NEWS ARCHIVE
Nihar Gokhale reports: Rainfall across India in March has been 300-500% higher and often were accompanied by hailstorms. As a result, winter crops across six Indian states – Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra – stand destroyed. Rain and the accompanying hail has damaged upto 60% standing winter crops across the country….
Read More about NEWS UPDATE #88
25 March 2015. Farmer Nityagopal Barman (43) committed suicide, after being unable to repay his loans
AFP
Development/Growth
As output is rising at a slower rate since 1990, profitability of farmers is getting adversely affected: for they are not being able to produce at as fast a rate as they had been doing before. Note, decline in public investment is a conscious government decision. There are also other policy changes which aggravated this….
Read More about Farmer suicides: What do we know? What does it mean?
Shutterstock
Consumerism/Lifestyle
Maywa Montenegro reports: Very few technologies merit the epithet “game changer” — but a new genetic engineering tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 is one of them. Since we first developed the ability to alter genetic material, efforts to do so have required months or even years of molecular tinkering. With CRISPR, precision and speed have soared….
Read More about CRISPR is coming, with big implications for food, farmers, consumers and nature
Development/Growth
Over the past three decades, average income of the farmer has increased by only 19%, while that of the government employee has by 370% and that of the corporate sector by more than a thousand per cent… Hidden in the rhetoric of being “pro-farmer and pro-poor” are the continued logic of being “pro-investor and pro-business”….
Read More about A.R. Vasavi: The bitter reality behind the ‘pro-farmer’ budget
Development/Growth
Devinder Sharma writes: Jaitley wants the farmers to wait five years for their income to rise to 3,332 rupees a month. I can imagine the Economic Survey presented in 2022 proudly stating the success. But the reality is, by 2022, adjusting for inflation, the doubled income would be equivalent to what a farmer makes now….
Read More about Budget Analysis: Don’t believe the hype, farmers have been short-changed again
Wikimedia Commons
Development/Growth
Devinder Sharma writes: Arun Jaitley’s economic agenda revolves around pushing reforms in order to lift growth and create jobs. But what is not being realised is that agriculture alone – the sector that has been neglected all these years – has the potential to create massive gainful employment, build domestic demand and thereby revitalise the sluggish economy….
Read More about More than Make in India, Jaitley needs to focus on Farm in India
CLIMATE CRISIS
SkyMet founder Jatin Singh says: When SkyMet had said there was an El Nino and the 2014 monsoon won’t be good, the reaction of the then person in charge of IMD was that El Nino was a western conspiracy to play with our devices. But the IMD’s forecast after 2014 became very El Nino based….
Read More about CEO of India’s first private weather forecasting organisation on strange weather trends
CV Subrahmanyam/The Hindu
ALTERNATIVES
He did not form a people’s movement. Nor did he plead with the government to popularise his natural farming method. Palekar took a more direct route instead. He reached out to the farmers. Met them in person and trained them in his cultivation practices. He continues to spread awareness and hold training workshops for farmers….
Read More about Subhash Palekar: From farmer to national treasure
CLIMATE CRISIS
Common Dreams reports: A new analysis, published in Science Advances journal, reveals that global water scarcity is a far greater problem than previously thought, affecting 4 billion people—two-thirds of the world’s population. Previous analyses looked at water scarcity at an annual scale, and had found that water scarcity affected between 1.7 and 3.1 billion people….
Read More about NEWS UPDATE #83
Pradeep Gaur/Mint
Consumerism/Lifestyle
Sudipto Mundle writes: India’s current high growth is organically linked to food price inflation, and the rising margin between the wholesale and retail price of food. Should we continue to celebrate India’s status as the world’s fastest growing economy, while leaving it to consumers to cope with rising food prices as best as they can?…
Read More about India’s high growth rate and the price of food
At the duck pond on the campsite – even better than YouTube!
Venetia Ansell
ALTERNATIVES
The camp is a great opportunity to meet people who are trying to make the transition from urban to rural or at least high impact to low impact lifestyles, to find inspiration, role models, ideas and perhaps answers to those questions and challenges that well meaning conventional thinking relatives and friends keep hurling at you….
Read More about Ideas, inspiration and ducks: Letter from an Ecologise Camp participantConserve/Resist
Bowing To No One, the first film in a series by Sarah Khan, is about Satyavati, an indigenous woman farmer from Central India, who comes from a rich but rapidly eroding agro-ecological knowledge system. Also in this post is a report from Meghalaya’s Terra Madre festival, which brought together around 600 members of international indigenous food-making communities….
Read More about Video & Report: India’s indigenous people are holding fast to food traditions against all odds
ECOCIDE/EXTINCTION
Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said Chris Arsenault, Reuters ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation…
Read More about Only 60 years of farming left if soil degradation continuesALTERNATIVES
Peak Oil, Food Security and Urban Agriculture T. Vijayendra Abstract Peak Oil refers to the point when oil production reaches a peak, and henceforth can only fall. This has already happened. This has enormous implications for food security. It raises cost and prices of food because farm inputs – primarily fertilisers and pesticides – are petroleum…
Read More about Peak Oil (Or why city slickers should learn to get their hands dirty)
NEWS ARCHIVE
World will pass crucial 2C global warming limit, experts warn The Guardian UK Pledges by nations to cut carbon emissions will fall far short of those needed to prevent global temperatures rising by more than the crucial 2C by the end of the century. This is the stark conclusion of climate experts who have analysed…
Read More about News updateCLIMATE CRISIS
Common Dreams At least ten million of the poorest people face food insecurity in 2015 and 2016 due to extreme weather conditions and the onset of El Niño, Oxfam has reported. In Oxfam’s new report called Entering Uncharted Waters, erratic weather patterns were noted including high temperatures and droughts, disrupting farming seasons around the world….
Read More about Oxfam Report: 10 Million at Risk of Hunger Due to Climate Change and El NiñoCLIMATE CRISIS
Stop the killing fields Farmers are in a terrible situation, with no water for crops, livestock or drinking. If we dismiss this year as a freak weather year, we will never make the necessary corrections Sunita Narain, Editor – Down To Earth magazine This is our season of despair. This year, it would seem, the gods…
Read More about Down to Earth issue on the elusive monsoonCLIMATE CRISIS
Warming of oceans due to climate change is unstoppable, say US scientists The Guardian UK The warming of the oceans due to climate change is now unstoppable after record temperatures last year, bringing additional sea-level rise, and raising the risks of severe storms, US government climate scientists has said. The annual State of the Climate…
Read More about News updateCLIMATE CRISIS
Part 4 – Capitalist agriculture: class formation and the metabolic rift Libcom.org In this fourth installment on our series on food and climate, we look at the dynamics of capitalist agriculture in terms of production, class formation, and the ‘metabolic rift’ in the nitrogen cycle. Part 1 (Climate, class, and the Neolithic revolution) looked at the…
Read More about LibCom series on Capitalist agricultureECOCIDE/EXTINCTION
War, pestilence, even climate change, are trifles by comparison. Destroy the soil and we all starve. George Monbiot Imagine a wonderful world, a planet on which there was no threat of climate breakdown, no loss of freshwater, no antibiotic resistance, no obesity crisis, no terrorism, no war. Surely, then, we would be out of major…
Read More about George Monbiot: Soil – the crisis to beat them all?
