The bumper potato harvest this year is ironically turning out to be bad news for farmers in Uttar Pradesh. With storage houses already full to capacity, the market is flooded with the produce, causing a steep fall in prices. Farmers in Kanpur, Etawah, Farukkhabad and others districts have been forced to hunt for storage houses in other districts. On Wednesday night, over a dozen people including two policemen were injured and several vehicles damaged during a protest by villagers angry over non-availability of space in a cold storage.

Khasi tribe is an ancient hill tribe of East and West Khasi Hill districts of Meghalaya in Northeast India. Potato is the most important crop for the tribal farmers. Traditional potato storage structures and methods accords high significance among this tribe owing to the semi-perishable nature of the potatoes, the need of the farmers to store potatoes for seed as well as table purpose, and non-existence of cold storage facilities in these districts.

Food scientists are meeting in Cusco, Peru, this week to find ways of boosting world potato production to ease the strain of surging cereal prices on the world's poorest countries. Potato production already reached a record high last year as cereal prices rose, partly as a consequence of grain producers - such as the US - switching to bio-fuel crops. The impact of more expensive cereals has been harshest on developing countries that are dependent on imports.

The government is considering exporting potatoes to Bangladesh and selling them to Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and Karnataka to deal with the bumper production this year.

2008 has been declared the year of the potato by the un. You can expect lots of new research projects, films and exhibitions on one of the most important staple crops. Over the years, breeders have

As the world warms, the plants that billions of people depend on for their food are likely to become less nutritious. That's the worrying conclusion of an analysis of more than 40 studies investigating how crops will react to increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Farmers' indigenous method of management of potato blight by selecting the appropriate varieties as per the production situation characteristics in the existing constrained conditions in the Meghalaya hills for their benefit is a successful example of informal research and large-scale application of the results in the real field conditions.

Farmers' traditional methods for managing the potato late blight in the Meghalaya hills are successful examples of ecological disease management and an established outcome of traditional experimentations. Such farmers' wisdom ought to be given attention in formal research systems. Dec 2007

Second deluge

Increases risk of type 2 diabetes

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