The integration of water quality into transboundary allocation agreements Lessons from the southwestern United States

There is now a fairly substantial literature that addresses transboundary water allocation both at the international and interstate level. However, most of this literature deals almost exclusively with the question of allocation and ignores quality considerations. At the same time, there is a growing literature on transboundary pollution control and upstream/downstream externalities. What is missing is an attempt to integrate quality consideration into allocation agreements. This paper examines several allocation agreements and disputes in the southwestern United States and Mexico and looks at the ramifications of omitting pollution control and quality considerations in these negotiations.     

Land change variability and human-environment dynamics in the United States Great Plains

Land use and land cover changes have complex linkages to climate variability and change, biophysical resources, and socioeconomic driving forces. To assess these land change dynamics and their causes in the Great Plains, we compare and contrast contemporary changes across 16 ecoregions using Landsat satellite data and statistical analysis. Large-area change analysis of agricultural regions is often hampered by change detection error and the tendency for land conversions to occur at the local-scale. To facilitate a regional-scale analysis, a statistical sampling design of randomly selected 10 km × 10 km blocks is used to efficiently identify the types and rates of land conversions for four time intervals between 1973 and 2000, stratified by relatively homogenous ecoregions. Nearly 8% of the overall Great Plains region underwent land-use and land-cover change during the study period, with a substantial amount of ecoregion variability that ranged from less than 2% to greater than 13%. Agricultural land cover declined by more than 2% overall, with variability contingent on the differential characteristics of regional human-environment systems. A large part of the Great Plains is in relatively stable land cover. However, other land systems with significant biophysical and climate limitations for agriculture have high rates of land change when pushed by economic, policy, technology, or climate forcing factors. The results indicate the regionally based potential for land cover to persist or fluctuate as land uses are adapted to spatially and temporally variable forcing factors.     

Irrigation technology adoption and its implication for water conservation in the Texas High Plains: a real options approach

Water shortage has been a significant issue for several decades in the Texas High Plains. Agriculture has been identified as the main activity contributing to this shortage. To address this issue, many efforts have been focused on the possible adoption of sophisticated irrigation systems with high levels of water application efficiency. In this study, the entry and exit thresholds for the low‐energy precision application (LEPA) system are analyzed simultaneously in cotton farming in the Texas High Plains using a real options approach. The results show that the LEPA system is profitable only when cotton price is set above $1.59/kg. The exit (entry) threshold is consistently low (high) over a range of values for parameter changes including investment cost, exit cost, variable cost, risk‐adjusted discount rate, and volatility rate, so it is unlikely that farmers with irrigation systems in place would leave them easily. This implies that to attain the goal of saving water, Lubbock County needs to focus on convincing current farmers to replace old irrigation systems with new ones.     

Contracting for Canola in the Great Plains States

Canola has become an important crop in the last decade in the United States. Production of canola is risky and competes with other crops that have varying risk reduction mechanisms. Processors develop and offer contracts with varying specifications that allow growers to reduce risk and attract canola production. In this study, preplant contracting strategies were evaluated in terms of risk and return for growers and processors. Alternative contracts include fixed‐price‐variety‐specific with and without act‐of‐God provisions, and an oil‐premium contract. Grower returns and processor gross margins were simulated and resulting distributions were evaluated using stochastic efficiency with respect to a function. In the dominant growing region, growers would prefer fixed‐price‐variety‐specific contracts versus contracts with oil premiums. The latter would only be preferred by crushers that are highly risk averse. The results vary regionally suggesting that contract types should vary by region to be acceptable to a broader range of growers and processors.     

MIKE BASIN在麻栗坝灌区水资源配置中的应用

为解决陇川县麻栗坝灌区在水资源开发利用过程中存在的水资源短缺、用水结构不合理、水质污染严重、用水效率低下、用水浪费等一系列问题,实现区域内水资源的可持续利用和合理配置,利用MIKE BASIN软件构建了区域内的水资源配置模型,并给出了P=80%保证率下的水资源配置结果。结果显示,通过对麻栗坝水库与边缘小水库和新建小水库的联合调度,区域内的需水量基本可以得到满足。     

World Health Organization Dietary Norms: A Quantitative Evaluation of Potential Consumption Impacts in the United States, United Kingdom, and France

The member countries of the World Health Organization have endorsed its Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity, and Health. We assess the potential consumption impacts of these norms in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom using a mathematical programming approach. We find that adherence would involve large reductions in the consumption of fats and oils accompanying large rises in the consumption of fruits, vegetables, and cereal. Further, in the United Kingdom and the United States, but not France, sugar intakes would have to shrink considerably. Focusing on sub-populations within each country, we find that the least educated, not necessarily the poorest, would have to bear the highest burden of adjustment.     

Food Label Regulations in the United States and European Community:

Growing interdependence among the world's food markets presents increased trade and investment opportunities for food firms. Although international trade agreements have recently been negotiated which will likely lead to increased food trade, especially among Western nations, revised product standards and technical regulations used in the course of implementing these agreements have potential to create trade barriers that are less obvious. This paper assesses recent developments in food quality and labeling regulations in the European Community (EC) and United States. The regulatory changes taking place in these large trading partners have the potential to result in trade barriers based on meeting technical standards, especially since the reforms are being pursued independently in each country.     

Agricultural policy reform in the United States: an unfinished agenda

The 1996 Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act (FAIR) contained important breaks with a tradition of crop–by–crop subsidies dating back to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Farmers with recorded base acres were given the opportunity (which nearly all accepted) to sign a seven–year 'contract' with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), under which payments will be continued on the merged base acres on a declining schedule until the year 2002. FAIR is an unfinished agenda. First, the coverage of 'freedom to farm' is only partial, with numerous commodities left out of the decoupling programme. Second, the largest producers will augment their already significant receipts with generous lump sum transfers from USDA. This will further reinforce the concentration of roughly 90 per cent of receipts and payments in the hands of the 100 000 to 200 000 largest producers of field crops. An alternative would be to make payments in times of low marketing receipts which recede when prices are high.     

Agriculture in the United States,Mexico, Canada Agreement: Agreeing to keep things pretty much the same

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was referred to by U.S. President Trump as one of the worst trade deals ever made. Given this billing, one might have expected the result of its renegotiation to be a major change to the trading relationship between the United States and Canada. The new United States, Mexico, Canada Agreement (USMCA), however, retains a great deal of its predecessor. This is particularly true for agricultural trade. Canadian market access into the United States remains virtually unchanged. No major domestic regulatory changes were agreed to by Canada. While there were concessions made on market access for U.S. products into Canada's heavily protected sectors where the supply management policy applies, they do not appear to threaten the system. While the value of the compensation has not yet been announced, compensation for losses that will be suffered by farmers producing under supply management is agreed in principle. The USMCA is an agreement to keep things pretty much the same.     

美国乡村旅游发展

美国乡村近一个世纪以来一直经历着急剧的变化,这在二战后尤其如此。全球化及美国经济重组使传统的乡村经济活动如农业,林业及煤矿业竞争力下降,乡村旅游就成为乡村经济复苏及经济多样化的一个重要且有效的手段。在参阅相关文献的基础上,概括和分析了美国乡村旅游发展的历程和原因,以及乡村旅游发展对社区的影响等,以期对中国乡村旅游的发展、管理和研究能起到一定的借鉴作用。     

Development Assistance and Exports: The Case of the United States

The relationship of development assistance and exports has been a controversial subject in recent years. U.S. public organizations feel that development assistance, particularly for research, while intended primarily and immediately to encourage economic development in low-income nations, will also help increase the effective demand for agricultural exports. Some commodity-oriented U.S. farm groups, on the other hand, see assistance primarily in terms of leading to increased competition for exports of their product. They would have the U.S.A. provide less international support for agricultural development and they have had some influence. While there has been considerable debate on the subject, this has not yet resulted in the development of an enlightened national policy. The paper attempts to sort out the facts and perceptions that have led to this situation and to provide some policy suggestions. Two important needs are for: (a) greater public understanding, and (b) strengthened domestic research and improved linkages between domestic and international research activities. Paradoxically, the latter point tends to be overlooked by some of the farm groups but is essential if the U.S. is to remain competitive in what is likely to become a more open international market in the future.     

Status of Benefits Transfer in the United States and Canada: A Review

Benefits transfer refers to the use of existing benefit estimates in a different but similar context compared with the original study that generated the benefit estimates. Benefits transfer techniques include fixed value transfer, expert opinion and value estimator models. Although benefits transfer techniques are subject to a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, these techniques are widely applied by government agencies as input into economic assessments of public policies and projects.
Le concept d'estimation des avantages économiques par transposition de données connues s'applique à I'utilisation de données obtenues dans un certain contexte a un contexte distinct mais semblable par rapport à celui de l'étude originale. Il y a essentiellement trois variantes de cette démarche: à partir de valeurs fixes, de jugements experts ou de modèles estimateurs de valeurs. Bien que ces techniques soient exposées à un certain nombre de limites conceptuelles et empiriques, elles sont largement utilisées par les organismes gouvernementaux comme intrants pour l'évaluation economique de leurs programmes et de leurs projets.     

Differences in agricultural returns: an empirical test of efficiency in factor input allocation using Vietnamese data

We study whether rural households in Vietnam allocate their factor inputs efficiently. Factor returns and technical rates of substitution (TRS) between production activities are compared. We estimate two translog production functions and conduct three tests: First we test the equality of bootstrapped returns. Second, we use a bootstrapped t -test comparing the equality of TRS. Finally, we derive a set of nonlinear restrictions on our estimated parameters, which, if held, would imply that we cannot reject efficiency. The article concentrates on the allocation of factors between the cultivation of the two most important agricultural crops—sugar cane and rice. We cannot reject the possibility that households are efficient in their input allocation. These results are consistent and stable over different estimation techniques and support the assumption of profit maximization.     

The role of the commonwealth environmental water holder in annual water allocation markets

In recent years, the Government of Australia has bought back a significant amount of water entitlements in the Murray‐Darling Basin (MDB) through its Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder (CEWH) agency. This has been a welcome development, as it is an efficient way of securing water for the environment in the basin. However, the question of how to best manage water holdings held by the government is as yet unresolved. In particular, the question of whether and how should the CEWH engage in water markets is still grappling the government and academia alike. This paper addresses that question by evaluating total benefits to a range of water users, including the environment, under a variety of hydro‐climatic conditions. This is approached through running simulations based on environmental benefit function that varies with prevailing hydro‐climatic conditions. The findings indicate that the benefits are greater when CEWH actively participates in annual water allocation market and that such participation enables the CEWH to secure most water when it is needed the most by the environment. This suggests that policy should encourage the CEWH to further explore opportunities to engage with the water markets to the benefit of communities and the environment in the MDB.