-Reuters KHAMMAM (India): It was a deal struck almost 40 years ago by a poor, illiterate Indian farmer, driven by desperation after a drought wiped out his crops and left his family close to starvation. The agreement: 10 acres of land, the size of four soccer pitches, for a mere 10 kg (22 lbs) of sorghum grains. "My father-in-law pawned the land for food," said Kowasalya Thati, lifting the hem of...

-Reuters NEW DELHI (TrustLaw) - About 60 percent of Indian women have no access to family planning services, giving them little control over their bodies and slowing efforts to boost human development indicators, said the head of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA). Human development indicators cover health, education and living standards. India, Asia's third-largest economy, is set to overtake China as the world's most populous nation by 2030. But, despite its impressive economic...

The economic crisis, the ecological crisis and the food crisis are a reflection of an outmoded and fossilised economic paradigm. It is a paradigm that grew out of mobilising resources for the war by creating the category of “growth”. It is rooted in the age of oil and fossil fuels. It is fossilised because it is obsolete, a product of the age of fossil fuels. If we have to address...

Tribal Health Indicators A tribal child is 25% more likely to be underweight and 40% more likely to die before five years of age compared with an average Indian child. The proportion of low birth-weight children at around 23% as well as the proportion of neo-natal deaths at roughly 40% is similar for tribals and others. However, more tribal children die in the 1-4 age group compared with others, according to the World...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...