Goodness. Seems like every post today has an imperative title, and a reference to innocent causalties in needless wars. This post is something that came up a few weeks back at my Cody's reading in Berkeley.

One of the questions was about Binayak Sen, and while Preeti Shekar from ASATA gave a fine answer about the situation, we were both swimming a little on the details.

The short version of the story is this. The government of Chhattisgarh, a state in India, is fighting a war against Naxalites, the Mao-inspired rural agitators, whose bretheren have recently succeeded in overthrowing the monarchy in Nepal. Land reform is never far from the surface of trouble in rural areas, and this is one such case. ... read more »

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Posted on 31 May, 2008 - 04:40

Just when you thought it couldn't get any more apocalyptic, the food crisis looks like it's getting a helping hand from another horseman: pestilence. ... read more »

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Posted on 21 April, 2008 - 03:53

Image:AboutColonBlank

A reporter at Bloomberg dropped a line with this story about diet pills in India. What with Indians ballooning (as we all are) there's something of a demand for weight-loss remedies.

The remedies that make sense (eat less, be a little more physically active, don't eat processed food, enjoy fresh food more) aren't terribly popular. Generating far more interest are the solutions that let you carry on eating unhealthily, but where you don't have to bother trying too hard. The chemical companies have been lining up to provide something like this, a magic regulator of free will that can help take the edge off our food cravings.

Through the cunning use of cannabis, specifically the discovery of how to switch off that part of the brain that makes you crave Mars bars when you're high, the drug giant Sanofi-Aventis has hit on a billion dollar weight-loss drug: Acompli. ... read more »

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Posted on 5 April, 2008 - 09:58

Photo Credit: Debt Slayer

This is some interesting populist politics. The Indian government has just announced that it will be cancelling all farmer debt by the beginning of next year, at a cost of $15bn. Predictably, this spike in rural funding comes before an election year, and 70% of Indians live in rural areas. Also, the government has pledged to keep food prices under control because, well, many Indians are having a hard time affording it.

So what to think of this? ... read more »

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Posted on 29 February, 2008 - 16:29

It's been a while since we had a post mentioning bird flu, but in the past couple of days, folk've written in with avian influenza news. So it seems appropriate to acknowledge, first, that bird flu is alive and killing people - over 100 in Indonesia (out of 124 cases - those aren't good odds). But it's also spreading dangerously through India, in West Bengal. The Times of India quotes Mamata Banerjee even going so far as to say that it's "man-made" and part of a concerted strategy to destroy the rural economy. ... read more »

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Posted on 28 January, 2008 - 18:55

A reader writes from the UK with the following observation about Stuffed and Starved.

There is one issue which is scarcely mentioned in the book or on this web-site, and that is human over-population. This seems to me to be the Achilles heel of the political left.

Let’s remedy the omission, because for people who care about food, population is a serious concern. ... read more »

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Posted on 26 November, 2007 - 17:59

The Ecologist has just run a story that I penned last month, about farmer suicides, drawing the line between those in the UK, those in India and, most recently, those in Australia. ... read more »

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Posted on 9 November, 2007 - 03:04

This came in via a number of readers today. It's a posting from the Food News wire concerning the soaring diabetes rates in India. What's perhaps more depressing than the diabetes data (and its mischaracterisation as a 'lifestyle disease') is the fact that the article's authors can only see a solution to diet-induced disease through private healthcare. Government intervention in the marketing of food to children, for instance, isn't on the cards. With a vision as tunnelled as this, the authors would undoubtedly find a comfortable and lucrative (if brief) tenure in the current US administration. ... read more »

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Posted on 5 October, 2007 - 04:38

While I was writing Stuffed and Starved some of the most thoughtful and incisive analyses I came across were those by Utsa Patnaik. She has now made available a fine summary of her thinking on rural poverty in India, and for policy wonks in particular, it's a must read. Abstract below. Full article here.

Many economic and social indicators suggest that not only is the level of absolute poverty in India high, there has also been an adverse impact of neoliberal policies on poverty. And yet, the poverty estimates by the Planning Commission and many individual academics, both using a method that renders irrelevant the question of a nutrition norm, show low levels as well as decline in poverty over the 1990s and beyond. This article proves that both comparisons over time of the all-India and state-level estimates of poverty as well as any comparison at a point in time of poverty levels across states, obtained by this method, are invalid. Using a direct poverty estimation route of inspecting and calculating from current National Sample Survey data the percentage of persons not able to satisfy the nutrition norm in calories, the author finds that in 1999-2000 nearly half of the rural population who are actually poor have been excluded from the set of the officially poor. For 2004-05, while the official estimate of rural poverty is 28.3 per cent, the author’s direct estimate of persons below the poverty line is 87 per cent. There is clear evidence of a large and growing divergence over time between the author’s direct estimates of poverty and the official indirect estimates.

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Posted on 8 August, 2007 - 06:00

Adding to the commentary about Special Economic Zones, here's a solid article from Devinder Sharma, a man whose thoughts crop up in Stuffed and Starved. The scourge of 'Special Economic Zones' shouldn't come as any surprise, of course. It's a similar process wherever 'export industry' has successfully wrangled concessions from central government, whether in rich countries or poor.

This commentary courtesy of ZNet.

Displacing farmers India will have 400 million agricultural refugees
July 17, 2007 By Devinder Sharma ... read more »

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Posted on 17 July, 2007 - 22:35