Gender,control, and crop choice in northern Mozambique

Women play an important role in the agricultural production process in developing countries, yet their role in making decisions about what to grow and implications for household welfare remains poorly understood. In this article, I study women's empowerment in northern Mozambique as it relates to agriculture, considering in particular the factors associated with women managing the plots that they nominally control. Women control about 30% of the plots in the data, but only manage about 70% of those plots. Using a unique panel data set, I find that women are more likely to manage plots when households have had historic access to off‐farm labor, typically completed by men. When women manage plots, they tend to grow crops with less complicated production techniques and are less likely to grow the main area cash crop. However, conditional on historic access to off‐farm labor their farm incomes are the same as among men.     

Scope economies and technical efficiency of cocoa agroforesty systems in Ghana

A number of studies have addressed issues relating to the physiological, environmental and economic values of trees in cocoa farming systems. However, to date, little has been done to quantitatively examine the effect of crop diversity on cocoa farming efficiency. This study therefore sets out to first investigate whether and to what extent crop diversity (defined as the mixing of cocoa with other crop species on farmers' plots) affects productivity on cocoa farms. Secondly, it sought to establish whether there are economies of scope (i.e., cost complementarities) from the sharing of farm inputs by crops on the same plots. Our results indicate that diversified (i.e., multi-crop) cocoa farms are more efficient than single (i.e., mono) crop farms. Furthermore, our estimate for the economies of scope parameter indicates possibilities for cost complementarities between production of cocoa and other crops on the same plot. We advocate further investigation on the issue of scope economies to determine which crop combinations offer better cost complementarities and also meet biodiversity conservation objectives.     

映射气候的大学校园规划

映射气候的规划研究旨在通过设计手段创造绿色低耗的校园环境,突出规划结合地域气候和自然地理,达到生态节能目的。应用建筑物理和生态学理论,采取图解分析和比较的方法,探究适宜地域气候的生态校园规划与设计的原理和方法,提出了校园规划布局结合地方气候与地理、空间规划组织自然通风与防风、节地省耗规划、建筑节能设计与校园空间的气候应变等规划与设计策略,为生态校园规划与实践奠定理论基础。     

India's post‐green‐revolution agricultural performance: what is driving growth?

Following a period of poor performance in the 1990s, India's agricultural growth rate has reaccelerated in the 2000s. Some believe the reacceleration has been a product of intensified investment, which in turn has spurred yield growth. Others suggest it is because India's newly wealthy citizens have demanded greater product diversification. To examine these hypotheses, we use growth accounting techniques in conjunction with more complete agricultural production data than in past studies to construct state, regional, and national output, input, and total factor productivity quantity indexes, which can be decomposed into their underlying sources. Sectoral performance evaluation suggests that, since 1980, output growth has diffused away from the northern “grain belt” and toward high‐value agriculture in traditionally less‐productive regions. Productivity growth, rather than resource use, has accounted for these geographical and intensity shifts. The growth burst has not, as the literature has primarily argued, been uniquely explainable by yield growth or product diversification but by a variety of factors, including area expansion. For example, the contributions of irrigation technologies permitting double‐cropping have until now been largely ignored.     

Towards productive landscapes: Trade-offs in tree-cover and income across a matrix of smallholder agricultural land-use systems

One of the main causes of tropical forest loss is conversion to agriculture, which is constantly increasing as a dominant land cover in the tropics. The loss of forests greatly affects biodiversity and ecosystem services. This paper assesses the economic return from increasing tree cover in agricultural landscapes in two tropical locations, West Java, Indonesia and eastern Bangladesh. Agroforestry systems are compared with subsistence seasonal food-crop-based agricultural systems. Data were collected through rapid rural appraisal, field observation, focus groups and semi-structured interviews of farm households. The inclusion of agroforestry tree crops in seasonal agriculture improved the systems’ overall economic performance (net present value), even when it reduced understorey crop production. However, seasonal agriculture has higher income per unit of land area used for crop cultivation compared with the tree establishment and development phase of agroforestry farms. Thus, there is a trade-off between short-term loss of agricultural income and longer-term economic gain from planting trees in farmland. For resource-poor farmers to implement this change, institutional support is needed to improve their knowledge and skills with this unfamiliar form of land management, sufficient capital for the initial investment, and an increase in the security of land tenure.     

制糖企业与糖料农户之间交易关系研究

本文从交易方式的角度，通过对糖料加工企业和原料采购市场结构的分析，探讨制糖企业与农户上下游部门间的协调机制对整个产业链竞争能力的影响。研究发现，糖料划区收购使得糖厂具有地域垄断特征，农户在交易中处于不利的地位。目前采用的订单糖料生产形式，在一定程度上较好地协调了两者的关系。但由于订单合约的不完全性，双方市场风险依然很高，都具有机会主义倾向，专用性资产投资不足。在交易成本很高的情况下，制糖企业不会实行一体化形式提高企业竞争力。     

Food versus fuel: examining tradeoffs in the allocation of biomass energy sources to domestic and productive uses in Ethiopia

Rural households in Ethiopia have limited options to meet their domestic energy needs because they lack access to modern fuels and technologies. Domestic use of certain fuel sources, such as cow dung, can hinder agricultural outcomes and productivity. This article explores the tradeoffs between domestic and productive uses of biomass energy sources in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia using a nonseparable farm household model where labor allocation to energy collection and farming are analyzed simultaneously. We estimate a system of five structural equations using three‐stage least squares and find that the use of dung as a domestic fuel source has negative implications for the value of harvested crops, while use of on‐farm fuelwood is associated with increased value of agricultural output. On‐farm production of fuelwood appears to increase the value of crop output and provide labor savings, by making fuelwood collection more convenient for households. Policy interventions to support the expansion of agroforestry and increase access to new energy‐efficient technologies are needed to ensure that agricultural productivity can be both increased and sustained.     

Sustainable agricultural practices,environmental risk mitigation and livelihood improvements: Empirical evidence from Northern Ethiopia

Using sustainable agriculture practices has various economic, social and environmental benefits. Determining the attitude of farmers toward risk is an important first step in understanding their behaviour and coping strategies to mitigate environmental risks. This paper investigates the dual impacts of some agricultural practices on agricultural yields and farmers’ livelihoods considering sustainable farmland. Cross-sectional data is collected from farmers in six rural villages in Tigray region, Northern Ethiopia using structured questionnaires. Results show that education, labour supply, agricultural extension services, attitudes, social capital, risk mitigation attitudes, farming experience and soil conditions are factors that significantly affect farmers’ decisions to adopt these practices. The practices are adopted either in isolation or jointly of integrated sustainable practices that increase crop production, household income and asset. Therefore, government and other development actors should promote their adoptions especially in drought-prone, degraded and water-stressed areas     

A framework for the analysis of socioeconomic and geographic sugarcane agro industry sustainability

Sugarcane agroindustry sustainability is the result of interaction of technology, land suitability, environment, management practices, by-products utilization, socioeconomic and geographic constraints of stakeholders. Nevertheless, as competitiveness factor is measured by three self-dependent indicators: sugarcane, sucrose and factory yield by statistically analysis, without consider multiple interrelated and interdependent socioeconomics and ecological factors. This paper presented a method for development of composite sustainability index, based on the Multicriteria evaluation Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in a GIS, as a technique for supporting the decision making, which integrates in the analysis 14 sector-specific criteria ranked along all the three aspect of value chain, raw material production, processing and markets at the Mexican sugarcane agroindustry, as case study. These criteria were integrated in a hierarchic structure, pair-wise comparisons matrix and after obtaining the relative importance of each criterion, an integrated sustainability assessment tool was developed. Results show that the construction of sustainability index, provides a framework for assessing and zoning the sustainability, and the variables Sugarcane yield, Sugarcane Agroindustry final products, Sugar mill Yield and Productivity Index (Ratio Harvested area/sugar production), as socio-economic factors and Agro-climatic suitability for sugar cane cultivation are highly relevant with a overall weight of 69.5% and represent the key point of decision making by stakeholders.