The Basque Conflict Globally Speaking: Material Culture,Media and Basque Identity in the Wider World

This article explores the interplay between global and local determinants through the Basque conflict. It demonstrates that self-determination movements among the Palestinians and Irish Republicans are comparatively similar to the Basque cause in material expressions of political identity and by conveying their nationalist sentiments through the agencies of different mediums. In addition, the impact of 11 September on separatist struggles like the Basque one is discussed. Throughout it is argued that material culture as much as media are significant conduits to political relationships between objects and sentiment, as well as images and reality whereby these associations become modes of "political consumption" by political actors. As a result, political images and objects have "value potential" to transform society and are projected as material products in banners, posters, graffiti, jewellery and clothing or through varying mediums of communication such as the Internet, television broadcasts, video testimonies and other forms, in order to reinforce political ideology.     

依托开发区推动河北沿海地区发展

本文在全面回顾我国开发区和河北沿海开发区发展历程的基础上,从政策支持、技术创新、对外开放、产学研结合、发展旅游文化产业等多角度提出促进河北沿海开发区协同发展的思路与对策。     

World Energy Outlook 2014 projections to 2040: natural gas and coal trade,and the role of China

The paper presents data and results from the World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2014, published by the International Energy Agency (IEA). Over the period to 2040, total energy use is projected to grow by almost 40 per cent, while the share of fossil fuels in the energy mix falls. Nonetheless, these fossil fuels remain the dominant sources of energy, with oil, coal and gas each accounting for around one quarter of global energy needs by 2040. Increasingly, modern renewables are projected to replace fossil fuels, especially in the power sector. Around 93 per cent of the projected increased primary energy demand comes from non‐OECD countries, with two‐thirds coming from developing Asia, led by China. By 2025, China could account for almost a quarter of global energy use, doubling its share since the turn of the century. After 2025, India and other Asian countries surpass China as the main centres of energy demand growth. The IEA's WEO 2014 concludes that even taking into account ambitious policy measures announced as of mid to late 2014, energy growth projections place the world on a path consistent with a long‐term temperature increase of 3.6 degrees. Urgent action is required if the world's energy systems are to be steered towards lower greenhouse gas emissions.     

The Coal Crisis in Appalachia: Agrarian Transformation,Commodity Frontiers and the Geographies of Capital

Capital's commodity frontiers strategy has at once woven together regional differences within an expanding world‐system and remade the productive and reproductive activities of humans and the rest of nature. The development of successive commodity frontiers gave way to long waves of economic expansion that have been pivotal to accelerating accumulation and transcending capital's recurrent crises. In short, commodity frontiers are constitutive of world‐ecological moments premised on booms and crises of accumulation. In this paper, I examine the coal commodity frontier in Appalachia, to illustrate the region's history as one of succeeding frontiers in and out of the region over the long twentieth century of American capitalism. I argue that the origin of Appalachia's coal frontier was decisively made through the nineteenth‐century agricultural revolution expressed outside of the region. Appalachia's full‐fledged development was an outcome of capital's under‐reproduction strategies. The crisis of the region's frontier turned on a lack of surplus from under‐reproduction strategies, competing coal basins, economic diversification and competing energy sources. I find that the commodity frontier concept not only illuminates regional political economies and ecologies of difference, but also explains the production of nature of historical capitalism.     

The Virtual and the Imaginary: The Role of Diasphoric New Media in the Construction of a National Identity during the Break-up of Yugoslavia

In the conflicts of the last decade within ex-Yugoslavia, diasphoric communities have played a significant role, on the practical level of providing remittances, arms and often even fighters in the various conflicts, and on a cultural and ideological level in helping to (re)construct a national narrative amongst the various ethnic groups and in helping to spread the viewpoints of these groups into a wider international sphere. New media, particularly the Internet, video and satellite television have transformed the way diasphoric communities relate to their "homelands". These new media make possible a dramatic increase in information flows both to and from the homeland. This in turn helps to increase the fluidity of identity construction and conceptions of collective identity, among diasporas and to a lesser extent among those remaining in the homeland. This article examines the impact of these new information flows on constructions of "the other" within national narratives at a theoretical level and more generally the role of diasporas in participating in the national discourse, despite the distance between them and the homeland. At an empirical level, we focus on the use of videotape among the Croatian community in Australia and the use of the Internet by Croatian and Kosovar Albanian communities around the world.     

Valuation of environmental and social functions of the multifunctional Cypriot agriculture

The multifunctional farming sector in Cyprus poses threats on the island’s water resources, but highly contributes to the protection of the cultural identity and to the provision of incomes and employment in its rural areas. These services are externalities, as farmers are not remunerated in markets for the environmental and cultural services they provide, nor for the fact that they maintain vivid rural areas. This paper presents an application of the Choice Experiment method, in order to evaluate these non-traded outputs of Cypriot agriculture. The results of the empirical analysis demonstrate that the Cypriot public is in favor of a less intensive pattern of agriculture. Furthermore, Cypriots are willing to pay in order to mitigate adverse environmental effects of agriculture, to improve cultural heritage and to safeguard the continuation of farming trade on the island. The estimated benefits often exceed income losses from changes in the cropping pattern towards extensification, which verifies that EU rural development policies are regarded as beneficial by the public.     

Managing China's pastoral lands: Current problems and future prospects

China has the second largest area of pastoral land in the world, and these lands and their peoples play a very beneficial role in the global environment. Because of China's huge population, rate of social reform, and economic development, the pastoral ecosystems are at a critical turning point. There is a conflict between national benefit and the land users (mainly herders) benefit. This paper introduces the scale of pastoral land, the history of its management institutions, past and current projects and programs, as well as the current framework of policy and law as relevant to land management. The challenges for pastoral management in terms of institutions, administration, technology and their shifting role in regional economies of scale are also analyzed. Opportunities for sustainable development in China's pastoral lands are presented. Finally, this paper highlights the available approaches for enhancing livelihoods and conserving pastoral land, including establishment of law and policy framework at the national level, redefining use rights for community management, promoting Integrated Ecosystem Management (IEM) as a basis for natural resource utilization, preserving and respecting cultural aspects of pastoral peoples, and shifting the focus from GDP generation to environmental protection.     

Current agri-environmental policies dismiss varied perceptions and discourses on management of traditional rural biotopes

Traditional rural biotopes (TRBs) are threatened habitats that host significant biodiversity and several ecosystem services, and depend on active management such as low-intensity grazing. The current study explores private landowners’ decision-making on TRB management and abandonment within a social-ecological system framework. We provide insight into supporting resilience of TRB systems in the face of agricultural modernization. Using a mixed methods approach with content analysis and Q analysis, we demonstrate that TRB management fosters cultural, biological, aesthetic, and utilitarian values. These are reflected in different ways through conservationist’s, profit-oriented farmer’s, landscape manager’s, and landscape admirer’s discourses on TRB management. Overall, management reinforces landowners’ place attachment, and reflects an approach to landscapes as spatial representations of cultural heritage and identity over multiple generations. Landowners consider TRB pasturage and its social-ecological outcomes motivating and rewarding. Giving up grazing cattle and perceived bureaucracy of national agri-environment scheme contribute to TRB abandonment. Landowners point out that current policies detach TRB management from what is seen as “regular agriculture”, and the focus on monetary compensation bypasses the multiple values tied to TRB management. Based on our results, we suggest that promoting TRBs requires reconfiguring the current arrangement of remedial management payments and adopting a more participatory governance approach. Locally, resilience of TRB systems relies on the connections between landowners and landscapes that foster sense of place and landscape identity, which can be supported by knowledge sharing and collaborative grazing efforts among landowners.     

Buddhist Feminist Transnational Networks,Female Ordination and Women's Empowerment

Consideration of the role that religion plays in women's lives in developing contexts can be important in understanding ways of approaching their “strategic gender needs”. Rather than rejecting religion for its inherent patriarchy, styles of “religious feminism” have emerged across the globe. These argue for reinterpretations of religious systems that are consistent with the “core” values of the tradition as well as various types of feminist thinking. The aim of this paper is to discuss the emergence of a transnational movement across Buddhist traditions and countries that is concerned to make full ordination an available option to women in contexts where it is currently prohibited. While becoming fully ordained is considered to be the most suitable way of becoming enlightened and escaping future rebirths, a strong theme within the movement is the argument that gender hierarchies within Buddhism have a broader cultural impact upon social attitudes that disempower women and limit their development. Dialogue between members of Buddhist communities across the world has encouraged reflection upon and a challenge to unequal and oppressive gender hierarchies within the Buddhist tradition and within Buddhist societies. This paper explores four “international” events/examples that enable information exchange as well as the flow of material support between women from different traditions.     

Challenges facing China's unbalanced urbanization strategy

China has taken a “great leap forward” in urbanization, but the resulting unbalanced development strategy seems likely to lead to unsustainable socioeconomic development, including increasing income disparities, waste of resources, environmental degradation, damage to China's natural and cultural heritages, growing social turbulence, and consequences for the rest of the world. To solve these problems, China's government must adjust its economic strategy to balance rural and urban development and to seek more sustainable socioeconomic development.     

Impacts of agricultural price support policy on price variability and welfare: Evidence from China's soybean market

China is a predominant soybean importer; thus, its domestic soybean policies have a large impact on world soybean market dynamics. We develop the first aggregate structural econometric model of China's soybean market and link it to the rest of the world (ROW), which allows us to analyze the impacts of China's soybean price support policy that ran from 2008 to 2013. We investigate the impacts of China's policy on the variability of their domestic and world soybean prices, and adopt a Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate the effects on distributional and aggregate welfare. Our results indicate: (a) after China's soybean price support policy, price transmission elasticity decreases, China's domestic price variability decreases, and world price variability increases; (b) China's producer surplus increases, consumer surplus decreases and the net welfare change in their domestic market is negative; and (c) although soybean exporting countries in the ROW experience significant welfare gains, the world net welfare change is negative.     

Bovine meat,authoritarian populism,and state contradictions in Modi's India

While authoritarian populism and its relationship to the rural world have gained analytical prominence recently, few have attempted a systematic exploration of how various authoritarian populisms emerge from, and are embedded within, dynamics of capital accumulation, state, and class struggle. Drawing on Poulantzas' approach to “state contradictions,” we focus on the ways by which bovine meat figures in Narendra Modi's authoritarian populist project in contemporary India. On the one hand, violent authoritarianism in the country uses beef eating as a powerful tool for subjugating subaltern groups to Hindutva rule. On the other hand, the country houses a rapidly expanding beef meat agro-industry, accounting for as much as 20% of global exports and based on corporate concentration around dominant class interests. We argue that this points to state contradictions in Modi's India witnessing strained accumulation patterns. These contradictions, we emphasize, have distinct ramifications for India's classes of labour in the countryside, as certain groups experience what we describe as a process of “double victimization.”     

Maritime connectivity and agricultural trade

Seaborne shipping is the dominant mode of transport in international trade in agricultural products, and an increasing part of seaborne agricultural trade is carried in containers. Furthermore, the majority of world containers are moved through liner shipping services, that is, regular transport services provided by global shipping companies which comprise a dense network connecting ports and countries around the world. Using a theoretically consistent gravity equation and a novel identification strategy based on the use of intra-national trade flows, this paper investigates the effect of liner shipping connectivity on international trade in agricultural products. The results show that liner shipping connectivity has a positive and statistically significative effect on agricultural trade. Moreover, this positive effect can be observed for the majority of the agricultural products analysed and is also identified for countries at different stages of development. These findings appear especially relevant in terms of the objective of increasing less developed countries' participation in global agricultural trade.     

China and Taiwan access to the World Trade Organization: implications for U.S. agriculture and trade

This paper investigates the impact of China's and Taiwan's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on U.S. and world agricultural trade by means of a 12-region, 14-sector Computable General Equilibrium model for world trade and production. The simulation results show that integrating China and Taiwan into the global trading system could induce more competition on labor-intensive Products and reduce their prices. It could drive up the demand for capital and skill-intensive manufactured goods, thus further improving industrial countries' terms of trade. The expansion of labor-intensive sectors in China could also induce contraction in agricultural exports from China and increase its net agricultural imports by as much as US$9 billion annually, causing food and agricultural exports from other regions to increase. Total U.S. food and agricultural exports could increase by about US$2.4 billion annually, with the non-grain crop sectors gaining the most. The biggest winner from China's WTO accession is China itself. WTO membership could bring a net welfare gain of about US$30 billion a year for China, a substantial benefit compared with the gains for the USA (US$8.5 billion).     

Thinking about the Local and the Global in the Algerian Context

This article poses questions arising from research on local and the global cultural flows in struggles for self-determination to draw attention to some complexities. While we may think in terms of a relationship between the local and the global, rather than a uni-directional flow from the global to the local, it is important to hold on to the way in which other relations, notably those of power, also impact on the way this relationship is constructed. In different contexts there are trends or hierarchies which may affect how the local relates to the global and the global impacts on the local. After briefly surveying theoretical debates about the local and the global, I ask whether our work on conflict and self-determination is suggesting any new ways of looking at this relationship. The argument is illustrated throughout with materials from a case study of Algeria drawing particularly on the media and migration.     

Emerging amenity landscapes: Invasive weeds and land subdivision in rural Australia

Throughout history non-native invasive species have created environmental, economic, and social problems. Technological change, trade, and land system change are among the key factors in their spread and intensification. A recent global phenomenon holds the potential to exacerbate the invasive species problem: amenity migration, the subdivision of farm and grazing land, and the introduction of alternative land uses and management regimes by new rural residents. An Australian case study explores the subdivision of fine wool sheep ranches, the arrival of amenity migrants, and the impact on the management of one of the country's worst weeds, serrated tussock (Nassella trichotoma). Interviews with property owners, government officials, and members of the community-based conservation group, Landcare, expose cultural, institutional, and economic barriers to the control of the invasive grass. As the subdivision process leads to smaller properties and higher population densities it holds the potential to improve management of serrated tussock if the result is fewer livestock and more people to chemically and mechanically control the grass. But roughly 65% of the newcomers are part-time residents and absenteeism tends to result in weak efforts to manage the weed. In addition, regardless of their full-time/part-time status, most of the newcomers are ‘amenity” landholders whose cultural context and ideas about land and nature is diverse, and who do not seek their primary income from the land. Much of rural Australia now contains amenity landscapes, with weakened social capital, and a reduced capacity to coordinate a response to regional-scale environmental problems.     

全球农产品贸易网络演化与中国对策

目的 面对日益严峻复杂的国际经济政治环境,理清全球农产品贸易格局演变的特征及趋势,对于及时应对国际农产品市场风险、提高国际循环利用能力具有重要意义。方法 基于社会网络分析法,利用1996—2021年世界农产品贸易数据,文章从总体—行业—加工程度3个维度分别构建了全球农产品贸易网络,定量分析了全球农产品贸易网络的格局演化及重要节点特征。结果 （1）各国间农产品贸易关联日益加深,处于核心地位的国家数量显著增加,以美国为代表的单中心主导地位被削弱,但由少数国家主导全球农产品贸易的情形并未改变。（2）中国在全球农产品贸易网络中地位显著提升,点度中心度和接近中心度均位于前列,但中介中心度处于较低水平,说明中国对全球农业资源和市场的掌控能力依然不足。（3）各国在不同细分行业中的地位呈现明显的异质性,大多数国家的进口集中于少数贸易伙伴的少数产品,加工贸易逐渐成为全球农产品贸易的主流,发展高附加值农产品贸易成为各国农业贸易长远发展的战略选择。结论 为此,应持续优化农产品贸易布局,拓展与亚洲、拉美、非洲等新兴市场的贸易,不断提升农业全球价值链地位。     

African Perspectives on China–Africa: Modelling Popular Perceptions and their Economic and Political Determinants

China's recent political and economic inroads into Africa have generated much interest in the current literature, with scholars and policymakers endeavouring to assess the merits and risks implicit in this renewed engagement. Absent from the literature, however, are systematic analyses of African perceptions of these rapidly growing China–Africa links, and what determines these perceptions. This article fills this void by examining not only African attitudes towards China's African presence, but also investigating the considerations that inform these views. Using multi-level modelling techniques, this article estimates the effects of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI), Sino-African trade and notions of democracy and human rights on African attitudes towards “China-in-Africa”. The results suggest that Africans' views of China are nearly equivalent to those that they hold vis-à-vis Western countries. The perceived impact of imports from China has a negative effect. However, this effect is counter-balanced by perceptions of China's impact on poverty alleviation—in line with its greater focus on economic, social and cultural, as opposed to civic and political human rights—in particular through FDI. Among those who value civic and political human rights, in contrast, attitudes towards China are less favourable. This finding is echoed with respect to democratic governance, though the effect is less stable. The results are derived from Afrobarometer data covering 20 African countries.     

水利风景区高质量发展评价体系研究

基于水利风景区高质量发展内涵,从水利特色鲜明、生态环境优良、文化氛围浓厚、发展动力强劲、管理安全高效、综合效益显著6个方面,构建包含23项主要内容、52项评价指标的水利风景区高质量发展评价指标体系,并采用德尔菲法评分,将评价结果分为3个等级,从而构成水利风景区高质量发展评价体系。构建的评价体系已初步应用于首届国家水利风景区高质量发展典型案例征集遴选工作,征集遴选出30个国家水利风景区高质量发展典型案例,并公布了第一批重点推介的10个标杆景区,取得了良好的应用效果。     

China's agriculture: drivers of change and implications for China and the rest of world

The overall goal of this article is to identify major changes in China's agriculture/food economy and their implications for both China itself and, more importantly, to the rest of world. China has become one of the fastest‐growing economies in the world since late 1970s. GDP grew at about 10% annually in the past 30 years. China's experience shows the importance of both domestic and external policies in achieving sustainable growth. The results from this study provide significant policy implications to many countries that are currently China's major trade partners or those seeking greater economic and trade relations with China. The main conclusions on the implications of China's rapid economic growth are that China's growth will provide more opportunities than challenges to the rest of the world, on average. Overall, the rest of the world will gain from China's economic expansion though this general conclusion may not hold for some countries.