By Jay Walljasper

Poverty is often regarded as a matter of political policy and economic aid. But for ­Thomas George, who grew up on a farm in India where his family struggled to make ends meet, it's a simple question of agriculture. The vast majority of the world's poor live on the land, so how do we make farming more profitable for them?

"A farmer can produce a lot of wonderful tomatoes but that's no good if there isn't a demand for those tomatoes at the time they are ready for harvest," explains George. "The capacity to know what to produce, when to produce it and how to sell is limited."

New technology and microcredit are often held up as solutions. But George, a former University of Hawaii agronomist who worked many years on introducing new technology to rural communities in Asia, believes high tech isn't enough. And he contends that microloans-giving poor people small loans to start businesses-offer opportunity only for those who already have an idea of how to get ahead and the capacity to make it happen. He hopes to reach the rest with Vipani (Sanskrit for "marketplace"), an organization that seeks to create "fair play for small farmers."

PUNE, India, is one of the world's most techie cities. Wireless internet pumps out across the city, students from its top-ranked universities jam the streets on motorbikes and on graduation vie for jobs at many of the West's biggest high-tech companies.

The city is a model of the tech-led renaissance of the subconti-nent's economy - and is also, as chance would have it, home to Tata Motors, the new owner of Jaguar and Land Rover, two of Britain's most famous car companies.

An hour's drive away, past encampments of grinding poverty and urban sprawl is a very different world but one that may just be starting to see the benefits of what the government has dubbed "India Shining".

Standing in an onion field in a village outside Pune, Chandra Kant can check weather reports, get crop spraying information and find out how much onions are fetching at the local market, all on his mobile phone, for 175 rupees (£2.19) a quarter. The service is being offered by Reuters, better known for offering news and financial information to City workers for whom £2 would not cover a run to Starbucks.

By Michael Grunwald

From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it's going to get worse fast. "It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. "It's like witnessing a rape."

The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It's been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it's released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked--he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands in Brazil--but he can sound downright panicky about the future of the forest. "You can't protect it. There's too much money to be made tearing it down," he says. "Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work."

Welcome, dear readers, to the court of the law of unintended consequences.

Britain is mulling tougher labeling standards to make it more difficult for imported food to carry an "organic" label. The idea is to make it less appealing to air-freight in fruits and veggies from Africa, with their aircraft emissions, in order to save the developing world from the ravages of global warming somewhere down the road. But one group may come out the loser much sooner: poor farmers in the developing world.

From today's London Times: "So how do we save Africa from a possible future disaster? Apparently, by creating a real disaster in the here and now: making poor Africans even poorer. That sounds like madness - or plain badness - to me."

A "social stock exchange" where ethical investors can trade shares in worthy enterprises could be set up under plans announced on Friday.

The exchange would aim to combine profitable trading with social or environmental missions. Clean technologies, healthcare, first world development projects and help for disadvantaged communities would be included in the exchange.

The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world's best-known philanthropic organisations, is putting up $500,000 (£252,000) to pay for the feasibility study. If this identifies demand for a social stock exchange, the market would be launched next year.

The price of food is soaring. The threat of hunger and malnutrition is growing. Millions of the world's most vulnerable people are at risk.

An effective and urgent response is needed.

The first of the Millennium Development Goals, set by world leaders at the U.N. summit in 2000, aims to reduce the proportion of hungry people by half by 2015. This was already a major challenge, not least in Africa, where many nations have fallen behind. But we are also facing a perfect storm of new challenges.

The prices of basic staples -- wheat, corn, rice -- are at record highs, up 50 percent or more in the past six months. Global food stocks are at historic lows. The causes range from rising demand in major economies such as India and China to climate- and weather-related events such as hurricanes, floods and droughts that have devastated harvests in many parts of the world. High oil prices have increased the cost of transporting food and purchasing fertilizer. Some experts say the rise of biofuels has reduced the amount of food available for humans.