18% of fruits and vegetables from India are going to waste for want of adequate cold chain facilities. The amount of food wasted is worth Rs 44,000 crore.

"These were the findings of a study conducted by the Central Institute for Post Harvest Engineering & Technology, Ludhiana (published in 2010)," minister of state for food processing industries Charan Das Mahant said.

Daily mail- Strolling hand-in-hand with someone special, these young lovers must be in one of the world's most romantic spots. India may have the Taj Mahal, and Paris is the city of love, but the Ukraine has this incredible, ethereal Tunnel of Love. There is one thing though, it's also a train line. And when it's choo-choo time, the tunnel does get rather noisy.

The missing links between policymakers and other stakeholders in the field of agriculture are creating hurdles in the way of exploiting the true potential of the key sector of Pakistan’s economy.

Mexican tasteless mangoes are being sold at $4 per piece in the US while the delicious mangoes of Pakistan have the potential to be sold at more than $5, but it is not the case due to lack of post-harvest technology.

Azad-Jammu and Kashmir traders returned 21 trucks of chilli and pomegranate seeds to their counterparts in Indian-administered Kashmir saying the items were of substandard quality, says a report from across the Line of Control.

Temperature management is extremely important in maintaining quality of stone fruits during prolonged storage and shipment to distant markets and making sure that they then ripen properly after removal from cold storage. Table 1 below details the influence of different temperatures on stone fruit and highlights their sensitivity.

Most notably, stone fruits are susceptible to chilling injury, which manifests itself as one or more symptoms including a dry or mealy texture, leatheriness, failure to ripen, flesh browning, translucency, and dark discoloration of the stone cavity. Since chilling injury is most severe after prolonged exposure to temperatures of 2-8°C, it is important to reduce temperature below this range and maintain it at close to ~0°C throughout the supply chain.

The Food and Drugs Administration has conducted raids on a market in Maharashtra and seized 400kg of mangoes and three kg carbide powder, used for the artificial ripening of fruits.

FDA Joint Commissioner Shashikant Kenkare said, "This is the first action against the fruit-vendors and we conducted the raids after we received information that mangoes, water melons and other fruits are being ripened artificially by using carbide powder, which is dangerous to humans," he said.

Five FDA squads along with the staff of the Nashik Municipal Corporation (NMC) have conducted raids in the market yard. Samples of these mangoes have been sent to Pune for laboratory tests, FDA sources said.

Punjab Chief Minister, Muhammad Shahbaz Sharif, said that vacant lands are being converted into beautiful landscape through horticulture all over the province.

In this way, beautiful environment has become available to the people in their surroundings and cities have been given new identity, he added.

Pakistan has missed this year's kinnow export target of 0.3 million tonnes. It has actually exported closer to 0.225 million tonnes, despite raising a bumper crop of 2.1 million tonnes.

The losses came as a result of difficulties with the Iranian market due to US imposed trade sanctions and a failure to take advantage of new market opportunities in Indonesia - which is often blamed on the authorities.

UNL/DICYT Spain- The fight of producers in the region against diseases in citrus is intense. The attention is mainly focused in three diseases that the European Union considers to be cases worthy of quarantine: scabies, cancrosis and Dark Spot. A single fruit infected and exported can cause a whole shipment to be refused. And the ones able to identify those diseases are few.