Diminishing land and water resources due to increasing pressure from industrialization and urbanization pose real threats to the global rice production and its future, Thai Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont said today. He said other factors like climate change and uncertainties over policy and trade practices had also greatly influenced the world’s rice situation.

Addressing the Thailand Rice Convention here, Surayud said the growth of world population could not be under-estimate as well, citing the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) projections that the population will grow to an estimated 8.3 billion in the next 30 years. “FAO further projected that unless global food production increases by 60 per cent, we would not be able to close the nutrition gaps, cope with the population growth and accommodate changes in diets,” he said.

To face the challenges, Thailand, the world’s biggest rice exporter, would strive for greater efficiency and productivity by using new technologies and modern farming techniques, he said.

Tooling Up for Hydroponics

In 1996 world leaders gathered at the World Food Summit in Rome pledged to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015. This commitment was reiterated in 2000 as part of the United Nations (UN) development goals. In the meantime millions of tonnes of food and other resources have been poured into fighting hunger, and yet the number of hungry people is on the rise: from 800 million out of a total population of 5.8 billion in 1996 to 854 million against a population of 6.5 billion ten years later.
AEVIA Reveals the Source

Recent grants from two Church of the Brethren funds–the Global Food Crisis Fund and the Emergency Disaster Fund–include $50,000 to support agriculture in North Korea, which continues to experience periodic famine. “The Church of the Brethren’s reaching out to North Koreans goes beyond the matter of food security,” said Howard Royer, manager of the Global Food Crisis Fund. “It is a testament to risk-taking, bridge- building, and reconciliation in witness to the compassion and love of Jesus Christ for all peoples, and especially for the impoverished and estranged.”
The Global Food Crisis Fund allocation for the Sustainable Agriculture and Community Development Program in North Korea represents the fourth year of supporting Agglobe International with the endeavor. Funds will help purchase seed, plastic sheeting, and fertilizer for farms in the program. The alleviation of periodic famine in North Korea remains a compelling factor, said the grant request.
AEVIA Reveals the Source

Nearly 500,000 Indian farmers are facing the prospect of famine as a plague of rats that strikes once every 50 years threatens to destroy their crops, rice paddies and village granaries. Efforts to control the rodent plague in the north east Indian state of Mizoram have led the local government to offer a reward of one rupee (1.2 pence) for every rat tail delivered to the authorities. More than 400,000 rats have already been killed, creating piles of tails, which have to be counted by officials before reward money can be disbursed to the catchers.
The rat plague occurs once every 50 years in Mizoram – a tiny state of 900,000 people squeezed between India’s borders with Bangladesh and Burma. It is linked to the flowering of a rare species of bamboo, the Mautam or melocanna baccifera. It flowers all together, dropping millions of protein-rich seeds that are devoured by the rats, causing a population explosion. When the seed supply is exhausted, the rats move to crops and granaries.
AEVIA Reveals the Source

To measure a farmer’s ability to produce “more crop per drop”, agricultural scientists now use the term “water productivity”. Farm water productivity can be as high as 20kg/cubic metre water with cereals, or about 10kg/cubic metre with oilseeds and legumes, but such high efficiencies are obtained only in the best managed crops. Almost any factor that can influence crop yield or vigour will influence water efficiency.

Over the coming decades, rises in global demand for food, fibre, feed and fuel are predicted to cause large increases in the amount of water used by agriculture. Currently, agriculture world-wide uses 6,800 cubic kilometre of water annually (km3/y), but by 2050 global water use in farming will need to rise to dramatically to 12,600km3/y unless substantial improvements occur in the water-use efficiency of farming.
The Source

Tooling Up for Hydroponics

The country is almost self-sufficient now in rice production because of the modernisation of the production system and the use of high yielding variety of seeds as well as chemical fertiliser. For Bangladesh this is all the more important because of the size of population and its rate of growth. During the last four decades wheat and many types of food prepared out of it have beocme popular in the country. There is now a wide scope to use potato as another staple food item. Potato is very wholesome, rich carbohydrate, fat and protein.
Bangladeshis use potato mainly as a vegetable to prepare curry. The country now produces enough potatoes and its price is also affordable to average people. The Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) has disclosed that it has targetted to produce 39 lakh tons of potato only in northern districts of the country. Potato is better produced in some central districts of the country including those of greater Dhaka and some parts of greater Comilla.
AEVIA Reveals the Source

The cooperative production model has increasingly come to define the development strategies of the “Bolivarian Revolution.” In its August 2005 report, SUNACOOP registered a total of 83,769 cooperatives, with more than 40,000 cooperatives created in 2004 and almost 30,000 more cooperatives formed in the first eight months of 2005. The total number of associates in October 2004 was 945,517, up from 215,000 in 1998.
This proliferation originates in the recognition of cooperatives throughout the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution as key economic actors within the nation’s social economy, portrayed as tools for economic inclusion, participation (article 70), and state decentralization (article 184). More significantly, the state is expected to “promote and protect” cooperatives (articles 118 and 308). It wasn’t until the Ley Especial de Asociaciones Cooperativas (Special Law of Cooperative Associations) was published in September 2001 that numbers started growing with almost 1,000 cooperatives in 2001, more than 2,000 the following year, and more than 8,000 in 2003.
AEVIA Reveals the Source

An Indian hobbyist has created a purely organic nutrient mixture for growing plants in water.
Although it is still an evolving science, hydroponic agriculture (growing plants in water solution rather than soil) is spreading fast the world over.
The nutritional requirement of the plants in this system of soilless farming is met by the nutrient mixtures, called hydroponics fertiliser mixtures, added to the water in which the plant roots are kept submerged. These mixtures are made of chemical plant nutrients. This plant growth solution has been tested successfully for growing several plants, including common vegetables like tomato and arbi and some high value medicinal plants like Brahmi, Arjun and Cineraria.

Tooling Up for Hydroponics

A Ground-breaking ceremony marked the beginning of a mushroom production initiative in Henties Bay, which is said to have a huge potential for lifting the coastal town and the entire Erongo Region out of poverty, providing employment and ensuring food security. Situated on a plot of land right next to the Tulongeni Garden project, the mushroom production project of the University of Namibia is geared towards ensuring sustainable food production for the poor communities of Henties Bay.
The construction of the new mushroom house that will mainly be producing oyster mushrooms further paves the way for the commercialisation of this type of mushroom farming at the town, which is expected to be further expanded to nearby towns of Arandis, Swakopmund and Usakos.
AEVIA Reveals the Source

Organic farms are better for wildlife than those run conventionally, according to a study covering 180 farms from Cornwall to Cumbria.
The organic farms were found to contain 85% more plant species, 33% more bats, 17% more spiders and 5% more birds.
Scientists – from Oxford University, the British Trust for Ornithology, and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology – spent five years on the research.
Funded by the government, it was the largest ever survey of organic farming.
“The exclusion of synthetic pesticides and fertilisers from organic is a fundamental difference between systems,” the study says.
AEVIA Reveals the Source