-The Hindustan Times   Unacceptably high food prices are a result of slow and below-target farm growth, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Saturday. Singh said the farm growth had been less than the targeted 4% and a “consequence in recent years has been unacceptable levels of food price inflation”. He said he expected the Twelfth Plan to contain all measures required to accelerate agricultural growth. Speaking at a function to mark the foundation...

In his fields, Badhia Naval Singh , a farmer tilling 8 bighas of land in the Bagli tehsil in Madhya Pradesh, has been seeing something strange for a while now. Earlier, if he pulled out a tuft of grass, he would see earthworms . "Ab woh dikhna bandh ho gaye hain (they don't show up any longer)," says the 45-yearold . Also, he says, when he ploughed earlier, the soil...

Andhra farmers shun growing paddy this kharif in absence of buyers, storage space Achanta, a small village in Andhra Pradesh, hit the headlines in 1967 with a record rice yield in the kharif or monsoon crop season. It was the time of the green revolution. N Subba Rao, a farmer from the village, harvested three tonnes of paddy from just one kilogramme of seeds. Other farmers followed suit and the village...

When he drank poison on January 11, farmer Hargovind Harne’s run-down hut was bursting with freshly harvested paddy. Yet he was neck-deep in debt. Even the bottle of pesticide that he used to take his own life had been bought on credit, as the bill shows. His large stock of grain wasn’t the only puzzle in the 47-year-old’s suicide. Vidarbha is infamous for continuing suicides by cotton farmers but Harne grew food,...

-The Business Standard   Remember the food riots of 2008? Is the world heading towards another food crisis? That, worryingly, seems to be the conclusion that a new publication on food prices and availability in the next decade (2011-20), issued jointly by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), arrives at. The OECD-FAO report forecasts agricultural commodity prices, in real terms,...