Irked by curbs on milk, cotton and sugar exports, Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar has shot off a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stating that the government’s policies are hurting farmers who are being asked to subsidise the industry.
Mr Pawar wrote to the Prime Minister on Tuesday, a day after a group of ministers disallowed cotton export beyond 13 million bales for the current marketing year.
A group of ministers on Monday decided to continue with the ban on cotton exports, even as the prohibition on outbound shipments had led to intense political pressure on the government.
"For the time being, there is no move to ease the export ban,&" said a senior official who participated in the meeting on Monday.
A large body of work has tried to attribute the remarkable growth of Chinese agriculture between 1979 and 1984 to the dismantling of collectives. This paper critically reviews the evidence and finds that decollectivisation did not contribute to agricultural growth in the early 1980s. In particular, its response to Lin (1992) challenges the consensus and argues that decollectivisation was largely irrelevant to the exceptional growth in this period. It is held that a more intensive application of modern inputs and favourable weather conditions accounted for most of the spurt in growth.
This has reference to a series of articles published in DNA in March 2012 quoting certain NGOs who blamed Bt-cotton as being responsible for crop failures and farmer suicides!
While a number of empirical studies have demonstrated the role of Bt cotton adoption in increasing Indian cotton productivity at the farm level, there has been questioning around the overall contribution of Bt cotton to the average cotton yield increase observed these last ten years in India.
The report released on the occasion of a one-day workshop called “10 years of Bt cotton in Karnataka: Whither other cotton?”, with partial support from the Karnataka State Biodiversity Board on March 29th 2012.
This review of a decade of Bt cotton in MP by Beej Swaraj Abhiyan & Hamara Beej Abhiyan finds that that there have been no gains in the state as claimed by Bt cotton proponents & calls for strict regulations to regulate Bt cotton seed industry.
The Maharashtra government is set to implement some harsh monetary steps from next month, as finance minister Ajit Pawar envisaged a raise in tax rates across sectors in the 2012-13 budget presented on Monday. The proposals are expected to mobilise an additional Rs 600 crore, and make the state revenue-surplus by Rs 152.5 crore by the end of the coming financial year.
