n 2008, 36 million people died from non-communicable diseases (NCDs). 1 By 2020, NCDs are projected to cause almost three quarters as many deaths as communicable, maternal, perinatal, and nutritional diseases, and by 2030 to exceed them as the most common causes of death. 2 On Sept 19, 2011, the UN will take an important step towards modification of the future course of NCDs at the High-level Meeting on Non-communicable Diseases.

China is attempting to pursue the same impossible path as the rest of the world: generating consumer demand and wealth without destroying its natural resources and the planet.

In this paper we demonstrate that the high level of wheat procurement during 2008-09 and 2009-10 at a higher minimum support price was necessitated by the difficult circumstances that the government faced, characterised by a precarious buffer stock position from 2005 to 2008. Hence, blaming larger procurement and a higher msp alone for the soaring wheat prices between 2008 and 2010 is an oversimplification of the problem. The experience with wheat procurement in the recent past suggests that foodgrain procurement at a lower msp may not always be feasible.

Jason Clay identifies eight steps that, taken together, could enable farming to feed 10 billion people and keep Earth habitable.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7356/full/475287a.html

There is a view that we are now in the midst of the emergence of a new world food regime, characterised by three important and interrelated features – the rise of large corporate food empires with oligopolistic powers over entire food supply chains, the growing dominance of cash crops at the expense of food agriculture and the closer alignment of domestic market prices with internati