Microbiology. How to get along--friendly microbes in a hostile world

Microbiologists have long been puzzled by the finding that the gut mucosa does not respond to the myriad varieties of bacteria that normally reside in the gut. As Xavier and Podolsky explain in their Perspective, this may be because bacteria that are indigenous to the gut have learned ways to switch off pathways in gut epithelial cells that lead to switching on of genes involved in inflammation (Neish et al.).     

农产品加工业如何应对全球经济一体化

<正>改革开放以前,我国农产品加工业发展一直处于较为缓慢的状态,80年代中期开始,特别是“九五”以来,农业和农村经济发展进入了全新的发展阶段,粮食等重要的农产品由长期短缺到总量平衡,同时农产品加工业也得到了迅猛的发展,但随着经济全球化和地区经济一体化加速发展,一个开放的市场体系正在形成。加入WTO之后,面对激烈的国际市场,以及一些必须遵循的新的市场准则,需要重新认识发展农产品加工业的重要意义,清醒的分析市场格局,找到发展机遇,并据此来制定出相应的战略。     

Recognizing rationalizations among responses to hunger

In this article I undertake to discover the extent to which five distinct philosophical arguments for “hardhearted” responses to hunger are rationalizations. In each case, I consider the prima facie appeal and then consider the extent to which these appeals can be answered or overcome by principles promoting policies of food equity. I pay special attention to the appeal that pits political self-determination against food equity, because I believe it is especially important to determine the extent to which respect for sovereignty and political self-determination is to be seen as compatible with promoting policies of food equity.     

面对开放的世界--中国的农业将如何应对?

中国的农业一方面面临着自然环境的日渐恶化，另一方面又面临着由于技术落后、生产率低下及价格不断上升所带来的竞争优势的缺乏。在这个前提下，面对中国“入世”所带来的机遇和挑战，中国政府只有进行国内农业改革以解决农业发展的根本问题，同时在符合WTO规则下加强保护与支持本国的农业，在此基础上，进行农业结构的调整及培养和增强其竞争优势，这是尽快使我国实现产业化的必由之路。     

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.     

Hiding hunger: food insecurity in middle America

This is a community based research project using a case study of 20 people living in middle America who are food insecure, but do not use food pantries. The participants’ rate of actual hunger is twice that of food insecure community members who use food pantries. Since most of the participants are not poor, the Asset Vulnerability Framework (AVF) is used to classify causes of food insecurity. The purpose of the study is to identify why participants are food insecure and why they do not use food pantries. Findings reveal that the participants restrict the quality and quantity of food eaten as a strategy to manage their budget. Following AVF, this strategy allows them to offset lower returns to labor assets, cover rising costs of human capital investment, protect their two most important productive assets of housing and transportation, and compensate for household relationships that increase their vulnerability. In addition, food insecurity itself inhibited social capital formation, further increasing vulnerability. The main reasons the participants do not use food pantries is to protect their social capital assets: almost all of the participants hid their hunger from colleagues, friends, relatives, and even the people they lived with. The participants described fear of societal shaming and blaming as motivations for hiding their hunger. However, using food pantries could reduce their food insecurity. Therefore, there was a feedback loop between food insecurity and social capital: food insecurity reduced social capital and efforts to protect social capital prevented participants from improving food security by using food pantries.