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...

Food inflation rose sharply to 6.19% in January from 4.58% in December, led by rising prices of most segments Livemint.com The union government on Wednesday sold 385,000 tonnes of wheat worth ₹901 crore in the open market, in the second round of a planned auction of three million tonnes it plans to offload from the central pool to counter rising prices of the key foodgrain. The move assumes significance as India’s retail inflation...

The World Food and Agriculture – Statistical Yearbook 2022, released in December 2022, provides its readers a plethora of useful statistics and data across the countries pertaining to agriculture and food security. The yearbook by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) primarily covers four themes -- Economic Dimensions of Agriculture; Production, Trade and Prices of Commodities; Food Security and Nutrition; and Sustainability and Environmental Aspects of Agriculture.  While going through the report,...

-The Telegraph The Telegraph brings you the story of how — and why — Calcutta is putting meat on the World Cup table Ahead of the World Cup this year, 1.2 metric tonnes (one tonne equals 1,000 kilos) of mutton made its way to Qatar from the Haringhata meat plant in Nadia district of Bengal. The plant and the brand take their name from a small town in Nadia. To get back to...

-Down to Earth Rise in demand for meat and dairy products was reconciled through the intensification of livestock systems Intensification of food production is gaining prominence in a world battered by climate change and food insecurity. Intensification aims to increase output for each unit of input (labour, land, time, fertiliser, seed, feed, or money). The need for intensification is more pressing when the supply of food needs to be augmented. For instance, in...