Latin America, the poster child of bad economic policy in the 1980s and early 1990s, is leading the way in one rapidly evolving area of social development: conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes. These schemes provide cash payments to poor households that meet certain behavioural requirements, generally related to children’s healthcare and education. The idea here is to support minimal levels of consumption through income transfers, while encouraging long-term human development. The...

Sixty-five per cent of hungry people in the world live in Asia, according to a new report on Food Security, which also warns that the gains of the Green Revolution could be at risk due to declining trends in agricultural research and rural investment.The report prepared by a group of researches led by noted agriculture scientist M S Swaminathan, who is also known as the father of India's Green Revolution,...

India has long been simultaneously a country of enormous wealth and desperate poverty. In recent decades, the distance has only grown between those who enjoy living standards comparable to the finest in the world, and the millions left far behind. Even as Indians crowd the lists of the world’s richest dollar billionaires, an estimated 200 million people sleep hungry. Half our children are malnourished and nearly a fifth severely so....

“If countries impose export ban, import duty, there will be an inflationary trend” The outlook for global wheat production is still positive Restrictions can cause inflationary trend on food prices in 2011 and 2012 The drought in Russia and the floods in Pakistan that have affected wheat production will impact food prices as in 2007-08, says a senior official of the World Food Programme. WFP Deputy Executive Director Ramiro Lopes da Silva says: “The...

A combination of factors led by state policy has enabled the southern State to become a notable achiever with respect to some key indicators of development. In 2001, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen recorded an eyebrow-raising fact in his book, “Development as Freedom”, that Tamil Nadu and Kerala had both achieved much faster rates of decline in fertility than China had achieved since it introduced its one-child policy. That same year, the international...