Investments aimed at improving agricultural adaptation to climate change inevitably favor some crops and regions over others. An analysis of climate risks for crops in 12 food-insecure regions was conducted to identify adaptation priorities, based on statistical crop models and climate projections for 2030 from 20 general circulation models.

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.

This article discusses the acute and chronic health effects of pesticide exposure among Filipino rice farmers. Data were collected from 50 farmers during 2002 and 2003 using a semi-structured questionnaire to elicit demographic information, various aspects of farming life, types and extent of pesticide use, exposure means, and self-reported acute and chronic illness experiences.

'Sella' rice plant effluent is one of the major environmental pollutants. The physico-chemical characterization of effluent collected from three 'Sella' rice plants revealed that the pH of the effluent varied from 6.9-7.4 and effluent was yellow brown in colour and turbid.

In recent decades, the introduction of fertilizer and irrigation responsive high yielding dwarf varieties of rice have resulted in more widespread and intensive use of chemical fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides. The indiscriminate use of such chemical agents led to a wide array of problems and has forced mankind to consider safer ways of crop production and protection. Many such approaches are, in fact, practices that our ancestors had employed for centuries.

In Bangladesh, the first Farmer Field Schools were organised in the early 1990s, assisted by the FAO inter-country programme for IPM in rice. After initial positive experiences, several other donors (UNDP, CARE-Bangladesh and DANIDA) started projects to spread IPM to hundreds of thousands of farmers through IPM Farmer Field Schools. All these projects included season-long Training of Trainers courses to develop skilled FFS facilitators. Through this continuous support over the past ten

A German ornithologist reported that a single pair of Tits destroys, annually, at least 120 million insect eggs or 150000 caterpillars and pupae. The contribution of birds in controlling and managing insect pests in agricultural crops has not been recognized by farmers as well as agricultural scientists in general. Birds are good indicators of agro-biodiversity and an important group of life forms in any ecosystem. Dec 2007