Good Food is First Food. It is not junk food. It is the food that connects nature and nutrition with livelihoods. This food is good for our health; it comes from the rich biodiversity of our regions; it provides employment to people. Most importantly, cooking and eating give us pleasure. …
India's forest cover has been showing a rapid decline. With community participation and social forestry being alien concepts the government sponsored conservation drives were unable to touch the chord of success. To ensure better co-operation, the joint forest management ( jfm ), programme was proposed by the ministry of environment …
INDIA might be the software superpower but its remote villages still remain caught in a time warp where the effects of modernistion have not yet filtered down. Even after 54 years of independence, the rhetoric of development and conservation rings hollow without the people's participation in development schemes. Here in …
There would be no timber left for industrial use in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) after 2025 if unabated over exploitation of timber continues, reveals the Provincial Forest Resource Inventory (PFRI), which was conducted by a German consortium. The PFRI findings reflect that a seven-year ban on forest harvesting …
nepal's forest bureaucracy is set to follow the footsteps of its Indian counterpart. What was hailed as a radical community forest management (cfm) programme is on the brink of a complete, disastrous makeover. The Forest (Second Amendments) Bill, 2001, to be soon placed in parliament for approval, will strip the …
Forest bureaucracy arms itself to halt the spread of CFM • In the guise of a finance bill, the Nepalese government has given district forest officers powers to punish forest users' groups (FUGs) members l In the terai , the government is interested to give the forest to foreign companies …
Past experiences have shown that centralized management of natural resources, based on a culture of exclusion and rules, has not contributed to the sustainable management of natural resources. This important realization has led to a series of policy changes in the recent past that provides an ever-widening democratic space to …
The politics surrounding climate change is getting murkier by the day as a few indusrialised countries insist on using forests to combat global warming. The debate over the use of these forestswhich absorb carbon dioxide and are called
Around 30 per cent of pesticides marketed in developing countries do not meet internationally accepted quality standards, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and World Health Organisation (WHO). These pesticides have an estimated market value of us $900 million annually. "The labeling often fails to provide data …
Pakistan plans to set up a Geographical Information System (GIS) to monitor changes in the forest cover in the country. A ban on the commercial harvesting of forests will also be lifted for one year and progress will be reviewed through the federal forestry board. The forest management centre in …
The Nainital high court recently stayed an order of the Uttar Pradesh (UP) government, which allowed withdrawal of Rs 210 crore from the reserve funds of the UP Forest Corporation. The order was given in response to a public interest litigation filed by former member of Parliament, Mahendra Pal Singh. …
ON THE face of it, democracy in India has won a small battle. People's aspirations have been met by the creation of the three new states - Chattisgarh, Uttaranchal and Jharkhand. The people agitated for decades against apathy and skewed development of the mother states - Madhya Pradesh (MP), Uttar …
RAIPUR'S air is euphoric. The secretariat, earlier the main civil hospital of the city, still smells of fresh paint. A huge cutout of chief minister Ajit Jogi overlooks its premises, while residents of Raipur eagerly debate the future of this natural resource-rich state and the opportunities it brings. The general …
WHILE the first chief minister of Uttaranchal was being sworn in at midnight on November 9, 2000, many leaders who fought for statehood swore to continue the struggle. "It is not over yet," summed up Kamla Pant, a leader at the forefront of the movement and member of the Uttrakhand …
ON NOVEMBER 15, 2000 when the collective dream of some 22 million people for half-a-century rolled into reality, there was hardly anybody to celebrate. Jharkhand, India's youngest state and one of the richest, was born at midnight. Twenty minutes later, a new government was sworn in to chart out its …
forest fragmentation, the world over, is associated with widespread animal extinction, loss of biodiversity and damage to the ecosystem. The two basic ways in which forest fragmentation affects natural biodiversity are, firstly, a reduction in net area of natural habitat available to the animals surviving in the patch. Secondly, in …
Military personnel of at least 32 Latin American and Caribbean nations may soon get training from members of the us armed forces to guard rainforests, protect endangered species and undertake a variety of other environmental tasks. The us soldiers will teach their Latin American and Caribbean counterparts various ways of …
It is estimated that around 8,000 years ago, more than six billion hectares (around 40 per cent) of the Earth's surface was covered by forests. Today, the figure has plummeted to a mere 3.6 billion hectares. Every year, at least 14 million hectares are lost. Among the hundreds of species …
" the decline in the forest area has been halted to a great extent and many states have shown sizeable increase in the forest cover, despite mounting pressures of human and livestock population,' said Union environment minister T R Baalu, while releasing the report The State of Forest Report , …
What does JFM lack? Even today, most of the major decisions are taken by the forest department. Only a small part of the decision making process has been transferred to the village community, and that too only for degraded forests. Another drawback is that only 15-20 per cent of the …
