1) Sugarcane: India emerges as the world’s largest producer and consumer of sugar and world’s 2nd largest exporter of sugar.
- A highly water intensive crop cultivated of tropical and subtropical areas.
- It grows well in hot and humid climate with a temperature of 21°C to 27°C and an annual rainfall between 75cm and 100cm.
- It is the main source of sugar, jaggary, khandsari and molasses (raw material for ethanol production).
- Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana are Sugarcane producing states in India.
- The Fair and Remunerative Price (FRP) is the minimum price that sugar mills have to pay to sugarcane farmers. It is approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA).
2) OPEC+ cuts Oil Production: Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is a permanent intergovernmental organization of 13 oil-exporting developing nations.
- The OPEC coordinates and unifies the petroleum policies of its Member Countries.
- They usually meet every month to determine how much oil the member states will produce.
- The non-OPEC countries which also produce and export crude oil, affiliated with OPEC are termed as OPEC+. It include Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Oman, Russia, South Sudan and Sudan.
- India is the world’s third-largest consumer of crude with 5.35 million barrels per day (mbpd), behind the US (21.2mbpd) and China (15.1mbpd).
3) Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022: was awarded to Carolyn R Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K Barry Sharpless “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry”
- Click chemistry is a functional field where molecules snap together quickly and efficiently – literally like a click. It is defined as a “set of powerful, highly reliable, and selective reactions for the rapid synthesis of useful new compounds and combinatorial libraries through heteroatom links”.
4) Impossible trinity: The impossible trinity, or the trilemma, refers to the idea that an economy cannot pursue independent monetary policy, maintain a fixed exchange rate, and allow the free flow of capital across its borders at the same time.
- According to economists, any economy can choose to pursue only two out of the three policy options noted above simultaneously in the long run. The idea was proposed independently by Canadian economist Robert Mundell and British economist Marcus Fleming in the early 1960s.
5) Dengue: Last week, a total of 412 Dengue cases were reported in the capital – more than twice the figure recorded last year in September with 217 cases.
- Dengue is a mosquito-borne tropical disease caused by the dengue virus (Genus Flavivirus), transmitted by several species of mosquito within the genus Aedes, principally Aedes aegypti. This mosquito also transmits chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika infection.
- There are 4 distinct, but closely related, serotypes (separate groups within a species of microorganisms that all share a similar characteristic) of the virus that cause dengue (DEN-1, DEN-2, DEN-3 and DEN-4). There is no specific medicine to treat dengue infection.