1.   

Govt to export rice via diplomatic channels

The Centre will export rice through diplomatic channels to Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the Union Agriculture and Food Processing Industries Minister, Mr Sharad Pawar, said on Monday. However, Indonesia, which had sought a similar arrangement, will have to buy the food grain for its needs from private traders, he told reporters on the sidelines of the World Cotton Research Conference here. India has already begun exporting three lakh tonnes of rice to .....

2.   

China to become world's top farm products importer - researcher

China will become the world's largest importer of agriculture products in 5 to 10 years as the country faces from shrinking farmland and other constraints on production, a top government think-tank researcher was cited by local media as saying. Cheng Guoqiang, a researcher with the Development Research Center of the State Council, or the cabinet, did not elaborate on which kind of farm products China has to import. China is already the world's top importer of soy and cotton. The country's .....

3.   

Milk production has slowed down in last two years, says Pranab

India is the largest producer of liquid milk, but there is a demand-supply mismatch as production has slowed down in the last two years, the Union Finance Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, has said. Inaugurating the Mumbai office of Dwarka Milk, a private sector milk procuring and processing company on Monday, Mr Mukherjee said that over the last decade, global milk production has gone up by 2.1 per cent to about 710 million tonnes in .....

4.   

Rice procurement to start in 4 more states by month end

With Punjab and Haryana approaching the kharif 2011-12 target for the government’s rice procurement drive, Food Corporation of India (FCI) and state-owned agencies in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh are set to start rice purchase operations by the end of this month. According to the latest food ministry data, rice procurement during the ongoing kharif marketing season (October-September) has crossed 9 million tonnes with the bulk of purchases in .....