Plan for drought proofing

Contradictory state of affairs in two Uttaranchal villages highlights both potential and obstacles of organic farming. The paradox has cropped up despite two ongoing government run programmes in the hill state to propagate the process...

DAVID HATHAWAY is a social scientist who has worked in Brazil on issues such as transnational corporations, pesticides, genetically engineered crops, patents and biopiracy. He tells T V JAYAN why Brazil s proposed seed bill will hurt farmers

India s soils are in a bad shape. T V Jayan investigates

Fertilisers boost plant growth but imbalanced application soon leads to use-fatigue

Agricultural growth in India has always laboured under the burden of producing more. The idea was: grow only foodgrains. That meant: not ecologically adapted cereals such as millets, but rice and

A third factor has led to the current debility of soils in India: irrigation. That is to say, water over-use. To feed the rice-wheat mentality, net irrigated area rose from 20.8 million ha in 1950 to

The domino effect of bad policy-making and its fallout

Soils are a very slow renewable resource. To reclaim them requires, above all, a long-term plan. With falling productivity, the realisation has sunk in that soils cannot be blindly mined, and that

Pesticides are not the only way

Pages