial production and a rise in inflation. The sharp increase in consumer price-based inflation, to more...

-Live Mint The national food security law is in trouble from an unlikely source The outcome of the World Trade Organization (WTO) summit at Bali has been projected as a great victory for the Indian government by its spokespersons. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In exchange for a temporary reprieve on its food support programme, India has bartered away the bargaining chip of trade facilitation, which Western negotiators demanded. The...

-The Hindu     India wilted under pressure from US: Right to Food Campaign Civil society groups are "extremely disappointed" about India accepting a peace clause with conditionality on its food and farm subsidies at the Bali World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial with no assured mechanism for finding a permanent solution. They are unhappy that India has opened up its farm and food domestic policies, programmes and mechanisms to international scrutiny with large data and...

-Outlook The state elections rolled out smoothly, but it's money power which ruled on the ground As we celebrate the smooth working of a massive electoral exercise-simplistically dubbed by many as the semi-final to the greatest show on earth, General Elections 2014-a realisation has dawned that the role of ‘money power' is reaching alarming proportions. Sure, elections are more fool-proof today than in the past, and most (rightly) salute the EC...

-The Hindu Appachi eco-logic cotton project is a unique organic cotton contract farm model in the Western Ghats region of Kabini Reservoir. The project covers nearly 1,200 farmers spread over 1,875 acres. Over 17 per cent of the area comes under reserve forests of both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and exposing the cultivation fields to wild animal attacks is forcing farmers to start cotton cultivation on a mono cropping basis instead of...