Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has questioned whether the US has developed a secret technology to give cancer to left-wing leaders in Latin America.
Treated for cancer this year, Mr Chavez was speaking a day after news that Argentina's president had the disease.
Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and her predecessor Lula have also had cancer.
Mr Chavez said this was "very strange" but stressed that he was thinking aloud rather than making "rash accusations".
But he said the instances of cancer among Latin American leaders were "difficult to explain using the law of probabilities".
"Would it be strange if they had developed the technology to induce cancer and nobody knew about it?" Mr Chavez asked in a televised speech to soldiers at an army base.
Who next?
Mr Chavez noted that US government scientists had infected Guatemalan prisoners with syphilis and other diseases in the 1940s, but that this had only come to light last year.
And he joked that he would now take extra care of the presidents of Bolivia and Ecuador - Evo Morales and Rafael Correa - lest they also be diagnosed with cancer.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has beaten cancer, and Lula is fighting the disease
The Venezuelan leader, who is 57, has often accused the US of plotting to overthrow or even kill him.
He says he is now free of cancer after having surgery and chemotherapy in Cuba earlier this year.
The exact details of his illness have not been made public, fuelling speculation that his condition may be worse than he has let on.
Mr Chavez was the first regional leader to offer support to the Argentine President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, after it was announced on Tuesday that she had thyroid cancer.
"We will live and we will conquer!" he told her.
Ms Fernandez, 58, is due to have an operation on 4 January, but doctors say her prognosis is very good.
Survivors' summit
Doctors treating former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for throat cancer say the 66-year-old is responding well to chemotherapy and should make a full recovery.
Dilma Rousseff, 64 - who took over from Lula as Brazilian president a year ago - is fully recovered after receiving treatment for lymphoma cancer in 2009.
Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, 60, was diagnosed with lymphoma in August 2010 but is now in remission after chemotherapy.
Lula and Mr Chavez have previously joked that they would hold a summit of Latin American leaders who had beaten cancer.
Ms Fernandez has now said that she will insist on being the "honorary president" of the summit of cancer survivors.
India must define its priorities. If we look at present unexpected bump and lower IIP number, one thing has become very clear this year India's growth is going for rough ride. The growth, development and middle class everything is just gone and vanished to give sleepless night.
If India want to grow and long term sustainable growth can only come from where it is needed most. In my opinion Rural and Agriculture is the core. Governments attitude of neglecting this sector for last one decade is sole reason for today debacle.
Government must give enough weight-age to the rural and agriculture development where 72% population resides.( This is steadily going in down in last one decade)
Water shade management and conservation must be given priority so that the farmers in the areas of rain-fed farming may have better income and opportunities to go for multiple farming.
India's infrastructure is pathetic, this must improve. Power generation should be priority.( Power generation should not be hold hostage to the governments foreign policy, government should sign gas pipeline agreement with Iran and this will reduce inflation and improve the power availability, the ultimate effect will be in good growth.)
Indian Railway is outdated and should improve and upgrade. It must double its capacity to cater to the needs of growing aspirations of fast growth of India.
Roads and Airports must be priority.
Food industry should take priority.
Mandi act needs to be amendment.
India:
Priorities for Agriculture and Rural Development
Although agriculture contributes
only 21% of India’s GDP, its importance in the country’s economic, social, and
political fabric goes well beyond this indicator. The rural areas are still
home to some 72 percent of the India’s 1.1 billion people, a large number of
whom are poor. Most of the rural poor depend on rain-fed agriculture and
fragile forests for their livelihoods.
The sharp rise in food
grain production during India’s Green Revolution of the 1970s enabled the
country to achieve self-sufficiency in food grains and stave off the threat of
famine. Agricultural intensification in the 1970s to 1980s saw an increased
demand for rural labor that raised rural wages and, together with declining food
prices, reduced rural poverty.
Inequitable allocation of water: Many states lack the
incentives, policy, regulatory, and institutional framework for the
efficient, sustainable, and equitable allocation of water. Deteriorating irrigation infrastructure: Public spending in irrigation
is spread over many uncompleted projects. In addition, existing
infrastructure has rapidly deteriorated as operations and maintenance is
given lower priority.
Rural
poor have little access to credit: While India has a wide network of rural finance institutions,
many of the rural poor remain excluded, due to inefficiencies in the formal
finance institutions, the weak regulatory framework, high transaction
costs, and risks associated with lending to agriculture.
Weak
Natural Resources Management: One quarter of India’s population depends on forests for at least
part of their livelihoods. India's "green revolution" allowed the country to produce enough
food to feed its population - but 40 years on, is this revolution unraveling?
The Green Revolution was a
deliberate, all-out attempt to become self-sufficient in basic food crops.
For 40 years. Under India's
"Green Revolution" in the 1960s and 70s -- seen as one of the world's
most successful agricultural turnarounds -- planting of high-yield varieties of
wheat and rice resulted in a sharp output rise.
Agriculture
There has been a dearth of resource support to the
farmers in the Union budgets which calls for urgent attention of the policy makers
to boost budgetary investment in agriculture in general, and dry land and rain
fed agriculture in particular. In 2006- 07, the share of agriculture in total
budget was meager 1.4 percent. This has further declined to 1.27 percent in the
current Union Budget 2010-11 (BE). A quantum jump of expenditure by the
Ministry (to around 2.5 times, in absolute numbers, between 2004-05 and
2010-11) has been noticed. However, public spending in agriculture as a
proportion of GDP is hardly perceptible. It has increased from 0.17 percent of
GDP in 2004-05 to 0.20 percent of GDP in 2010-11 B.E. The government needs to
direct its efforts towards improved rural infrastructure, agricultural research
support, investments in water management and new technology/institutional
innovations to increase agricultural productivity, and consequently growth of the
economy. Long-term sustainability of India’s farming sector, particularly dry
land agriculture, is only possible through coordinated efforts from different
quarters along with increase in share of budgetary investment in the agriculture
and allied sector and share of Central plan expenditure in agriculture.
Need for public investment
The record of agricultural growth in India in
the second-half of the 2000s was hardly inspiring. Growth rates of agriculture
in 2006-07 and 2007-08 were better on the average, riding on good monsoons and
hardening global prices. However, the growth rates in 2008-09 and 2009-10 were,
respectively, -0.1 per cent and 0.4 per cent. Advance estimates for 2010-11
have raised hopes again, but it is clear that elevating agriculture to a path
of sustained growth requires a major increase in public expenditure. In
particular, public investment, which would create fixed capital formation in
agriculture, has to increase significantly to arrest decisively the trend of
long-term decline. Budget 2011-12 plainly refuses to recognise this task as
urgent.
How
numbers are manipulated
The sharp rise in the supply of indirect finance was facilitated by
a series of definitional changes made under the UPA regime on what constitutes
priority sector credit in agriculture (for details, see R. Ramakumar and
Pallavi Chavan, “Revival of Agricultural Credit in the 2000s: An Explanation”,
Economic and Political Weekly, December 29, 2007). These definitional changes
broadly involved (a) recognising new forms of financing commercial,
export-oriented and capital-intensive agriculture as “agricultural” credit; and
(b) raising the credit limit of many existing forms of indirect financing. For
instance, from 2007 onwards, two-thirds of loans given to corporates,
partnership firms and institutions for agricultural and allied activities in
excess of Rs.1 crore per borrower were considered as indirect finance to
agriculture; the remaining one-third were treated as direct finance to
agriculture.
In 1990,
about 83 per cent of agricultural credit was of a size less than Rs.2 lakh. In
2009, however, only about 44 per cent of agricultural credit was of a size less
than Rs.2 lakh.
An area of darkness
Over
recent weeks, reports of frequent and increasingly longer power cuts from
across the country have added another layer of serious concern to India’s
faltering growth story. What is unusual about these power outages is that they
have been occurring during the months of October and November, when demand is
traditionally low. The immediate causes of the power crunch are well known.
There is a growing and acute shortage of coal, which is the mainstay of power
generation in the country, accounting for over 50 per cent of overall capacity.
Over the past four years, demand for coal, mainly for thermal power generation,
has grown by 7.3 per cent, while domestic output rose by only 5.4 per cent. What
is most worrying is the significant drop in investment in the power sector in
view of uncertainties on fuel availability and uneconomic pricing of power. The
target for additional power generation capacity in the current plan of 62,000
MW (already reduced from the original 78,000 MW) is likely to have a shortfall
of as much as 12,000 MW, according to the Planning Commission.
Indian railways lag 20-25 years behind world on technology front: E
Sreedharan
Thanks to
E Sreedharan , MD, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, India's capital has a world
class metro. A project that was on drawing board for decades and which many
thought would be almost impossible to execute is up and running. He took charge
in 1997 when he was 65 years old, long after he retired from the Railways in
1990. Today at 79, he is finally hanging his boots on December 31 to retire in
his native village in Kerala. He spoke to ET on Delhi Metro, its success and
his life. Excerpts:
You retired from the
Railways, what's your prescription for Railways future? ( Thanks to E Sreedharan , MD)
Indian
Railways has the world's fourth-largest network with 9,000 engineers but it
lags 20-25 years behind the world on the technology front, it needs to be
upgraded dramatically.
The present model of development is not sustainable and will increase crime in urban areas and increase disparity among India's population.
There is no need of targeting 9% growth, India should target 7% inclusive growth which will reduce poverty and increase quality of life.
