Food, fuel and feed are now tied together, more than ever, by a single string

CRITICAL food shortages and growing demand for bio-fuels and hydro-electricity, due to high fossil fuel prices, rank among the greatest threats today to the preservation of precious wetlands worldwide as farmers and developers look for new areas for agriculture, energy crop plantations and hydro dams.

Peru is considered to be one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change. On the steep slopes of Chopcca, a community of 10,000 residents in the Andes, the rains come later, don't last as long and end more abruptly than they did only a few years ago. Frosts and hail hit earlier and more frequently. Fewer clouds drift by to moderate the extremes of temperature.

Rituparna Bhuyan & Ajay Modi / New Delhi August 2, 2008, 0:42 IST

Prices of key farm produce like wheat and rice in India are way below international prices, which means rural households will not be robbed of their income if liberal imports of these commodities are allowed.

Data collected by Business Standard show that rice prices in India are less than half of global prices, whereas wheat sells at two-thirds of global prices. While soya oil prices are the same in the two markets, cotton prices are slightly higher in India. These commodities can be exported free of duty to India.

Asit Ranjan Mishra & Siddharth Zarabi / New Delhi July 30, 2008, 0:02 IST

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Economic Advisory Council (EAC) has rejected a recommendation by a government-appointed agricultural price fixing body to increase the minimum support price (MSP) for paddy to Rs 1,000 for the current Kharif season.

Instead, the EAC has said the ad hoc price of Rs 850 for paddy declared by the Union Cabinet last month should be the final MSP for the 2008-09 season, sources told Business Standard.

An international team of 27 laboratories said on Sunday they had laid bare the genetic code of a tiny parasite responsible for billions of dollars in crop losses each year.
The worm, known as the root-knot nematode (Meloidogyne incognita), infests plant roots leaving them gnarled.
More than 3,000 crop types are affected, especially coffee, cotton, tomatoes, melons and cucumbers.
Sequencing the worm's genome could open the way to smarter, less toxic pesticides and other greener methods to curb the little menace, the researchers.

The new 'records' of most crops are not significantly higher than those achieved in the past.

The updated crop production estimates released by Krishi Bhawan for 2007-08 and the previous year, showing new production records for most crops, may suggest an impressive performance of agriculture, but a closer look at the numbers shows that the new peaks are not significantly above the levels scaled in the past. The average annual growth beyond the previous high levels has been rather modest in most crops, barring cotton.