-Down to Earth Japan's Sapporo brewery patents Indian barley gene without giving benefit to farmers Ballia district, the easternmost part of Uttar Pradesh, is a flood-prone area that extends towards Bihar from the confluence of the Ganga and the Ghaghra. Over decades, its farmers, mostly marginal and small, have been cultivating barley, exchanging its seeds, improving the varieties and giving these to a government project to cull the best of the lot....

-The Hindu With the era of cheap, bountiful water having been replaced by increasing supply-and-quality constraints, many international investors are beginning to view water as the new oil There is a popular, tongue-in-cheek saying in America - attributed to the writer Mark Twain, who lived through the early phase of the California Water Wars - that "whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over." It highlights the consequences, even if...

-The Hindustan Times Punjab: Having seen my uncle hard at work in a farm and his decision to quit school to till land, I have often felt that popular imagination tends to see farming as an esoteric profession and food production as something that will somehow magically take care of itself. A young man/woman (who has had secondary education) seems to consider agriculture as far too back-breaking and tedious to be taken...

-The Hindu India on Wednesday launched third-line drug therapy for people living with HIV/AIDS and extended free anti-retroviral therapy (ART) to more of them by revising the eligibility norm. The third-line therapy, sometimes called salvage or rescue therapy, is prescribed for people who have limited drug options left - after the failure of at least two drug regimens and with evidence of HIV resistance to at least one drug in each line...

-Tehelka Away from the politics of food security, a small initiative in Assam is changing the way young people look at agriculture. Pubali Saikia, 13, plucks fresh ripe tomatoes, as her classmate Sunti Saikia, 14, arranges beanstalks. The two teenagers are excited; it is, after all, the first produce of their life. Of late, the Titabor sub-division in upper Assam's Jorhat district has been witnessing a silent awakening of sorts. And...