KEY TRENDS   • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...

There is some respite expected for India in terms of prices of imported commodities. This may ease the depletion of its foreign exchange reserves. The country has faced a widening of its merchandise trade deficit from US$ -17.91 billion to US$ -26.91 billion between October 2021 and October 2022. The commodity price data provided by the World Bank in December 2022 (termed as The Pink Sheet) shows that energy prices plummeted by...

-The Hindu Coffee cultivation is becoming an increasingly loss-making proposition in India. Already weighed down by the high cost of inputs and production as well as labour shortage, the industry is now also affected by changes in climate patterns, reports  Mini Tejaswi from Karnataka’s coffee heartland Bose Mandanna was devastated when torrential rains in September thrashed the coffee plants in his plantation and left tender berries and leaves strewn everywhere. The plants...

-Moneycontrol.com Measures like assistance for fallow land cultivation, upland cultivation, and conversion of single crop to double crop have increased productivity. Though paddy farmers are still struggling with rising cost of production and procurement delays, they get a daily wage of Rs 700, against Rs 200-300 in other states. Paddy farmers in Kerala have something to cheer amidst the ongoing row between the Kerala government and the rice millers over procurement. Rice production...

-Down to Earth The production of the allium has doubled in the last decade; Chinese, Iranian garlic with larger cloves in greater demand, say farmers There have been several calls to allow garlic export after several video clips on social media showed farmers from Madhya Pradesh throwing out or burning their crops, allegedly over low prices of the allium.  One clip making rounds showed the crop being dumped into a river, while another...