Parashram Patil

As water and climate become instruments of geopolitical leverage, India has an opportunity to turn agricultural resilience into a new form of South-South diplomacy. Climate change is making an old truth harder to ignore: food security is national security. As water becomes scarcer, harvests more erratic and trade policies more protectionist, agriculture is moving from the margins of geopolitics to its centre. Nowhere is this clearer than in Africa, where fragile food systems intersect with...

India’s vast dairy economy has turned ageing livestock into a $5-billion export engine and a new instrument of South-South trade. India’s enormous livestock economy is capable of sustaining both large-scale domestic consumption and a substantial international protein trade. According to livestock census data, the country has roughly 74.26 million sheep, 148.88 million goats and 9.06 million pigs, alongside vast standing populations of bovines and poultry. Together, these animal resources...

India’s sugar crisis is less about one bad season than about the uneasy trade-offs between food, fuel, water and farm incomes India’s latest sugar-price shock is a reminder that agricultural markets rarely obey the neat logic of supply and demand. Retail sugar prices surged towards Rs. 62–Rs. 67 a kilogram before easing after government intervention. But the episode exposes a deeper problem: India is asking its sugar economy to serve too many objectives at once - support farmers, supply...