Chief Adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed yesterday underscored the need for diversifying the use of potato through changing food habit to help ensure food security of the country. In a statement, he said it is equally important to create awareness in all tiers of the society alongside carrying out a massive campaign about various recipes of potato to popularise it. The CA appreciated the initiative of organising a three-day potato campaign marking 'International Potato Year 2008', declared by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Fighting hike in food rates, the government may continue the ban on futures trading on four agricultural commodities

The food price crisis is caused largely by greed and speculation rather than food shortages, the head of Southern Africa's development bank said on Tuesday. Spiralling food costs -- called a "silent tsunami" by the World Food Programme -- have ignited fury and a rash of protests from Haiti to Somalia to Bangladesh. Exporting countries have curbed shipments to ensure domestic supplies and tame inflation.

Sir, Contrary to Martin Wolf's article "Food crisis is a chance to reform global agriculture' (April 30), the riots or disturbances that have, unfortunately, taken place in some parts of the world have not occurred in the Philippines. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her administration have been working diligently to address challenges arising from the slowdown in the global economy combined with the spike in high oil and food prices.

For years, food policy in the Middle East and North Africa was very simple: hydrocarbon exports paid for carbohydrate imports. Rising agricultural commodities prices and a large population increase mean that the traditional policy is now untenable even if crude oil trades at about $120 a barrel, forcing countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia, to reconsider how it feeds its population. "The region has woken up to the new food market reality," says Abdolreza Abbassian, an expert at the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome.

The European Union too has jumped on the U.S. bandwagon to target India and China for driving food prices worldwide. EU Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural development Mariann Fischer Boel on Tuesday said change in dietary habits in India and China was responsible for the spiralling global food prices.

In striving for "efficiency' by means of narrow targeting, households that should be entitled to basic food security through the PDS have been left out.

The Leader of the Opposition in the Delhi Assembly, Jagdish Mukhi, on Tuesday charged that the Sheila Dikshit Government had not kept its promise of providing 25 kg of wheat and 10 kg of rice per month to ration card holders and only managed to supply them 13 to 14 kg of wheat and 5 to 6 kg of rice. Terming this a ''failure' of the Delhi Government, the BJP leader said the inability of the administration to provide sufficient rations to the poor and the downtrodden had had an adverse impact on their financial health in these times of high inflation and soaring prices.

The Union government has decided to provide subsidy to all cooperative milk marketing institutions for switching over to natural vanilla as a flavoured ingredient in their various milk-based products. The commerce ministry is preparing a scheme for this and a notification will be issued shortly. The ministry has planned to provide the difference in prices between natural and synthetic vanilla as subsidy.

By holding higher grain consumption in India and China responsible for global food crisis, US President George W Bush and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, have needlessly started a blame game which is so far removed from the facts as to be laughable, which does not improve Mr Bush's already dodgy reputation on sticking to the facts, and which in any case leads the world nowhere in its combat against hunger.