Feature Article

The problem of chronic hunger that afflicts around 10 million rural people in West Bengal has largely been ignored. What is the Left Front government doing to alleviate the situation? May 3-9, 2008

The demand for "universalisation' of the public distribution system during a period of rising prices is not relevant since, more than four-fifths of households in rural areas and two-thirds in urban centres are already covered by it. Yet, a very small proportion of rural/urban households actually make purchases of either rice or wheat from the PDS; an insignificant amount of consumption is met by ration shop purchases. The pattern is somewhat better for below the poverty line households with ration cards.

Within a couple of years of the global rush to promote biofuels new questions are being asked about the claimed benefits of these fuels and serious negative impacts are coming to light. It is in this regard that the focus of the biofuel policy in India has been towards utilising an "oil bearing' plant, jatropha carcus, for oil extraction, processing and eventual blending with diesel. The advantage of this plant lies in the fact that it can be grown on cultivable wasteland and requires very little fertiliser and other inputs as normally required in agriculture. (Editorial) May 3-9, 2008

The department of personnel and training (DoPT) proposes to ask the international firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to assess the efficacy of the Right to Information (RTI) Act of 2005. The RTI Act has been hard won with activists raising awareness about the issue since the 1990s. They have now criticised the government for hiring a foreign company for the evaluation and are certain that the exercise is meant to ease the discomfort that the law has generated for a secrecy-loving bureaucracy. (Editorial) May 3-9, 2008

"Politicians seem to think that the science is a done deal," says Tim Palmer. "I don't want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for regional climate change, are immensely uncertain." Palmer is a leading climate modeller at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, and he does not doubt that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has done a good job alerting the world to the problem of global climate change.

Let's be clear. The science of climate change and of humanity's role in recent warming is very robust. So concerns about the ability of climate models to predict effects at the local level in no way undermine the case for urgent action to stop climate change happening. (Editorial)

In a recent paper in the journal Carbon Balance and Management (vol 3, p 1), Ning Zeng, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park calculated that if we buried half of the wood that grows each year, in such a way that it didn't decay, enough CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere to offset all of our fossil-fuel emissions. It wouldn't be easy, but Zeng believes it could be done.

The image of biofuels is rapidly tarnishing. Already under fire for displacing food production and tropical forests, they are now charged with marginalising poor rural women. In a report published on 21 April, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization concludes that women subsistence farmers will be evicted to make way for huge biofuel plantations.

Few studies have assessed the extent and distribution of the blood pressure burden worldwide. This aim of this study was to quantify the global burden of disease related to high blood pressure.

Boreal forests serve as important global sources or sinks of carbon (C) and wildfire is a major driver of C storage in these forests. Although fire releases CO2 to the atmosphere, it also converts plant biomass into forms of black carbon, such as charcoal, that are resistant to microbial attack and persist in the soil for thousands of years. It has frequently been suggested that, because of its resistance, black C can serve as an important long-term C sink that may help offset the release of human-induced CO2 to the atmosphere.