-Farmlandgrab.org Oxfam’s Phil Bloomer reports on the shocking scandal of (mostly) secretive land-grabbing, usually from those least able to defend their rights Land grabbing has fast become a major threat to poor communities in Africa, Asia and South America. Poverty-stricken women and men are being driven from their homes and the land they rely on to grow food to eat and make a living, usually without compensation. In many cases this is...

-The Economic Times It has never happened since Independence. May be not even in the last 1,000 years what happened during October 2011-September 2012. India exported 10 million tonnes of rice, valued at around $6 billion, becoming the largest exporter of rice, replacing Thailand and Vietnam, generally the two largest exporters of rice. This is now known to many in rice circles. But what is little known is that in 2011-12, India also emerged...

-The Business Standard Govt must stop open-ended procurement of wheat It is not often that the government asks the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) to review its report on the pricing and marketing policy for wheat — though the commission’s recommendations have been overlooked in the past to factor in political considerations while fixing minimum support prices (MSP). The present controversy over wheat- marketing policies concerns chiefly two issues....

-The Hindu For any law to truly liberate those trapped in manual scavenging, their numbers must first be established by a comprehensive survey Everybody declares with a full heart, and in a low voice, that it is a national shame. From Manmohan Singh and Pratibha Patil to Mukesh Ambani and Aamir Khan, the last mentioned a new convert to the Dalit cause, there is no dearth of people queuing up to take...

-The United Nations The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new record high in 2011, according to a new United Nations report released today, ahead of the start next week of the latest round of global climate changes talks. The UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which produced the 2011 Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, said that between 1990 and 2011, there was a 30 per cent increase in radiative forcing –...