-Financial Chronicle The United Nations declared 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming (IYFF) to recognise the importance of family farming in reducing poverty and improving global food security. According to the UN, the IYFF aims to promote new development policies at national and regional levels that will help small holder and family farmers eradicate hunger through small scale sustainable agricultural production. Family farming involves about 500 million families consisting...

-PTI Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan has dismissed the notion that the rural employment guarantee programme is behind the massive spurt in wages in rural areas. "On the NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), there is clearly a lot of sense that this has increased rural wages tremendously. I would argue that clean, trustworthy studies say that the effect was may be 10 per cent," Rajan told an audience here last week. It...

-The Business Standard The Budget missed the chance to articulate its intentions to the farming community; the prime minister's Independence Day speech provides another invaluable opportunity Young Indians starting their careers in an environment devoid of hope and opportunity and surviving on dole will be inclined to populist politics. But the farming community expects much more substance from the government, and the Budget was a good example of how populism trumped...

-The Business Standard Four sub missions have been merged into one scheme - agri extension, seed and planting material, agri mechanisation and plant protection and plant quarantine   Mumbai: The ministry of agriculture has introduced an umbrella scheme to augment agricultural extension and technology activities with the objective of improving the supply of the agricultural commodities from the grass root level. According to official sources, the impetus on agricultural extension has to go hand...

-The Asian Age In India and around the world, poverty is predominantly rural. Development agencies often note that 75 per cent of the world's extremely poor people - those who earn less than $1.25 a day - live in rural areas. New figures from the 2014 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which measures overlapping dimensions of deprivation, show that rural poverty rates are even higher in some regions. In South Asia, the...