Nine export promotion councils, which together account for over 50 per cent of the country s exports, have expressed their inability to meet the targets set for them by the government for 2007-08 due to the rise in the value of the rupee against the dollar. Downstream firms to suffer as oil price peaks. Nine export promotion councils, which together account for over 50 per cent of the country s exports, have expressed their inability to meet the targets set for them by the government for...

Research funding for specialty crops is among the dozens of proposals that will be considered in the legislation, which was last written in 2002 and gives farmers payments and other help to supplement their incomes, support crop prices and manage supplies. Shown among his peonies, Mayer, 40, a fifth-generation farmer, is the largest producer of fresh-cut gladiolus in the country. Shown among his peonies, Mayer, 40, a fifth-generation farmer, is the largest producer of fresh-cut gladiolus...

Can any type of agricultural product become certified organic? Yes, any agricultural product that meets third-party or state-certification requirements may be considered organic. Nonfood organic products (personal care products, nutritional supplements, household cleaners, flowers, pet food and clothing, bedding and other products from organic fibers such as flax, wool and cotton) grew 32. Pollution and climate change are now drawing worldwide attention, and one result of increasing...

Editor's note: This is Part 2 in an Associated Press series on ethanol, whose fortunes as a gasoline additive have risen and fallen with the price of oil, and is now in the middle of a boom. Still, some experts warn that the price has nowhere to go but down if the market is flooded, and not everyone has forgotten how prices wilted after a massive grain deal with the Soviet Union in the early 1970s and the 1996 drought in China shot corn prices to record highs. On farms across the nation,...

food and agricultural products, including shipping and banking costs, Alvarez said in an interview Tuesday. At an agribusiness fair in 2002, he fed milk in a baby bottle to a buffalo calf from Minnesota, greeted then-governor Jesse Ventura and penned some of the contracts to buy American goods. In recent weeks he has written a string of essays on international affairs, often denouncing the use of food crops to produce ethanol. But the 80-year-old Castro has not been seen in public since...

So while food prices appear inexpensive, there is the hidden cost of subsidies-- 72 percent of which is paid to the top ten percent of farmers according to statistics provided by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an independent think tank on agriculture and environmental issues. So while food prices appear inexpensive, there is the hidden cost of subsidies-- 72 percent of which is paid to the top ten percent of farmers according to statistics provided by the Environmental Working...