While global food prices declined for the first half of this year, they have spiked in recent months, according to a new World Bank publication, and this volatility could in turn push up the local food prices of the world's poorest and most malnourished countries. The Bank's grain price index had declined by 16 percent over the first six months of 2010 before rising that same amount between mid-June and August....

All eight of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are critical to development, but numbers four and five on child and maternal health are the real priority areas for this year. That was the main takeaway from a series of briefings with U.N., NGO and country officials in which IPS participated this week. When the MDGs were agreed in September 2000, they laid out a clear pathway to the often vague...

Slain Gujarat—based RTI activist Amit Jethwa has been chosen for a gallantry award instituted by a voluntary organisation working in the field of transparency. The organisation, National RTI Forum, has instituted several gallantry awards for RTI activists who have dared the adversities to get information from government on the issues concerning larger public interest and exposing corruption in the process. Jethwa will be given the ‘Satish Shetty Award for Gallantry’ posthumously. The ‘Lalit...

Does political corruption in India take place because there are always some civil servants who are willing to collaborate in it? Or, is the lure of post-retirement assignments a major reason for spinelessness of the senior civil servants? The affirmative answer to these questions has come from none other than bureaucrats themselves. Recently, they made these facts and many others -- usually, a subject of whisper in corridors of power...

Their ongoing negotiations remain shrouded in secrecy, but there are already reports that India and the European Union (EU) will have a free-trade agreement ready by the end of August, and that they will be putting signatures to it before the end of 2010. Yet it is a potential development that is causing more nervous chatter than joyous jitters here in India, where drug manufacturers in particular have raised concerns over...