DINDIGUL: Concrete plans are essential to protect agriculture and prevent migration of farmers to neighbouring towns and cities of survival. Ensuring better price for agriculture produces, bridging gap between lab and land and protecting existing cultivable lands alone will save agriculture and agriculturists in future, said Dindigul MLA K. Balabarathi.
Cereal consumption in India has further declined in both urban and rural areas, even though families are spending more on it.
This worrisome trend has been reported by the latest National Sample Survey (NSS) report released on Friday. It also reports that monthly per capita expenditure, unadjusted to inflation, has nominally increased in the past two years.
Over the last two years there has been a rapid rise in the world prices of almost all basic foods like rice, wheat, maize, soyabeans, edible oils etc. leading to high incidence of hunger and malnutrition around the world. This is a serious threat to the global economy, where millions of people are excluded from consuming food, simply because they do not have the purchasing power to buy it.
People will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid run-away climate change, a major new report warns.
NEW DELHI: To meet the challenge of food demand of a growing population in developing countries, cereal yields will have to be increased by 40 per cent and net irrigation water requirements by40-50 per cent. An additional 100200 million hectares of land may be required to meet double the current food demand by 2050, agriculture scientist M.S. Swaminathan said on Friday.
As the world's absolute hunger threshold (or absolute poverty of less than $1.25 a day) rose to 923 million last year due to rising food prices, India accounted for a lion's share of over 231 million, according to the latest figures released by the United Nations food and agriculture agency yesterday.
