Sustaining growth in agriculture: a quantitative review of agricultural research investments

Growth in agriculture depends on many things but one of the most important is investment in agricultural research. Decision making in the agricultural research policy area can only be aided by access to better information. This article overviews a recent endeavor to move policy dialogue beyond merely qualitative impressions towards a process that is underpinned with new and cogent data. The data used have been assembled at ISNAR in a manner designed to make comparisons both over time and between countries more valid than has been the case in the past. The comparisons thus possible reveal considerable diversity both between countries and between broad regional aggregations. Also illuminated here are issues related to the commodity orientation, capital and labor intensity, and size and scope of particular national programs.     

临汾市农业自然资源与农业可持续发展研究

分析了临汾市农业自然资源开发利用的现状,指出土地资源总量不足、耕地日趋减少、水资源缺乏、传统体制束缚严重及科技教育水平滞后等农业可持续发展的限制因子;提出严格保护耕地、加快建设现代化水利、严格控制人口增长、继续加大改革力度、扩大开放领域为该市农业可持续发展的基本对策。     

Conceptualising multifunctional agriculture from a global perspective: Implications for governing agricultural trade in the post-Doha Round era

The notion of multifunctional agriculture has been researched from diverse disciplines including economics, sociology, political economy, and geography since the URAA. In particular, the economics approach represents an attempt to tailor the concept of multifunctional agriculture to market- oriented WTO trade regime. The approach has been fundamentally troubled by the lack of concord among WTO member countries on the question of what constitutes multifunctional agriculture. This article redefines multifunctional agriculture as a concept encompassing six components that are extremely heterogeneous in their nature of external benefits. Upon examining different positions taken by the US, the EU, the Cairns group, LDCs, and the G10, this article develops a conceptual model explaining why the notion of multifunctional agriculture is conceived so differently across countries. The model posits that institutions, natural resources endowment, ecological conditions, farm policies, and culture/history unique to each country would determine the state of economic development and agricultural competitiveness in a country, which in turn shape the pattern of social demand for various components of multifunctional agriculture. The theorizing undertakes to overcome the Euro- centrism that has dictated the discourse of multifunctional agriculture since the URAA. Implications are discussed for the governance of agricultural trade in the post-Doha Round era.     

Eastern enlargement of the EU and its implications for agriculture and agricultural policies

In 2004 ten Eastern and Southern European countries will join the EU. Agriculture and agricultural policy is an important issue in this EU enlargement process, for several reasons. This paper assesses the implications of the enlargement process for agriculture and agricultural policies.     

桂西北石山区农业结构调整研究

根据桂西北石山区脆弱的生态环境以及丰富的生物资源特征,阐述了桂西北石山区在新阶段以发展高效生态农业为目的,调整农业结构布局的指导思想、原则、重点、方向以及实现农业结构调整的措施。     

The application of trade and growth theories to agriculture: a survey

This article reviews a broad range of theoretical concepts available to explain international trade in agricultural and food products. For many years agricultural trade analyses were largely based on traditional perceptions of comparative advantage following neoclassical theory. Observations of agricultural trade suggest, however, that concepts from modern trade and growth theories are increasingly relevant. This survey demonstrates that many opportunities exist for applying these new theories to the modern food economy.     

The environmental origins of shifting cultivation: climate, soils, and disease in the nineteenth-century US South

Farmers and planters in the antebellum South held large tracts of unimproved land because they practiced shifting cultivation. Southern cultivators burned tracts of forest growth to quickly release nutrients into the soil. After five or six years, when the soil had been depleted, the old field was abandoned for as long as twenty years. Environmental factors such as poor soils, rugged topography, and livestock diseases accounted for the persistence of this practice, more so than slavery or the availability of western lands. Shifting cultivation slowly declined in the postbellum era, but southern farmers continued to improve a far smaller percentage of their land well into the twentieth century.     

Adaptation in agriculture: historic effects of heat waves and droughts on UK agriculture

Extreme weather events are expected to increase in frequency and/or severity under climate change. Recent examples of these types of events, such as the heat wave in Europe in 2003, have caused considerable damage to crops and agriculture and substantial economic damage. If similar damage was incurred every time such an event occurred in the future, it would cause increasingly serious loss to social welfare and the economy as the frequency or intensity of these events increased. However, agriculture has a history of adapting to shocks, and in this paper we aim to determine whether there has been a systematic reduction in damage from historic extreme events over time in the agricultural sector in the UK. The impact of comparable droughts or heat waves over the past four decades is compared, and for many commodities there appears to have been a reduction in damage over time, to the point where recent events have had a minimal impact on production, indicating that the sector is relatively well adapted to the current climate. We discuss whether this type of adaptation can be sustained into the future under more rapid rates of change, or whether the ‘low-hanging’ fruits of adaptation have been picked.     

The emergence of urban agriculture: Sydney,Australia

Across the world the phenomenon of urban agriculture (UA) is defining itself after emerging from a mainly grass-roots response, evidenced in the Sydney Metropolitan Region by the Hawkesbury Harvest phenomenon and the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, to powerful global forces which are negatively and paradoxically impacting on the quality of life of urban and farming communities. In the developed world these major forces include: (1) urban sprawl and its progressive sterilization of agricultural lands; (2) the supermarket dominance of food chains; (3) the fast food industry and associated health problems such as obesity; (4) globalization. The community-based promotion and marketing of local agriculture is causing some governments and public and private organizations throughout the world to recognize UA as a strategic mechanism to enable urban communities to deal with food security in the context of neo-liberalism, climate change, pandemics, natural disasters, human and environmental health, carbon footprint, biosecurity/terrorism, peak oil, waste management, and landscape and natural resource management. This paper explores the history of UA in the Sydney region. It is a narrative that allows for UA in the Greater Sydney Metropolitan area to draw on the experiences of other developed countries where UA is establishing its position.     

Developments in biophysical and bioeconomic simulation of agricultural systems: a review

This paper reviews the features and uses of some recent biophysical and bioeconomic simulation models in agricultural economics research. Problems associated with earlier models are discussed and the extent to which recent simulators have addressed these concerns is appraised. Some salient factors that will enhance the continued relevance of simulators as research and decision support tools are indicated.     

Managerial form,ownership and efficiency: a case-study of Argentine agriculture

In agriculture, studies dealing with the separation of ownership from control have focused on sharecropping, paying little attention to the impact of management and ownership on efficiency. Using Argentine data, this study tests the hypothesis that efficiency is a function of type of management, concentration of ownership, and mechanisms for monitoring managers. Results show that management, ownership and monitoring have a greater impact on marketing efficiency than either on technical or cost efficiency.