Current Affairs Quiz 01 March 2024

Organic Farming in India
• India occupies fifth place globally with a total area of 2.66 million hectares in organic farming.
• Madhya Pradesh has the largest area under organic certification followed by Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Karnataka.
• Sikkim is India’s first fully organic state, with implementing organic practices on around 75,000 hectares of agricultural land.
• In 2022-23, India produced around 2.9 million metric tonnes of certified organic products like oil seeds, cereals and millets, cotton, pulses among others.
• The exports of India’s organic products stood at $708 million in 2022-23 and considering the global market size of around $138 billion, there is a tremendous scope to increase the organic exports in the near future.

Challenges in Organic Farming
• Yield Limitations: Organic farming typically yields lower outputs compared to conventional farming methods, at least in the short term.
• Weed Control: Weed management is a significant challenge in organic farming, as synthetic herbicides cannot be used. Organic farmers rely on methods such as manual weeding, mulching, and cover cropping, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming.
• Access to Organic Inputs: Organic farmers face difficulties in accessing certified organic seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs, especially in remote or underdeveloped regions.
• Certification and Compliance: Obtaining organic certification requires adherence to strict standards and regulations, which is complex and costly for farmers, especially smallholders.

National Programme for Organic Production (NPOP): It is under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry for development of the export market.
o It is a third party certification programme where the production and handling of activities at all stages such as production, processing, trading and export requirements for organic products is covered.

Oman shares land borders with Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, while sharing maritime borders with Iran and Pakistan.

Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act:
– It was enacted for regulation and supervision of the assisted reproductive technology clinics and banks.
– Under the Act, the services can be made available to a woman above the age of 21 years and below the age of 50 years and to a man above the age of 21 years and below the age of 55 years.
– ART procedures include gamete donation, intrauterine insemination, and in-vitro fertilization or IVF.

What is Aditya-L1 Mission?
 About:
o Aditya-L1 is the first space based observatory class Indian solar mission to study the Sun from a substantial distance of 1.5 million kilometers. It will take approximately 125 days to reach the L1 point.
• Aditya-L1 is also ISRO’s second astronomy observatory-class mission after AstroSat (2015).
• The mission’s journey is notably shorter than India’s previous Mars orbiter mission, Mangalyaan.
o The spacecraft is planned to be placed in a halo orbit around the Lagrangian point 1 (L1) of the Sun-Earth system.

Nordic-Baltic Eight (NB8)
• The NB8 is a regional cooperation format that brings together the Nordic countries and the Baltic states.
o Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden (Nordic countries),
o Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (Baltic states)