Food security and organic farming can go hand in hand. Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee today gave a green signal to efforts under the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture to promote green manuring and organic farming while talking about bringing in the Food Securtiy Act this year, settling the debate on high pesticide and chemical fertiliser use in Punjab and Haryana. He said his government is mulling to also bring urea,...

Rattled by soaring food prices and falling farm productivity, the FM has announced a slew of measures to boost the farm sector and vowed to deepen the process of attracting more private investment in agriculture and agro-processing. He announced an increase in bank lending for farm sector as well as interest subsidy to farmers who pay short-term crop loans on time. "I propose to enhance additional subvention to 3% in 2011-12....

This is a collection of 45 select articles written by M.S. Swaminathan over the past 20 years. Arranged in six sections, they cover ‘sustainable development in Indian agriculture', ‘technology and evergreen revolution', ‘sustainable food security', ‘agrarian crisis', ‘WTO and Indian farmers', and ‘shaping India's agricultural destiny'. As Jeffrey Sachs says in his foreword, Swaminathan had “recognised already in the early days of India's green revolution that the new breakthroughs could create...

Is the chemical fertilizer-based food production system sustainable? As a result, what happens to the soil and the larger issue of food security? After a raging debate, the government finally decided to hike the chemical fertilizer subsidy, to catch up with spiralling fertilizer prices in the global market. Also, there is talk about bringing urea under the Nutrient Based Subsidy (NBS) system and decontrolling its prices. Obviously, the fertilizer industry...

India’s Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has refused to ban Endosulfan, a chemical used widely in India as an insecticide. He blamed farmers for the disastrous effects of this pesticide on people. For instance, Kasargod district of Kerala had reported deaths and permanent disabilities due to the use of this chemical. Pawar said the culprits were the farmers who were spraying the pesticide on the cashew crop against the advice of the Pesticide...