-AFP ROME: The UN's food agency on Tuesday said obesity and poor nutrition weigh heavily on the global economy and told governments that investing in food health would bring big economic as well as social returns. Lost productivity and spiralling health care bills linked to malnutrition "could account for as much as five per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP)," equivalent to $3.5 trillion (2.6 trillion euros) a year, the Food...

-Tehelka.com There are few figures from the adivasi community in India who have made a bigger dent in the collective imagination of the country than Dayamani Barla. The "iron lady of Jharkhand" has been instrumental in articulating adivasi struggles against displacement and deprivation on national and international platforms. Dayamani, who was recently imprisoned in Jharkhand for her involvement in the Nagri people's movement, has won the first Ellen L Lutz Indigenous...

-The Hindu Business Line A mint-fresh working paper by the Reserve Bank of India once again trains the spotlight on a problem that, for five decades, every policy-maker has planned to snuff out, failed to, and then wished it would go away if ignored. But financial exclusion simply hasn't, and we now have the central bank applying its forensic skills to an examination of its magnitude. The title of Working Paper Series...

-The Hindu India's hard won gains in achieving food security are in danger of being undermined by a clause in the National Food Security Bill that encourages States to adopt cash transfers in lieu of food entitlements under the Public Distribution System (PDS). Supporting this view, a recent report by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) concluded that the provision of food subsidies in the form of cash would...

-The Hindu Business Line Mother Nature possesses bountiful natural resources. After all, it is not for nothing that our planet is today supporting a seven billion human population, besides a large number of other living beings with varying survival requirements. Till around the end of the 19th century, agriculture, in the form it was practised, provided more or less enough food to sustain the human population of that time. This is...