Corporate inventories of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions provide a firm foundation for emissions management by business. But they rarely include agricultural emissions, often because of confusion about the best practices needed to address unique aspects of agricultural sources.

This paper illustrates the environmental elements of a strategy towards the creation of sustainable enterprises by highlighting impacts on employment of different environmental instruments and policies.

This cover story in Down To Earth online charts the growth trajectory of India’s microfinance institutions and consists of a special report on the microfinance institutions in Andhra Pradesh who grew rich by lending insured loans to the rural poor.

The Green Revolution impacted livestock-rearing as well as agriculture. Farmers were encouraged to shift from low-input backyard systems to corporatised capital-intensive systems. As a result, write Nitya S Ghotge and Sagari R Ramdas, there was an artificial divide between livestock-rearing and agriculture, leading to the further crumbling of fragile livelihoods of small and landless farmers.

Small farmers need credit and other supporting services for diverse activities which comprise a family’s livelihood strategy. Self Help Affinity Groups (SAGs) are the most appropriate institutions which provide the necessary space, resources and skills required by a poor family to develop a livelihood strategy.

Coffee is a major international commodity, and because of this, coffee production has the potential for considerable global impacts on the environment. These impacts can include the consumption of energy, water, land and the loss of native forest.

Food prices in the immediate future can be controlled only through large imports. Wheat stocks are adequate but rice stocks are not. There will be a fiscal cost because global prices are above domestic prices, but this will not be above 1 per cent of central government expenditure. This may be the best option since food inflation is now threatening to become generalised.

Small-scale farmers depend largely on their animals and need to feed them well. Technology based innovations have been the mainstream solution to improve the fodder problem. But making farmers find relevant information and networks appears to be as much effective for innovation.

Olivier De Schutter is the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food. He aims to inform people at the highest political levels about the role that smallholders play in the world

In the face of persistent rural poverty, an incomplete agrarian transition, the predominance of small and marginal farms and a growing feminisation of agriculture, this paper argues for a new institutional approach to poverty reduction, agricultural revival and social empowerment.

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