Explore Business Standard
Poor Nations
Even under ambitious climate policies, lower-income countries would see consumer food prices rise 2.45 times by 2050 while producer prices would rise 3.3 times, a study has found. While the rise in consumer prices is less pronounced for farmers in lower-income countries, it would still make it harder for people in these countries to afford sufficient and healthy food, said researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany. "In high-income countries like the US or Germany, farmers receive less than a quarter of food spending, compared to over 70 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa, where farming costs make up a larger portion of food prices," said David Meng-Chuen Chen, a PIK scientist and lead author of the study published in Nature Food. "This gap underscores how differently food systems function across regions," he said. The researchers projected that as economies develop and food systems industrialise, farmers will increasingly receive a smaller share
New cancer drugs launched each year increased from 0.5 in the 1990s to over eight in 2022 among high-income countries, whereas they increased from 0.1 to 1.5 a year among upper-middle-income countries, according to a global analysis revealing "significant" and "widening" disparities. New drug launches remained minimal in lower-middle-income and low-income countries, it found. Published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Global Health, the analysis highlighted significant disparities in both availability and timeliness of these medicines worldwide, according to researchers. The inequities could explain the poor cancer outcomes across many countries, especially the low- and middle-income ones, where mortality-to-incidence ratios have been studied to be higher, despite overall cases being lower, the researchers, including those from The Pennsylvania State University, US, said. The measure 'mortality-to-incidence ratio' is used to compare inequities in cancer outcomes. It is calculat
Even after becoming the third largest economy in the world by 2029 as envisaged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India may still be a poor country and therefore there is no reason for celebration, former Reserve Bank Governor D Subbarao said here on Monday. Addressing a gathering at a book launch programme, Subbarao also said, citing Saudi Arabia, that becoming a rich country does not necessarily mean becoming a developed nation. Recalling PM Modi saying that if he returns to office, India will become the third-largest economy before 2029 -- before the end of his third term, he said many economists predict that the country would become the third largest after the US and China, much sooner. In my view, that is possible (India becoming the third-largest economy), but it's not a celebration. Why? We are a large economy because we are 1.40 billion people. And people are a factor of production. So we are a large economy because we have people. But we are still a poor country, Subbarao ..
Low-income countries could lose up to 30 per cent of nutrients from seafood due to climate change, researchers say in a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. These findings about the loss of nutrients, including calcium, iron, protein and omega-3 fatty acids, were valid in a high emissions and low mitigation scenario, the researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada, said. The nutrient loss may be restricted to 10 per cent, however, should the world meet the Paris Agreement targets of limiting global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius, they said. "Low-income countries and the global south, where seafood is central to diets and has the potential to help address malnutrition, are the hardest hit by the effects of climate change," said first author William Cheung, professor and director of the UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF). The researchers used predictive climate models on historical fisheries and seafood farming databases to ma