The United Nations said on Friday that the famine that has killed tens of thousands of people in Somalia this past year has ended, thanks to a bumper harvest and a surge in emergency food deliveries.

But conditions are still precarious, United Nations officials warned, with many Somalis dying of hunger and more than two million still needing emergency rations to survive.

“The crisis is not over,” said José Graziano da Silva, director general of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, who just returned from Somalia.

JAMMU: Highlighting the State's rich bio-diversity and uniqueness of being land of rich fauna and flora, Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah on Friday emphasized the need for protection and preservation of this individuality of Jammu and Kashmir.

Chairing the 2nd meeting of State Board for Wildlife (SBW), the Chief Minister, who is also its Chairman, said that measures should be in place to minimize wild animal-human conflict.

Ethanol production has boosted the prices of grains that Canadian farmers buy to raise cattle and pigs, and Ottawa should curb or eliminate its support for the industry, an agriculture research organization said on Tuesday.

But a leading biofuels group said the report wildly overstated ethanol's impact on grain prices.

The U.S. Forest Service today released a new proposal for the nation's 193-million-acre national forest system that will weaken rules protecting fish and wildlife from logging, livestock grazing, mining and off-road vehicles. The new proposal, which was released as part of the final environmental impact statement for the rule, is the Forest Service's fourth attempt since 2000 to revise nationwide regulations governing national forests. All three previous attempts were challenged in court by the Center for Biological Diversity and allies, and all three prior attempts were found unlawful.

The government is carrying out the National Agriculture Census (NAC), reaching out at the community level for the first time to study the overall scenario of the agriculture sector in the country. Besides collecting data on major areas of agriculture like production of major crops and livestock under Crop and Livestock Survey (CLS), the census will cover new areas including land utilisation, socio-economic condition, society formation, available facilities for farmers and development programmes being operated in the community level.

This time it is not merely crying wolf! The Indian Gray Wolf, inhabiting scrub lands and the ravines along the banks of the Central Indian rivers, needs protection. The immediate threat to the Indian wolf ( Canis lupus pallipes ), found along the banks of the Yamuna, Chambal, Banas and Mahi rivers, is the destruction of its habitat due to sand mining, cultivation and levelling of the ravines.