Local governance and participation in agricultural Development Process in Nigeria

Professor Famoriyo obtained a second class honours degree in Agricultural Economics at King's College, Newcastle-On-Tyne (then) of the University of Durham, England in 1966. He did graduate work at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria in 1968, and received at Ph. D. in Land Economics at Wye College, Wye of the University of London. He is currently Professor of Agricultural Economics and Head of the Department of Farm Management and Extension at The Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria. Professor Famoriyo is widely published in his field.     

Rural livelihoods in the arid and semi-arid environments of Kenya: Sustainable alternatives and challenges

The improvement of the welfare of inhabitants of arid and semi-arid lands, either through the enhancement of existing livelihoods or the promotion of alternative ones, and their potential constraints are discussed. Alternative livelihoods are discussed under regenerative and extractive themes with respect to environmental stability. Regenerative (i.e., non-extractive) livelihoods include activities like apiculture, poultry keeping, pisciculture, silkworm production, drought tolerant cash cropping, horticulture, community wildlife tourism, processing of livestock and crop products, agro-forestry for tree products, and micro-enterprises in the informal sector. Examples of livelihoods that are extractive or potentially so include timber production, woodcarving, basketry, brick making, sand scooping, and charcoal making. Suggestions to improve these livelihoods in a sustainable manner are offered.Robinson K. Ngugi, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Biosystems Analysis whose specialty is animal resources in the rangelands. He has taught at the University of Nairobi, Department of Range Management for about 15 years and is widely published on various aspects of animal resources in arid and semi-arid lands.Dickson M. Nyariki, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Agricultural Economics whose specialty is Range Resource Economics. He has taught at the University of Nairobi, Department of Range Management for about 15 years and is widely published on various aspects of range resource use and development. Currently, he heads the University of Nairobis Department of Range Management.     

The social construction of production externalities in contemporary agriculture: Process <Emphasis Type="Italic">versus</Emphasis> product standards as the basis for defining “organic”

The analysis distinguishes two types of standards for defining organic produce; process standards and product standards. Process standards define organic products by the method and means of production. Product standards define organic by the physical quality of the end product. The National Organic Program (NOP) uses process standards as the basis for defining organic. However, the situation is complicated by agricultural production practices, which sometimes result in the migration of NOP prohibited substances from conventional to organic fields. When this interaction alters the value of the product or the costs of production, a production externality is said to exist. Defining organic using process, rather than product standards, influences the burden and character of production externalities. The NOPs emphasis on process standards reduces the likelihood that production externalities will emerge.B. James Deaton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Business and Agricultural Economics, University of Guelph, Canada. His research examines environmental and natural resource issues. He is particularly interested in the manner in which laws, rules, and standards influence environmental quality, natural resource use, and economic development. Additional research examines the relationship between different forms of private property and economic development, public support for various criteria used to preserve farmland, and the social construction of production externalities in agriculture. Prior to his PhD training, he worked on economic development projects in Lesotho (Southern Africa) and the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky.John P. Hoehn is a Professor of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Michigan State University. His teaching and research activities address environmental and natural resource policies, benefit-cost analysis of environmental improvements, methods for valuing non-market goods, improved institutions for protecting, managing, and using environmental resources, and the economics of ecological resources. He teaches core courses in the departmental and university-wide graduate programs in environmental and resource economics.     

Motivations behind farmers’ pesticide use in Bangladesh rice farming

This paper addresses the motivations behind farmers’ pesticide use in two regions of Bangladesh. The paper considers farmers’ knowledge of arthropods and their perceptions about pests and pest damage, and identifies why many farmers do not use recommended pest management practices. We propose that using the novel approach of classifying farmers according to their motivations and constraints rather than observed pesticide use can improve training approaches and increase farmers’ uptake and retention of more appropriate integrated pest management technologies. Elizabeth J. Z. Robinson divides her time between Tanzania and the UK and is a research associate with the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University of Oxford in the UK. She is an economist specializing in agriculture, natural resources, and the environment. She has over ten years of experience undertaking applied research in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa as a fellow and lecturer in the Economics Department at the University of Oxford; at the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich in the UK; and with the World Bank and Rockefeller Foundation in the US. Sumona Rani Das is an agriculture economist who has been working for eight years with a non-government organization in Bangladesh named PROSHIKA. She is involved with monitoring and evaluation of PROSHIKA’s ongoing activities in agriculture, and is working as a team leader with an agriculture network to promote sustainable agriculture. She has special responsibility for motivation, training, project management, and documentation of different programs. Tim B. C. Chancellor is a crop protection specialist and currently is the leader of the Natural Resources Institute’s Plant, Animal and Human Health Group at the University of Greenwich in the UK. He has 17 years research and consultancy experience in vector ecology and in pest and disease management. Other skills include project management, monitoring and evaluation, and public-private partnerships. He is also Adviser to the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID) Crop Protection Programme. His commodity experience includes rice, banana, groundnut and vegetables.     

Erratum

In the 18 May issue of Science (p. 719, Don Paarlberg was identified as "former director of Agricultural Economics, U.S. Department of Agriculture." The attribution should have read: "Don Paarlberg, 1968, Purdue University, now Director of Agricultural Economics, U.S. Department of Agriculture."     

Simulating Agricultural Conversion to Residential use in the Hudson River Valley: Scenario Analyses and Case Studies

Land use changes threaten agricultural land. If agricultural land is going to be preserved, the social and economic causes of conversion must be understood. However, analyzing the causes of agricultural conversion is complex because trends need to be documented before analyzing the causes. One of the leading uses of agricultural land is for residential purposes. This paper projects residential development in a Hudson River Valley watershed within Dutchess County in New York State using an integrated modeling framework consisting of an econometric model, a geographic information system (GIS), and Monte Carlo simulation. The econometric model is used to project residential development, providing parcel-specific probabilities of residential development. The GIS is employed to extract socio-economic and county-level tax parcel data to be used in conjunction with bio-geophysical attributes, such as slope, soil, and location, to calculate and project growth trends on a residential level for undeveloped land parcels. Monte Carlo simulation is used to distribute these projections into the GIS to display outcomes of scenario analyses to provide policy-makers a demonstration of how policies would likely affect the agricultural landscape of the watershed. John M. Polimeni is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Albany College of Pharmacy in Albany, New York. Dr. Polimeni received a PhD in Ecological Economics and a BS in Mathematics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His professional interests include: quantitative economics, spatial and regional economics, land use change, economic development, and graduate education in Ecological Economics. He is currently working on linking ecological economics with the laws of thermodynamics and neuroeconomics into one unified model.     

Conceptualizing hunger in contemporary African policymaking: From technical to community-based approaches

This paper explains and offers a criticism of the technical solutions that have been proposed in recent years to address Africa's hunger problems, summarizes selected results of some of these approaches, and suggests a more useful conceptualization of African hunger for policymakers. Hunger is a problem with multifactorial causality. As such, it is not given to solution by the sequence of reductionist approaches that have been applied in recent years. Widespread adoption by African governments of ultimately unsuccessful reductionist conceptualizations of hunger has had much to do with foreign aid dependency, the general absence from central policymaking circles of senior government officials with responsibility for hunger-related policies, and political preference for centralized bureaucracy. The paper concludes with some recommendations for community-based strategies of hunger alleviation.Barrett is an assistant professor of economics at Utah State University. This paper was written while he was a doctoral candidate in the Departments of Agricultural Economics and Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously he worked for four years as a development economist monitoring African economies for an international institution in Washington. His research focuses on agricultural development strategies and rural poverty alleviation.     

Agrarianism and the American philosophical tradition

Paul Thompson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M University. His textbookEthics, Public Policy and Agriculture, written with Eileen Olsen VanRavenswaay and Robert Matthews, will be published by Macmillan in 1991. He is currently co-editing a book with Bill Stout on agricultural research policy entitledBeyond the Large Farm. He is guest editor of this issue.     

Sustainability and multifunctionality in French farms: Analysis of the implementation of Territorial Farming Contracts

Sustainable agriculture and ways to achieve it are important issues for agricultural policy. However, the concept of sustainability has yet to be made operational in many agricultural situations, and only a few studies so far have addressed the implementation process of sustainable agriculture. This paper provides an assessment of the Territorial Farming Contracts (TFC) – the French model for implementing sustainable agriculture – and aims to give some insights into the ways to facilitate the development of sustainable farming. Using a systems approach, the founding concept of the TFC model, an analysis has been made of the TFCs signed in the Midi-Pyrenees Region in south-western France. The results show that the first aspect of sustainability apparent in farmers’ projects referred to economic objectives. The environmental and social aspects were not foremost in the farming changes undertaken. In addition, the territorial dimension of the TFC was under-addressed. The majority of TFCs reveal a moderate or even low convergence with territorial priorities. These results are explained partly by the dominance of professional farming organizations in the implementation of TFC, and they imply that the organizational social dimensions of sustainability must not be neglected. Mohamed Gafsi is an assistant professor of farm management at the National School of Agronomic Training. He received his PhD in management science at the University of Bourgogne. His research interests include farm management and protection of natural resources, corporate environmental management, sustainable agriculture, and African family farms. Geneviève Nguyen is assistant professor in rural economics at the National Polytechnique Institute – National Superior School of Agronomy, in Toulouse. Her research interests include the dynamics of agrarian institutions in uncertain economies, the supply and organization of services in remote rural areas. Her research has been carried out in Europe, Africa, and Asia. She received her MA in Economics and her PhD in Agricultural Economics from the Ohio State University. Bruno Legagneux is assistant professor of farm management at the National Polytechnique Institute – National Superior School of Agronomy, in Toulouse. His research interests include farm management and the entry of young farmers into farming. Patrice Robin is an engineer agronomist. He received his diploma from the National Superior School of Agronomy, in Montpellier. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Toulouse. His research interests include agriculture and rural development, environmental issues, and food quality.     

Book reviews

Paul Thompson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M University. He is currently conducting research under a grant from the National Science Foundation, Ethics and Value Studies program on the role of ethics and values in the planning of agricultural research activities, and completing a textbook entitledEthics, Public Policy and Agiculture with Eileen Olsen VanRavenswaay and Robert Matthews slated for publication by Macmillan in 1990.     

ESSAYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: In Search of Einstein's Genius

Steve C. Wang is a lecturer in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. He earned his B.S. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Chicago. He has taught statistics and mathematics at the University of Chicago and Williams College. His research interests include applying statistics to paleobiology, endocrine diseases, and image recognition.     

Biotechnologies in the agro-food sector: A limited impact

Within the framework of a general reflection on technical change, this paper is aimed at opposing an approach that assigns a primary role to the progress of biological knowledge in the evolution of the agro-food system. Instead, the importance of the complex and heterogeneous nature of the transformation under way is highlighted. Biotechnological research risks falling into a reductionist rut when it ignores the structural and organizational changes in the agro-food industry and the contribution of other technical innovations, especially in the field of computers and in product innovation. If one really wants to speak of a biotechnology revolution, one must specify that it is essentially a scientific revolution: at the production level the contribution of the biotechnologies is still potential, while the agro-food sector is going through a period of profound change.Roberto Fanfani is professor of Political Economics at the University of Bologna (Italy). He is working on the structural change in the agriculture and food industries in Italy and Europe. He is author of papers on regional development of the agro-food systems and of a Common Agricultural Policy text-book.     

陕西城固监测记录野生动物物种及保护管理探讨

2006 年4 月,城固县野生动植物保护管理站被陕西省林业厅确定为省级野生动物疫源疫病 监测站,同年11 月被国家林业局晋升为国家级野生动物疫源疫病监测站,承担城固县境内野生鸟类 禽流感和野猪非洲猪瘟等野生动物疫源疫病监测防控工作。笔者结合10 余年野生动物疫源疫病监 测防控和野生动物摄影,发现记录野生动物29 目69 科191 种,并积累了丰富的保护管理经验,与同行 交流探讨。     

传统与现代马克思主义经济学探讨

为了更准确地将马克思主义经济学运用于社会主义市场经济实践，并在社会主义市场经济实践中与时俱进地、更好地发展马克思主义经济学，本文首先建议将马克思主义经济学划分为传统马克思主义经济学和现代马克思主义经济学。之后，分别从研究的目的、对象和内容三个角度描述了传统马克思主义经济学与现实之间的不相适应性，并从拓宽研究对象、更新研究方法、扩展研究内容等三个方而探讨了如何构建现代马克思主义经济学。此外，文还对重建价值范畴以及收入分配的依据进行了探讨。     

农业技术经济学的现状及发展方向

在分析农业技术经济学现状的基础上，探讨农业技术经济学的发展方向，并论述该学科的内容体系、学科性质及在学科体系中的地位。     

中国特色家政学理论体系与学科构架研究

改革开放以来,作为一门在我国重新兴起的学科——家政学,已越来越为我国的社会和高校所关注。除一些高校、高职开设家政专业外,在其他专业中开设公共家政学选修课的设想和实践也已被越来越多的学校所采纳。但由于我国的家政学研究还处于初级阶段,其理论体系还尚未完善。文中对现代家政教育的价值及构建中国特色的家政学理论体系及其学科构架等课题进行了深入的研究和探讨。     

AIDS meeting. South African leader declines to join the chorus on HIV and AIDS

When South African President Thabo Mbeki rose to address the opening ceremony for the XIII International AIDS Conference here last Sunday, the thousands of researchers packed into Kingsmead Stadium hoped he would say three simple words: HIV causes AIDS. He didn't. Mbeki's failure to acknowledge directly that HIV causes AIDS has angered the country's AIDS researchers; many visiting scientists also expressed their dismay.     

基于SNMP舰船电力监控网络管理的实现

西方经济思想在中国的传播,既有推进中国政治经济学多元发展积极的一面,又有排斥阻碍发展的消极影响。新自由主义经济学派的去意识形态论、鼓吹自由化和私有化等思想严重冲击了中国政治经济学;凯恩斯经济学和新制度经济学的国家干预、福利国家、经济制度等思想对中国政治经济学的发展产生了积极的影响。     

On the Restricting Factors ＆ System Arrangements of Chinese Land Tenure Marketization

As a general rule of Economics of Development,economic growth and development require rational institution guarantee. Land Tenure. As a main institution factor in agricultural development ,closely relates to the reform of Chinese agriculture. Based on the relevant theories of Economics of Institution and Economics of Development ,and combined with the marketization process of Chinese Land Tenure of Property Rights,the article studied the effects of institutional factors and put forward some choices in the development of agriculture, which is of both significant and practical importance.     

Traditional Mexican Agricultural Systems and the Potential Impacts of Transgenic Varieties on Maize Diversity

The discovery of transgenes in maize landraces in Mexico, a center of diversity for this crop, raises questions about the potential impact of transgene diffusion on maize diversity. The concept of diversity and farmers’ role in maintaining diversity is quite complex. Farmers’ behavior is expected to have a significant influence on causing transgenes to diffuse, to be expressed differently, and to accumulate within landraces. Farmers’ or consumers’ perceptions that transgenes are “contaminants” and that landraces containing transgenes are “contaminated” could cause these landraces to be rejected and trigger a direct loss of diversity. Mauricio R. Bellon is a human ecologist working in the Economics Program of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Texcoco, Mexico. He received his MSc and PhD in ecology at the University of California, Davis. His current research includes projects that deal with on-farm conservation of maize, gene flow in traditional farming systems, and the impact of improved germplasm in the livelihoods of poor farmers. Julien Berthaud is a population geneticist working for the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD). He received his PhD in plant science at the University of Paris 11. His current research includes projects related with the dynamics of genetic diversity, especially in traditional maize farming systems.