The $4.7 billion in cuts would leave USDA with a budget of $17.9 billion after cutting some statistical and rural business services and encouraging private sector conservation planning (all figures US$). Farm groups warned that farmers and rural communities could suffer.

The budget proposal would save $498 million by eliminating a rural water and wastewater loan and grant program that helps fund clean water and sewer systems in communities with fewer than 10,000 people.

Other areas targeted for cuts include staffing at county-level USDA service centres.

The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), the country’s largest organization representing farmers, said cuts to statistical services could hurt members.

“That’s a big concern because a lot of farmers and growers rely on USDA’s statistical capabilities to make a lot of marketing and risk management decisions and planting decisions,” said John Newton, AFBF director of market intelligence.

The budget proposal did not give details of which services could be cut.

Greg Fogel, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said cuts to rural development work could harm businesses in rural areas as these programs had created jobs and helped businesses survive.

The White House also said it would eliminate the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education program, which donates U.S. agricultural commodities to food-deficit countries. The program, which had $182 million earmarked in the fiscal-year 2017 USDA budget, “lacks evidence that it is being effectively implemented to reduce food insecurity,” the document said.

The plans for USDA spending were part of Trump’s budget blueprint, a broad outline of spending proposals for the fiscal year ahead.

The blueprint does not cover “mandatory” spending established by law, such as farm subsidies, only “discretionary” programs where lawmakers can adjust spending.

The Trump White House has said it plans to release a traditional full budget in mid-May.

The budget plan calls for $6.2 billion for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, about $150 million less than budgeted in fiscal 2016. Under former President Barack Obama, the program was reduced by $273 million between fiscal 2015 and 2016.

USDA oversees agriculture, rural communities and nutritional programs, including funding for school lunches. The agency also publishes closely watched global farming production statistics.

— Reporting for Reuters by P.J. Huffstutter and Jo Winterbottom in Chicago. Additional reporting for Reuters by Karl Plume in Chicago.

The post Trump budget plan cuts USDA food, rural water funding appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said this represented the first confirmed case of highly pathogenic H7 avian influenza (HPAI) in commercial poultry in the U.S. this year. It is the first time HPAI has been found in Tennessee, the state government said.

Tyson, the biggest chicken meat producer in the U.S., said in a statement it was working with Tennessee and federal officials to contain the virus by euthanizing the birds on the contract farm.

In 2014 and 2015, during a widespread outbreak of HPAI, the U.S. killed nearly 50 million birds, mostly egg-laying hens. The losses pushed U.S. egg prices to record highs and prompted trading partners to ban imports of American poultry, even though there was little infection then in the broiler industry.

No people were affected in that outbreak, which was primarily of the H5N2 strain. The risk of human infection in poultry outbreaks is low, although in China people have died this winter amid an outbreak of the H7N9 virus in birds.

The facility in southern Tennessee’s Lincoln County has been placed under quarantine, along with about 30 other poultry farms within a 10 km radius of the site, the state said. Other flocks in the quarantined area are being tested, it added.

Tyson, USDA and the state did not name the facility involved. Tyson said it did not expect disruptions to its chicken business.

USDA should have more information by Monday evening about the particular strain of the virus involved, spokeswoman Donna Karlsons said by email.

HPAI was last found in a commercial turkey flock in Indiana in January 2016.

USDA said it would inform the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and international trading partners of the outbreak.

The biggest traditional markets for U.S. chicken meat are Mexico and Canada, which introduced state or regional bans on U.S. broiler exports after the outbreak two years ago, and China, which imposed a national ban.

South Korea’s agriculture ministry announced Monday it will ban imports of U.S. poultry effective March 6 following the Tennessee outbreak. South Korea, in the midst of its own worst-ever bird flu outbreak with an H5N6 strain, has been importing eggs from the U.S.

Tennessee’s broiler production is too small to rank it in the top five U.S. producing states but it is the third-largest generator of cash receipts in agriculture for the state.

Tennessee is generally within the Mississippi flyway for migrating birds, which in Canada passes over Ontario and parts of Manitoba, Quebec and Nunavut.

In January, USDA detected bird flu in a wild duck in Montana that appeared to match one of the strains found during the 2014 and 2015 outbreak.

The U.S. stepped up biosecurity measures aimed at preventing the spread of bird flu after the outbreak two years ago.

Tyson said precautions being taken include disinfecting all vehicles entering farms and banning all nonessential visitor access to contract farms.

In recent months, different strains of bird flu have been confirmed across Asia and in Europe. Authorities have culled millions of birds in affected areas to control the outbreaks.

France, which has the largest poultry flock in the European Union, has reported outbreaks of the highly contagious H5N8 bird flu virus.

— Reporting for Reuters by Lewis Krauskopf in New York, Jo Winterbottom in Chicago and Jane Chung in Seoul. Includes files from AGCanada.com Network staff.

The post Bird flu found in Tennessee chicken flock appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The rioters were incensed over an issue arguably as old as India itself: the eating of beef, which the country’s majority Hindus have considered sacrilegious for at least 1,000 years.

Perhaps surprisingly in a country where so many people view cows as sacred, India could soon become the world’s biggest beef exporter, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Most, though not all, of the beef India exports is buffalo, an animal less venerated than the hump-backed indigenous Indian cow. But the trade, even in buffalo beef, still evokes revulsion among Hindu nationalists.

The sharpest criticism comes from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main opposition in parliament. Its candidate for prime minister in next year’s elections, Narendra Modi, has slammed what he calls the government’s “pink revolution,” (a play on the original agricultural or “green” revolution in India) and its “secret agenda… for export of beef.”

India’s vegetarian traditions and the Hindu aversion to beef mean only 2.1 million tonnes of beef are consumed domestically a year. That compares with 11.5 million tonnes a year in the United States, which has just a quarter India’s population.

But exports of beef from India are likely to hit close to 1.8 million tonnes in 2013, second only to Brazil, according to an April forecast by the USDA. The value of India’s exports has nearly doubled from $1.9 billion in 2010-11 to $3.2 billion in 2012-13, according to the government’s Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA).

Beef production in India is dominated by Muslims, a minority in the country.

This year’s unrest along the Delhi-Jaipur highway shows how quickly beef can stir anger.

Passersby reported a foul smell coming from a truck that had broken down; rumours spread that it was loaded with cow meat. Slogan-shouting youths swept through the town of Dharuhera, some 40 km (25 miles) from Delhi, ransacking the truck and tearing out its cargo of ice-covered meat. By the time police calmed the riot, 74 trucks and buses had been burned.

In the end, the cargo turned out to be buffalo meat, not cow. But Sailesh Soni, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a powerful Hindu nationalist group that backs the BJP and wants stricter enforcement of a ban on cattle killing, said all Hindus should be ready to defend all cattle.

“If somebody targets my mother, what would I do? I will stand and save her. Likewise, you should get up, gather and save our mother cow,” he said.

Mythology

Hindus believe that Nandi, a bull, is the steed of powerful deity Lord Shiva, and that Lord Krishna was born as a cowherd.

Many rural households in India, the world’s biggest producer of milk, own at least one cow or buffalo. Female buffaloes, in particular, are prized for their creamy milk, while the males are used for pulling carts and plows, and their dung keeps home fires burning in villages that have little or no access to power.

Statistically, there are enough cows and buffalo in India for every rural household to have about two. But once cows are past their productive life, owners will often simply turn them out, unwilling to spend on fodder for no return.

Buffaloes and cows are increasingly ending up in abattoirs mushrooming across the country, according to industry participants and officials interviewed by Reuters. Buffalo makes up by far the bulk of India’s beef exports. Cow meat is banned from export, but animal rights groups say some finds its way abroad.

In all, India has half the buffaloes in the world, according to the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and the largest number of cattle, with 327 million head, according to the USDA. The United States has around 89 million cattle.

Booming beef industry

Sitting in his airy ground-floor office in an abattoir about eight km from the town of Aligarh in northern India, Mahendra Singh says business is booming. His production of buffalo meat has increased to 150 tonnes a day from 100 to 120 tonnes around a year ago.

His employer, Hind Agro Industries Ltd., has sought the local government’s permission to lift its daily output limit to 250 tonnes to meet rising demand.

“Earlier there was only our plant but now there are more than five units in this area alone,” Singh, the plant’s general manager, said.

Hind Agro sells most of its meat to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, but the government says India’s biggest beef buyers are Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Egypt.

China, where beef consumption is growing rapidly, could soon be on the official customer list after the two countries signed a framework deal earlier this year.

Global demand for exports of buffalo — leaner and cheaper than cow meat — is growing at around 30 per cent a year. The lack of growth hormones in Indian beef provides an additional attraction for health-conscious consumers, said M. Kalim Khan, vice-president of exports and marketing at Hind Agro.

High stakes and hijacks

The rapid expansion of the beef meat sector, rising prices and demand have encouraged cattle smuggling, animal activists and officials say.

“Abandoned animals are picked up from the streets for slaughter. No one is bothered because everyone, including the police, get their share from the agents,” says Arvind Shah, a founder of Karuna, a charity for animal welfare in the city of Mumbai.

Shah, whose tall and thin physique has made him a well-known figure among residents near his tiny office, describes violent clashes between truck drivers and animal rights activists.

“Stopping trucks on highways in the middle of the night is a very risky business. I was chased by masked men and threatened,” the 49-year-old activist says.

Activists get tipoffs from villagers and even rival suppliers about the route and timing of vehicles carrying meat or animals, and then they work out a strategy to stop them.

“We go in a group of 30 to 40 people and carry wooden sticks. Most of the time, we succeed in stopping the trucks and releasing the animals,” says Brijesh Shah, a 34-year-old member of Jiv Rakshak Dal, which literally means animal protection group. “Sometimes… they attack us with iron rods and other sharp weapons.”

The group has stopped 120 trucks since 2002 and saved around 8,000 animals, he says.

Truck drivers, for their part, have stories of beatings and robberies.

“We are fed up with paying bribes to policemen and getting beaten up by animal rights people and political party members,” said Mohammad Gulfam, a driver at the Gulaothi market.

While government regulations on the transport of animals are strict, implementation is often weak and cattle are squeezed into trucks to cut costs. Animals often make the journey to the slaughterhouse without food or water and are sometimes left in the baking heat while drivers take their breaks.

Playing politics

And there are dangers for beef traders even when they are operating legally.

“On my way to make a delivery at Hind Agro, our truck was stopped by about 15 people belonging to some political party,” said Mohammad Yusaf, a driver waiting to load up at Gulaothi market. “They beat me and my co-worker and robbed us of 25,000 rupees ($408),” he added.

After the outbreak of violence outside New Delhi, Muslim elders and clerics decided that preserving the peace was far more important than eating beef.

Anyone killing cows, including the ones left to stray, will now be fined 115,000 rupees, they announced. Since then, tensions have eased in the area, where Hindus and Muslims live side by side and chat in each other’s front yards.

The post In the land of the holy cow, fury over beef exports appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The rioters were incensed over an issue arguably as old as India itself: the eating of beef, which the country’s majority Hindus have considered sacrilegious for at least 1,000 years.

Perhaps surprisingly in a country where so many people view cows as sacred, India could soon become the world’s biggest beef exporter, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Most, though not all, of the beef India exports is buffalo, an animal less venerated than the hump-backed indigenous Indian cow. But the trade, even in buffalo beef, still evokes revulsion among Hindu nationalists.

The sharpest criticism comes from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main opposition in parliament. Its candidate for prime minister in next year’s elections, Narendra Modi, has slammed what he calls the government’s “pink revolution,” (a play on the original agricultural or “green” revolution in India) and its “secret agenda… for export of beef.”

India’s vegetarian traditions and the Hindu aversion to beef mean only 2.1 million tonnes of beef are consumed domestically a year. That compares with 11.5 million tonnes a year in the United States, which has just a quarter India’s population.

But exports of beef from India are likely to hit close to 1.8 million tonnes in 2013, second only to Brazil, according to an April forecast by the USDA. The value of India’s exports has nearly doubled from $1.9 billion in 2010-11 to $3.2 billion in 2012-13, according to the government’s Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA).

Beef production in India is dominated by Muslims, a minority in the country.

This year’s unrest along the Delhi-Jaipur highway shows how quickly beef can stir anger.

Passersby reported a foul smell coming from a truck that had broken down; rumours spread that it was loaded with cow meat. Slogan-shouting youths swept through the town of Dharuhera, some 40 km (25 miles) from Delhi, ransacking the truck and tearing out its cargo of ice-covered meat. By the time police calmed the riot, 74 trucks and buses had been burned.

In the end, the cargo turned out to be buffalo meat, not cow. But Sailesh Soni, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a powerful Hindu nationalist group that backs the BJP and wants stricter enforcement of a ban on cattle killing, said all Hindus should be ready to defend all cattle.

“If somebody targets my mother, what would I do? I will stand and save her. Likewise, you should get up, gather and save our mother cow,” he said.

Mythology

Hindus believe that Nandi, a bull, is the steed of powerful deity Lord Shiva, and that Lord Krishna was born as a cowherd.

Many rural households in India, the world’s biggest producer of milk, own at least one cow or buffalo. Female buffaloes, in particular, are prized for their creamy milk, while the males are used for pulling carts and plows, and their dung keeps home fires burning in villages that have little or no access to power.

Statistically, there are enough cows and buffalo in India for every rural household to have about two. But once cows are past their productive life, owners will often simply turn them out, unwilling to spend on fodder for no return.

Buffaloes and cows are increasingly ending up in abattoirs mushrooming across the country, according to industry participants and officials interviewed by Reuters. Buffalo makes up by far the bulk of India’s beef exports. Cow meat is banned from export, but animal rights groups say some finds its way abroad.

In all, India has half the buffaloes in the world, according to the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and the largest number of cattle, with 327 million head, according to the USDA. The United States has around 89 million cattle.

Booming beef industry

Sitting in his airy ground-floor office in an abattoir about eight km from the town of Aligarh in northern India, Mahendra Singh says business is booming. His production of buffalo meat has increased to 150 tonnes a day from 100 to 120 tonnes around a year ago.

His employer, Hind Agro Industries Ltd., has sought the local government’s permission to lift its daily output limit to 250 tonnes to meet rising demand.

“Earlier there was only our plant but now there are more than five units in this area alone,” Singh, the plant’s general manager, said.

Hind Agro sells most of its meat to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, but the government says India’s biggest beef buyers are Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Egypt.

China, where beef consumption is growing rapidly, could soon be on the official customer list after the two countries signed a framework deal earlier this year.

Global demand for exports of buffalo — leaner and cheaper than cow meat — is growing at around 30 per cent a year. The lack of growth hormones in Indian beef provides an additional attraction for health-conscious consumers, said M. Kalim Khan, vice-president of exports and marketing at Hind Agro.

High stakes and hijacks

The rapid expansion of the beef meat sector, rising prices and demand have encouraged cattle smuggling, animal activists and officials say.

“Abandoned animals are picked up from the streets for slaughter. No one is bothered because everyone, including the police, get their share from the agents,” says Arvind Shah, a founder of Karuna, a charity for animal welfare in the city of Mumbai.

Shah, whose tall and thin physique has made him a well-known figure among residents near his tiny office, describes violent clashes between truck drivers and animal rights activists.

“Stopping trucks on highways in the middle of the night is a very risky business. I was chased by masked men and threatened,” the 49-year-old activist says.

Activists get tipoffs from villagers and even rival suppliers about the route and timing of vehicles carrying meat or animals, and then they work out a strategy to stop them.

“We go in a group of 30 to 40 people and carry wooden sticks. Most of the time, we succeed in stopping the trucks and releasing the animals,” says Brijesh Shah, a 34-year-old member of Jiv Rakshak Dal, which literally means animal protection group. “Sometimes… they attack us with iron rods and other sharp weapons.”

The group has stopped 120 trucks since 2002 and saved around 8,000 animals, he says.

Truck drivers, for their part, have stories of beatings and robberies.

“We are fed up with paying bribes to policemen and getting beaten up by animal rights people and political party members,” said Mohammad Gulfam, a driver at the Gulaothi market.

While government regulations on the transport of animals are strict, implementation is often weak and cattle are squeezed into trucks to cut costs. Animals often make the journey to the slaughterhouse without food or water and are sometimes left in the baking heat while drivers take their breaks.

Playing politics

And there are dangers for beef traders even when they are operating legally.

“On my way to make a delivery at Hind Agro, our truck was stopped by about 15 people belonging to some political party,” said Mohammad Yusaf, a driver waiting to load up at Gulaothi market. “They beat me and my co-worker and robbed us of 25,000 rupees ($408),” he added.

After the outbreak of violence outside New Delhi, Muslim elders and clerics decided that preserving the peace was far more important than eating beef.

Anyone killing cows, including the ones left to stray, will now be fined 115,000 rupees, they announced. Since then, tensions have eased in the area, where Hindus and Muslims live side by side and chat in each other’s front yards.

The post In the land of the holy cow, fury over beef exports appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Ajit Govind Sable s family has owned their farm in India s western Maharashtra state for 10 generations, which even for a region that has been farming for more than 10,000 years is long enough to witness plenty of changes.

Two generations back, they started cultivating sugar cane here in Shivthar, a village in Maharashtra s highlands near the Krishna River. India s most industrialized state soon became its largest sugar producer.

Today, it s not sugar the 35-year-old Sable is talking about as he sips sweet tea in the front yard of the low, two-storey farmhouse where half the ground floor houses his turmeric crop. He s discussing peppers, which he is now growing under polythene plastic coverings.

Like an increasing number of farmers in India, Sable is exploiting a shift in taste towards fruits and vegetables among Indians. My colleagues grow flowers under poly, Sable says. But the investment for that is too much for me, so I m trying out peppers. You can t eat flowers if you can t find buyers for them, he notes.

While many Indian farmers are eager to adjust to changing diets in one of the world s fastest-growing markets, the government continues to subsidize the cultivation of wheat, sugar and rice crops to ensure basic food needs for the country s half a billion poor.

The result is overflowing stocks of these carbohydrate-heavy staples and a huge subsidy bill that is adding to a ballooning budget deficit.

India, many agricultural experts say, is spending billions to prop up a traditional farm sector at the expense of investment in new crops and agricultural innovation.

But in a country where one out of five Indians goes hungry, the government has had to focus on foods that fuel or fill carbohydrate-heavy wheat, rice and sugar. About 36 per cent of women and 34 per cent of men in India are underweight. The costs of that undernourishment is high in terms of health care, lost productivity and poor quality of life.

At the same time, a growing urban middle class is consuming more higher-value, high-protein foods, which is stoking food price inflation as well as changing business and farm models in rural India.

The food chain in India is undergoing deep change.

There is a view that this is a structural shift and pulses, milk, meat, eggs, fish, protein items these are sectors where you need to concentrate, Abhijit Sen, who sits on the government s planning committee, said in a speech on June 5.

Rising middle class

Those shifts have been underway for years but are accelerating with rapid urbanization and the expansion of India s middle class. India is getting wealthier as well as healthier.

Its eight per cent annual growth, second only to China among major countries, is boosting incomes rapidly in the trillion-dollar economy. Per capita income surged to $1,265 in 2010 from $857 in 2006 a nearly 50 per cent increase according to the World Bank and IMF.

Middle-class households are expected to grow 67 per cent in the next five years, bringing over 53 million households into an annual income bracket between 340,000 and 1.7 million rupees ($7,600-$38,000).

Bijay Kumar, managing director of the National Horticulture Board, says having more money than your parents is pushing up demand for high-protein foods.

Rising income levels are allowing people to spend on high-value stuff, he says. People are more aware of health. They are increasing their intake of fruits in their regular diet.

In 2009-10, Indians boosted spending on fruit and vegetables by nearly nine per cent over the year earlier. They shelled out almost 31 per cent more on meat, eggs and fish. Spending on cereals, on the other hand, was flat.

A dietary transformation is underway in the country and demand for high-value, vitamin-and protein-rich food such as fruit, vegetables, milk, eggs, poultry, meat and fish is increasing, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) said in a study this year.

Food security

Years of eating an oil-rich, sugary diet high in carbohydrates have left many Indians with a paunch and a health problem. India has the world s largest diabetes population at just below 51 million people, while heart disease is the single-largest cause of death.

Yet hunger is endemic among the country s 500 million poor. The government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is drafting a Food Security Act that promises to expand subsidized wheat and rice well beyond the current 30 per cent of the population in a country that is home to 40 per cent of the world s malnourished children.

That could mean India spending about $25 billion a year on providing cheap food or about nine per cent of total spending this year more than four times the expenditure on health care.

While the farm sector is slowly diversifying, it is a declining contributor to growth, despite providing a living to more than half the country s workforce. About 600 million Indians are dependent on farming half the population of 1.2 billion even though agriculture makes up only 14.6 per cent of the economy and has been declining from 30 per cent a decade ago.

The average size of farms in India is a mere 1.33 hectares about the size of two soccer pitches and that figure has been steadily declining.

Farmers are finding it ever more difficult to make ends meet. The introduction of high-yielding seed varieties and increased use of fertilizers and irrigation spawned the Green Revolution in the 1960s that allowed India to become self-sufficient in grains. But experts say agriculture innovation and efficiency has stalled in recent years and farmers are getting squeezed by rising costs and inefficient agronomy.

Since the mid-1990s, an estimated 150,000 small farmers have committed suicide, according to the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University, most of them over debts.

Increasingly, voices in government and among experts are calling for a different approach, one that curbs subsidy spending, tackles inflation and boosts agricultural production of higher-value foods.

The post India appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Ajit Govind Sable s family has owned their farm in India s western Maharashtra state for 10 generations, which even for a region that has been farming for more than 10,000 years is long enough to witness plenty of changes.

Two generations back, they started cultivating sugar cane here in Shivthar, a village in Maharashtra s highlands near the Krishna River. India s most industrialized state soon became its largest sugar producer.

Today, it s not sugar the 35-year-old Sable is talking about as he sips sweet tea in the front yard of the low, two-storey farmhouse where half the ground floor houses his turmeric crop. He s discussing peppers, which he is now growing under polythene plastic coverings.

Like an increasing number of farmers in India, Sable is exploiting a shift in taste towards fruits and vegetables among Indians. My colleagues grow flowers under poly, Sable says. But the investment for that is too much for me, so I m trying out peppers. You can t eat flowers if you can t find buyers for them, he notes.

While many Indian farmers are eager to adjust to changing diets in one of the world s fastest-growing markets, the government continues to subsidize the cultivation of wheat, sugar and rice crops to ensure basic food needs for the country s half a billion poor.

The result is overflowing stocks of these carbohydrate-heavy staples and a huge subsidy bill that is adding to a ballooning budget deficit.

India, many agricultural experts say, is spending billions to prop up a traditional farm sector at the expense of investment in new crops and agricultural innovation.

But in a country where one out of five Indians goes hungry, the government has had to focus on foods that fuel or fill carbohydrate-heavy wheat, rice and sugar. About 36 per cent of women and 34 per cent of men in India are underweight. The costs of that undernourishment is high in terms of health care, lost productivity and poor quality of life.

At the same time, a growing urban middle class is consuming more higher-value, high-protein foods, which is stoking food price inflation as well as changing business and farm models in rural India.

The food chain in India is undergoing deep change.

There is a view that this is a structural shift and pulses, milk, meat, eggs, fish, protein items these are sectors where you need to concentrate, Abhijit Sen, who sits on the government s planning committee, said in a speech on June 5.

Rising middle class

Those shifts have been underway for years but are accelerating with rapid urbanization and the expansion of India s middle class. India is getting wealthier as well as healthier.

Its eight per cent annual growth, second only to China among major countries, is boosting incomes rapidly in the trillion-dollar economy. Per capita income surged to $1,265 in 2010 from $857 in 2006 a nearly 50 per cent increase according to the World Bank and IMF.

Middle-class households are expected to grow 67 per cent in the next five years, bringing over 53 million households into an annual income bracket between 340,000 and 1.7 million rupees ($7,600-$38,000).

Bijay Kumar, managing director of the National Horticulture Board, says having more money than your parents is pushing up demand for high-protein foods.

Rising income levels are allowing people to spend on high-value stuff, he says. People are more aware of health. They are increasing their intake of fruits in their regular diet.

In 2009-10, Indians boosted spending on fruit and vegetables by nearly nine per cent over the year earlier. They shelled out almost 31 per cent more on meat, eggs and fish. Spending on cereals, on the other hand, was flat.

A dietary transformation is underway in the country and demand for high-value, vitamin-and protein-rich food such as fruit, vegetables, milk, eggs, poultry, meat and fish is increasing, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) said in a study this year.

Food security

Years of eating an oil-rich, sugary diet high in carbohydrates have left many Indians with a paunch and a health problem. India has the world s largest diabetes population at just below 51 million people, while heart disease is the single-largest cause of death.

Yet hunger is endemic among the country s 500 million poor. The government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is drafting a Food Security Act that promises to expand subsidized wheat and rice well beyond the current 30 per cent of the population in a country that is home to 40 per cent of the world s malnourished children.

That could mean India spending about $25 billion a year on providing cheap food or about nine per cent of total spending this year more than four times the expenditure on health care.

While the farm sector is slowly diversifying, it is a declining contributor to growth, despite providing a living to more than half the country s workforce. About 600 million Indians are dependent on farming half the population of 1.2 billion even though agriculture makes up only 14.6 per cent of the economy and has been declining from 30 per cent a decade ago.

The average size of farms in India is a mere 1.33 hectares about the size of two soccer pitches and that figure has been steadily declining.

Farmers are finding it ever more difficult to make ends meet. The introduction of high-yielding seed varieties and increased use of fertilizers and irrigation spawned the Green Revolution in the 1960s that allowed India to become self-sufficient in grains. But experts say agriculture innovation and efficiency has stalled in recent years and farmers are getting squeezed by rising costs and inefficient agronomy.

Since the mid-1990s, an estimated 150,000 small farmers have committed suicide, according to the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University, most of them over debts.

Increasingly, voices in government and among experts are calling for a different approach, one that curbs subsidy spending, tackles inflation and boosts agricultural production of higher-value foods.

The post India appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.