Food

Whenever one hears of 'sustainable food', the mind invariably conjures images of heavily-priced, smartly-packaged organic stuff at swanky departmental stores. Or maybe, ritzy stand-alone stores that sell such items. In many ways this image trivialises matters since sustainable food is more than just that. One cannot have an idea about sustainable food without having a world vision. The world’s agricultural system is today facing a tricky balancing act that it must anyhow enact. By 2050, this...

Food prices in India continue to rise when when international prices are stable because of the failure of domestic food management, wherein temporary shortages have led to price spikes, the Interntional Labour Organization (ILO) has said. Over the past two years wholesale food prices have increased by 40 per cent much more than during the mid-1990s and 2004, and the retail food prices have increased faster, the ILO said at the release of World of Work Report 2011: Making markets work for jobs...

Rich nations such as the United States of offloading food it would not feed its own children to poorer countries as food aid, medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has said. "Foods we would never give our own children are being sent overseas as food aid to the most vulnerable children in malnutrition hotspots in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia," MSF's international president Unni Karunakara said in a statement. "This double standard must stop." MSF said food aid largely does not...

About 166 million people in 22 countries are suffering chronic hunger or difficulty finding enough to eat as a result of protracted food crises. Wars, natural disasters and poor government institutions are exacerbating this state of undernourishment. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said these countries are in what is termed a protracted crisis and said assistance should be refocused for countries around the world suffering from double and triple shocks. Chronic hunger and food...

Nectar, a symbol of well-being – the honey that millions buy believing it is pure, natural and healthy - is contaminated with high levels of antibiotics, fed to bees and is bad for our health, a leading environmental organisation in India has found. The findings are from a new study conducted by the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment’s (CSE) Pollution Monitoring Laboratory, which had earlier tested colas for pesticides and toys for poisonous chemicals. The findings had shocked...