-The New Indian Express CHENNAI: Five years ago, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government had put an indefinite moratorium on the commercial cropping of Monsanto’s Bt Brinjal. However now, the Centre is considering commercial cultivation of a genetically modified hybrid variety of mustard. Following news reports on the move of the application for approval of GM Mustard to the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee in the Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change...

-The Indian Express Government cannot afford to wait any longer to address the building agricultural distress. The government and the political class seem oblivious to a deepening farm crisis, resulting from back-to-back monsoon failures and falling crop prices. One indicator of the growing agrarian distress is Farmer Suicides, no longer a phenomenon confined to Vidarbha or Telangana. The current year has seen farmers even in states like Karnataka, Odisha and Madhya...

-NDTV In Drought-Struck Odisha, Aid Fails To Stop Farmers Suicides Khurda, Odisha: After her husband Abhimanyu, a 52-year-old farmer in Odisha's Khurda district, committed suicide by consuming poison last month, Pratima Baliarsingh is yet to recover from the trauma. Pratima, 45, now has to repay an almost two lakh rupee-loan that her husband took from various banks and villagers.   The district administration gave her a cheque of Rs. 20,000 after her husband's death but...

-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...

-The New Indian Express BHUBANESWAR: In a State where agriculture continues to be the mainstay of livelihood for the majority, the spate of Farmer Suicides has not really come as a surprise. Or has it? With agriculture turning into a non-remunerative business and State’s farm sector remaining largely rain-fed, climatic changes have been sounding the warning bells but the Government saw no danger. Its self-assuredness that minimum support price (MSP) only is...