Managing our soil and water resources in a sustainable and equitable manner needs a new political vision, which can be expressed through the proposed Land Acquisition Bill and the recently formed Global Soil Partnership. On the basis of a proposal I had made three years ago, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) launched a Global Soil Partnership for Food Security and Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation at a multi-stakeholder conference, held...

Have you heard of the Yangtze River Dolphin? For the longest time, it used to be found along 1,700 kilometres of the middle and lower reaches of the mighty Chinese river. The Baiji, as it is known, was white finned, a little over two metres long, had poor eyesight and relied mainly on sonar for navigation. A few decades ago, as populations along the river grew, as shipping traffic rose,...

-The Business Standard   Demand-side control cannot be an answer beyond a point to India’s persistently high food price inflation, the World Bank said on Monday. Consumer price-based food inflation in India has been at 10-20 per cent for quite a long while, noted its report on ‘Food inflation in South Asia’. The Bank’s chief economist for the region, Kalpana Kochhar, said controlling inflation in India was a difficult job for the Reserve Bank...

-The United Nations   World food prices remained virtually unchanged during the month of August, with only slight increases observed in the prices of cereals and Meat, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported today. FAO’s monthly Food Price Index averaged 231 points in August compared to 232 points in July, the Rome-based agency stated in a news release. It was 26 per cent higher than in August 2010 but seven points...

-The Economic Times   Food inflation climbed into double digits after a fivemonth gap, prompting finance minister Pranab Mukherjee to term the trend "disturbing". The wholesale index for food articles rose 10.1% for the week to August 18 from a year earlier on account of a sharp increase in prices of vegetables and cereals, data released on Thursday showed. The index was at 9.8% in the previous week. "This is really disturbing,"...