Along with expanded availability and access, safety is one of the three prongs of food security. However, we in India have shockingly little control over the Quality of the food we consume — apart from flat-out contami-nation at the level of agricultural produce to the hidden dangers of additives and preservatives and flavours, which can contain benzoates, glutamates, mono- and di-glycerides, nitrates, nitrites, and sulfites, all of which are linked...

A leading Dutch environment agency reported on Monday that the seminal 2007 UN scientific report on climate change is too generalized and has even more errors than discovered so far -- including one contributed by the agency itself. But the review by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency claimed the errors had no effect on the fundamental conclusion by UN panel of scientists: that global warming caused by humans already is...

In an effort to help prevent dangerous contamination of food with melamine, a toxic chemical, the United Nations food standards body today set new limits for the amount of the substance that can be present in baby formula, other foods and animal feed without causing health problems. The maximum melamine allowed in baby formula was set at one milligram (mg) per kilogramme (kg) and 2.5 mg/kg in other foods and...

SAMBALPUR: Good rains as yet, the kharif season in Sambalpur district is likely to be affected due to shortage of paddy seed. As per the available data, paddy will be cultivated over 1,04,500 hectares during the forthcoming kharif season. It was only 99,533 hectares last year. The Agriculture Department, to augment paddy production, had stressed cultivation of high yielding variety of paddy on a larger tract, but the nonavailability of seeds...

Since the advent of the Green Revolution popularised use of excessive irrigation and fertilisers in India in the 1960s, biodynamic farming, an advanced form of organic farming, had largely faded into oblivion. Biodynamic farming, a return to natural farming free from the use of pesticides and chemicals, is readying for a revival in Punjab, the hub of the Green Revolution in the country. While organic farming is basically a holistic management...