Authorities in Somalia's self-declared autonomous region of Puntland in the northeast have appealed for international aid following the destruction of thousands of hectares of pasture and farmland by a locust infestation.

"We issued an appeal for help on September 23; Puntland alone cannot deal with this,' Hassan Arab, the deputy minister of rangeland and forestry, told the un's Integrated Regional Information Networks. "This time the swarms are bigger and more destructive than the ones we had in June. They have also spread to a wider area,' he said.

After decades of promoting urea to increase soil fertility, the government has begun to acknowledge that it has achieved quite the opposite. The fact is soil fertility in parts of India is declining because of excessive and imbalanced use of fertilizers. And this confession has come from none other than Kanti Lal Bhuria, union minister of state for agriculture. On August 31, Bhuria admitted in the Rajya Sabha that "there were instances of deterioration of soil fertility and nutrient deficiency in some parts of the country, especially the Indo-Gangetic Plain'.

Commerce minstry's subsidy package to bail out vanilla farmers The commerce ministry will bring out a subsidy package to bail out vanilla farmers who have been badly hit by the falling prices of

Much has to be sown in the country's agriculture before a bountiful harvest can be reaped

trial and error: The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee has approved large-scale trial of Bt Brinjal, the first ever genetically modified food crop. This comes on the heel of a latest ASSOCHAM