What kind of labour regime is contract farming? Contracting and sharecropping in Java compared

This article compares contract farming with share tenancy, another labour regime in which smallholder farmers are bound by contract to deliver produce to another, usually more powerful party. Based on research in the Javanese village of Kaliloro, we explore contracting and sharecropping as labour regimes, each with their own specific mechanisms of surplus transfer from producers to non-producers. The cases compared are sharecropping of irrigated rice, contract farming of watermelon, and contract farming of poultry. There are important differences in how labour inputs are organized, how decisions are made, how costs are divided between landowner/contractor and farmer, and in the mechanisms of surplus transfer between the contracting parties. Exploring these differences allows us to understand and compare the role of the two labour regimes in the penetration of capital into the rural economy. Neither contract farming nor share tenancy are in themselves “win-win” or “win-lose” relationships, good or bad for small-scale cultivators. The actual balance of burdens and benefits—often contravening the provisions of written contracts or state regulation—is determined by power relations between the contracting parties.     

Hal Harvey:城市规划具体的8个原则

Hal Harvey提出:一个好的城市必须是一个适合步行的城市,要便于人们步行及骑车;街区不能够太大,要有很好的公共交通,使得各个街区能够很好地连接起来,使得人们可以很容易地到达想去的地方。     

David M. Young. The Iron Horse and the Windy City: How Railroads Shaped Chicago. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. ix + 270 pp. ISBN 0-87580-334-2, $39.95 (cloth).

Since their initial development, railroads have always beencentral to the development of Chicago as the transportationhub of the Midwest and the nation. Indeed, they remain centralin the twenty-first century. Although the number of trains andtrackage declined precipitously as consolidations and deregulationtook hold in the twentieth century, the actual tonnage hauledand the number of trains have grown. Consequently, Chicago founditself "as inundated with railroad trains in 2001 as it hadbeen a century earlier" (p. 220). Young     

Logs or permits? Forestry land use decisions in an emissions trading scheme

Negative carbon emissions options are required to meet long-term climate goals in many countries. One way to incentivise these options is by paying farmers for carbon sequestered by forests through an emissions trading scheme (ETS). New Zealand has a comprehensive ETS, which includes incentives for farmers to plant permanent exotic forests. This research uses an economy-wide model, a forestry model and land use change functions to measure the expected proportion of farmers with trees at harvesting age that will change land use from production to permanent forests in New Zealand from 2014 to 2050. We also estimate the impacts on carbon sequestration, the carbon price, gross emissions, GDP and welfare. When there is forestry land use change, the results indicate that the responsiveness of land owners to the carbon price has a measured impact on carbon sequestration. For example, under the fastest land use change scenario, carbon sequestration reaches 29.93 Mt CO₂e by 2050 compared to 23.41 Mt CO₂e in the no land use change scenario (a 28% increase). Even under the slowest land use change scenario, carbon sequestration is 25.89 Mt CO₂e by 2050 (an 11% increase compared with no land use change). This is because, if foresters decide not to switch to permanent forests in 1 year, carbon prices and ultimately incentives to convert to permanent forests will be higher in future years.