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water-intensive farming. So the ramifications of farmers struggling to cope with rapidly diminishing access and arsenic-contaminated groundwater are enormous.

A spiraling need for fuel has also boosted demand for corn, rapeseed oil, jatropha, thus diverting crop production from food to bio-fuel. Higher transportation costs have propelled the prices of other staple grains, meat, poultry and dairy. Resource mobilization, crop management and elimination of speculation are part of the development of emergency safety nets. On the crop-yield front, research and development is the key to increased crop productivity, with improvement in soil fertility, boosting of fertilizer technology and developing increased resistance to plant diseases, particularly bacterial pathogens. Herein, the IRRI and China, in collaboration, have developed high-yielding hybrid rice varieties and aerobic resilient rice strains requiring less water and labor than flood-irrigated paddy cultivation. Such scaled-up programs of China tailored to combat paucities and depleting resources, need to be replicated elsewhere.

As the UN Task Force on Global Food Crisis brings together heads of specialized agencies for a coordinated mitigation, and world leaders meet in Rome at the food security conference at the FAO, 3-5 June 2008, will a kiss of life be given to the frozen "Doha Development Agenda"? Or a concrete battle plan' emerge in a hitherto unparalleled collaborative crisis response for sustainable food production? It's a wait and watch' situation, even as the fracas continues in the Nargis affected Myanmar.

Sources :

The StarOnline The Economist http://www.irri.org/publicatio ns/today/ http://www.researchsea.com http://www.asiaamerica.org/pub lications/ http://timesofindia.indiatimes .com http://www.abc.net.au/news/ http://edition.cnn.com/ASIA/ http://www.atimes.com http://news.theage.com.au/ http://www.un.org/news/ http://www.wto.org/index.htm http://www.alternet.org http://www.acdivoca.org http://www.thenation.com http://www.wto.org/index.htm http://news.scotsman.com http://www.iht.com/articles/20 08/04/18/asia/food.php http://www.iht.com/articles/ap /2008/05/05/business/EU-FIN-As ian-Development-Bank-Food-Cris is.php

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