-Livemint.com The government had to lower the import duty on edible oils several times in recent months to tame food inflation NEW DELHI: The government is set to launch an oilseed mission to boost domestic production of oilseeds and reduce import dependence, said NITI Aayog member, agriculture, Ramesh Chand. India currently makes around ₹1 trillion worth of edible oil imports every year or nearly half of its demand. The proposed scheme was devised after...

-The Tribune Disruption in supplies due to Ukraine crisis may create food shortage, price distortions The war in Ukraine has become a war on the world’s poor. Russia and Ukraine, together, accounted for a quarter of the world’s wheat exports, one-sixth of global corn exports, nearly a third of barley and three-fourths of the export of sunflower oil. American sanctions on Russia mean it cannot sell its extra wheat in the global...

In his Mann ki Baat address to the nation on 30th May, 2021, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi appreciated the fact that the farmers received "more than the minimum support price (MSP) for mustard" pertaining to the rabi production. One can easily guess from this statement of the PM that the mustard growers in Haryana (and elsewhere) preferred to sell their produce to private traders in the open market instead...

Quite often it is argued by mainstream economists that a sizeable chunk of the Union Budget every year is wasted because the Government spends that on food and fertiliser subsidies. The burgeoning size of these two subsidies relative to the entire budget as well as the gross domestic product (GDP) is often used to build the argument that economic as well as environmental sustainability of the country is at stake...

-Press release by Vikalp Sangam (vikalpsangam.org), dated 5th December, 2020 Vikalp Sangam (vikalpsangam.org) -- a conglomeration of 60+ active CSOs and members -- in its press release dated 5th December, 2020 has stated that the newly enacted farm laws of the Centre will lead to further land alienation (landlessness) and destitution of the peasantry because the laws permit, in thinly disguised form, the unsparing loot by the lobby of agri-businesses and...