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...

-Hindustan Times India has consistently maintained that this position is based on both an erroneous reading of the nature and intent of India’s price support mechanisms and underplays the scale of America’s support to farmers. Washington: As elections for the House of Representatives loom, a group of Republican Congressional representatives from America’s agricultural belt or with agricultural interests have stepped up the rhetoric against India’s agricultural subsidies — alleging that these distort...

-Financial Express The extent of asymmetry between the support extended by the developing and the developed countries was brought to the fore in an earlier paper jointed submitted by India, China and some others. India, along with 80-odd developing countries, has sought a revision of the over three-decade-old external reference prices of farm commodities that are used by the World Trade Organization (WTO) to calculate current domestic farm subsidies extended by developing...

-Newsclick.in The roots of the present crisis lie in wrong policies adopted over the last two decades that have undermined domestic production of fertilisers led by the public sector and increased dependence on imports and production by the private sector. Indian farmers have been facing a major crisis because of shortages in availability and an unprecedented rise in prices of fertilisers. Fertilisers are a critical input for agriculture, and a shortage in...

-Newsclick.in A guaranteed MSP system will also reduce public storage costs/wastage if it is complemented by a universal public distribution system. The year-long protest by farmers and workers compelled the Centre to repeal the three contentious farm laws, which were designed to further corporate encroachment in agriculture, on November 29. On December 11, the protest ended but not before the protesters reiterated their demand for a legal guarantee on Minimum Support Price...