The human population is expected to reach ∼9 billion by 2050. The ensuing demands for water, food and energy would intensify land-use conflicts and exacerbate environmental impacts. Therefore we urgently need to reconcile our growing consumptive needs with environmental protection. Here, we explore the potential of a land-use optimisation strategy to increase global agricultural production on t...

This study provides food security situation in India for the next two decades. As expected, total physical land will remain more or less flat in the next two decade. But net cropped area is projected to increase through higher cropping intensity. More than 70 percent of additional area is likely to switch to horticultural and permanent crops. Among crops, oilseeds such as soybeans, rapeseed, an...

This review studies biofuel expansion in terms of competition between conventional and advanced biofuels based on bioenergy potential. Production of advanced biofuels is generally more expensive than current biofuels because products are not yet cost competitive. What is overlooked in the discussion about biofuel is the contribution the industry makes to the global animal feed supply and land u...

Malic enzymes (ME) catalyze the decarboxylation of malate generating pyruvate, CO2 and NADH or NADPH. In some organisms it has been established that ME is involved in lipids biosynthesis supplying carbon skeletons and reducing power. In this work we studied the MEs of soybean and castor, metabolically different oilseeds. The comparison of enzymatic activities, transcript profiles and organic ac...

Indian subcontinent has a plethora of traditional medicine systems that provide promising solutions to lifestyle disorders in an ‘all natural way’. Spices and oilseeds hold prominence in Indian cuisine hence the focus of the current study was to evaluate the bioactive molecules from Linum usitatissinum (LU), Lepidium sativum (LS), Nigella sativa (NS) and Guizotia abyssinica (GA) seeds. The seed...

Oilseeds are mostly grown in marginal lands with inadequate irrigation facilities (only 10% is irrigated) as a result yields tend to be low leading widening gap between domestic production of vegetable oil and demand. Production growth the early eighties was slow due insufficient technologies turning point year 1985-86. Since then, oilseeds country has increased implementation technology missio...

Oilseeds are rich sources of micronutrients and contribute to combating malnutrition caused by micronutrient deficiency. The objective of this study was to investigate the mineral and anti-nutritional contents of different varieties of niger seed, linseed and sesame. Five niger seed, eight linseed and ten sesame varieties were used. Inductively Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectrometry (ICP-A...

The predominant fatty acids in milk are the long-chain fatty acids myristic, palmitic and stearic. These saturated fatty acids account for 75% of the total fatty acids, with a further 21% occurring as monounsaturated fatty acids of which the most prevalent is oleic acid. Only 4 g/100 g of the milk fatty acids are polyunsaturated, occurring mainly as linoleic and linolenic acids. All milk fatty ...

This paper investigates the determinants of the dynamic equity-commodity return correlations between five commodity futures sub-sectors (i.e. energy, foods and fibers, grains and oilseeds, livestock, and precious metals) and two equity market indices (i.e. S&P 500 and Russell 3000). We employ the DCC model, as well as three time-varying copulas: (i) the normal copula, (ii) the student’s t copul...