The two-day Africa summit in New Delhi last month opened a significant chapter in India's external affairs. Inaugurating the summit, attended by 14 African leaders, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh

According to an Assocham study, the lethal fake drugs market is growing at 25% annually.

Spain plans to help five poor African countries fight hunger and climate change under a 60 million euro ($90 million) scheme to help the continent whose people flood to Spain in their tens of thousands each year. Spanish First Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega announced the aid package ahead of a Spanish-African women's conference opening on Monday in Niger, one of many African nations struggling to cope with high world food prices.

The first India-Africa summit, though late to come, holds a lot of promise in a number of areas.

INDIA, following the example of leading economic powers such as France and China, hosted an India-Africa summit for the first time.

Historically, there have been tenuous links between farmers and food producers, with many companies having scant knowledge of how and where their ingredients are grown. But as the prices of raw materials soar - from the barley used to make beer or the cocoa used to make chocolate - leading brewers and food manufacturers from Cadbury Schweppes to Diageo are increasingly recognising their businesses will benefit from investment in agriculture.

For years, food policy in the Middle East and North Africa was very simple: hydrocarbon exports paid for carbohydrate imports. Rising agricultural commodities prices and a large population increase mean that the traditional policy is now untenable even if crude oil trades at about $120 a barrel, forcing countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia, to reconsider how it feeds its population. "The region has woken up to the new food market reality," says Abdolreza Abbassian, an expert at the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome.