Major crops witnessed an impressive growth of 7.6 percent as against a negative growth of 4.1 percent last year. As a result of structural transformation, the share of agriculture in GDP has declined by 3.2 percentage points in the last 6 years alone and the share of the manufacturing sector has increased by 3.1 percentage points in the same period. ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's economy has grown at an average rate of almost 7.0 percent per annum during the last five years and real GDP grew...

Andrea Morales, assistant professor of marketing at the College of Business at Arizona State University, and Gavan Fitzsimons, professor of marketing and psychology at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, recently studied the "eww factor," this notion that products that disgust people can contaminateat least in their own mindsother products they buy. B-school researchers look into supermarket items "contaminating" others; left-outs at the office; and why some travelers...

The way the program works, the more commodity crops like rice, corn or wheat a farmer grows, the more subsidy money he or she receives. And rice is one of a number of "commodity" crops that the federal government supports each year with subsidies. Butte and Glenn counties rank so high in subsidies because the north valley has some of the nation's best land for growing rice. Farm commodity support consists of direct payments to farmers who grow commodity crops, which in California are...

DHAKA: Flood-prone Bangladesh is bracing for an unusual and unpredictable monsoon this year, with environment experts and officials blaming global warming, melting Himalayan glaciers, silted rivers and unplanned roads. But they feared that more floods, which experts predict could hit again around mid-July, would damage the country s prime agriculture sector which accounts for more than 20% of GDP. Floods caused by days of torrential rain, described by weather officials as unusually heavy...

But thousands of people who benefited from the subsidy flow were shielded from public view behind layers of partnerships, joint ventures, limited liability corporations, cooperatives, and other business structures that obscured their personal subsidy claims. Not surprisingly, the agricultural community and big agribusiness is fighting any such changes. On the contrary, most small farmers get comparatively little and many nothing while the richest farmers soak up the majority of crop...