The demand for compliance with food safety measures (FSM) at farm level, an integral component of food security, is increasing. Yet, literature on the assessment of FSM at the farm level is scarce, especially for developing countries.
Over the past two decades, many developing countries have achieved remarkable progress in improving dietary quality and reducing child-stunting rates. But understanding of the linkages between food expenditures, dietary quality, and nutritional outcomes is limited.
A goal of agricultural policy in India has been to reduce farmers’ dependence on informal credit. To that end, recent initiatives have been focused explicitly on rural areas and have had a positive impact on the flow of agricultural credit.
This paper has studied rural employment diversification in India and across major states using NSSO data at household level for the period 1983 and 2009-10. Factors affecting rural employment diversification towards non-farm sector have also been studied. Analysis has shown that the non-farm sector has consistently grown over time and employed nearly one-third of the rural workforce in 2009-10, as compared to merely one-fifth in 1983 at all-India level.
The world was caught in a severe economic crisis, which primarily originated from the U.S. in early 2007. Over the past two years, the crisis has virtually spread to the entire world causing an extreme credit crunch. The agricultural sector has also felt the heat of the meltdown, but there is a lot of uncertainty about the magnitude of the impact of economic recession on agriculture.
Livestock sector plays a significant role in the rural economy of India. It contributes about 5 per cent of the total gross domestic product (GDP) and one-fourth of the agricultural GDP. The sector is unique in terms of employment opportunities as two-thirds of female workforce in rural India is engaged in livestock rearing.
