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Digitized agriculture and food systems also require a digitally-skilled workforce
Socioeconomic constraints can also stand in the way. Gulati et al. , for example, report low adoption of mechanical rice transplanters in India due to women’s weak bargaining position in the household decision making process. Mechanization is often associated with a reduced demand for labor. In theory, the impact of mechanization on labor demand and…
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Disruptive politics thus provide the most favorable conditions for reform
Similarly, the factors that contribute to the outsized influence of farmer power can help explain why some areas of policy are harder to reform than others. Finally, the story of the decline of farmers speaks to the politics of managing major social transformations and provides lessons for how such a transition can be executed with…
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Preserving the CAP budget was the necessary price for direct payment equalization
At the time of the 2013 CAP negotiations, the Doha Round was stalled. This time, however, the negotiations were failing in multiple sectors and agriculture, though one of the points of trouble, was not to blame for delaying the successful conclusion of the entire round. Perhaps most importantly, the CAP was not a sticking point…
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The CAP was also under pressure from international trade negotiations
More problematic was that the compromise reached and approved by the Agricultural Council exceeded the spending limits the Economic and Financial Affairs Council proposed for the CAP by €7 billion. In the final agreement on this compromise within the Agricultural Council, Portugal was outvoted and France issued a reserve d’attente23 on the grounds that the financial problems…
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The existing system of farmer support was both unequal and dysfunctional
By this time, key European leaders, most notably President of the European Commission Jacques Delors, French President François Mitterrand, and Chancellor of Germany Helmut Kohl, recognized that European farming interests were threatening the benefits that important sectors of the economy would realize from a new global trade agreement . Three areas of importance for the…
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CAP reform and negotiations can be broadly categorized as falling under two sets of conditions
In addition, interviews with members of national legislators across countries, including the UK, Netherlands, and France, reveal that, when making agricultural policy, little effort is made to reach out to and incorporate other groups who may be interested in reform outcomes such as environmental or consumer groups . Instead, they consult agricultural interests almost exclusively.…
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The Nobelists boldly used the approach to rethink how to fight global poverty
This result could indicate that having other managed systems nearby results in fewer source populations of pests in the immediate surrounding, whereas having widespread cropland in the landscape leads to a concentration of pests [i.e., resource concentration hypothesis ] or a lack of natural enemies [enemies hypothesis ] within the broader agricultural region. If so,…
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Many fruit and nut trees have a dormancy phase during winter
With leading climate change scientists concluding that “It is very likely that heat waves will occur with a higher frequency and duration” as the global mean temperatures increases , it seems likely that tightening bottlenecks, rather than changes in mean temperatures, will be responsible for temperature related damages in agriculture for the next few decades.…
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Using food as a marker of distinction or identity is not a new phenomenon
Understanding how trade-offs, genetic costs, or relaxed selection impact symbiosis will inform efforts to engineer crops with novel symbiotic capabilities. Microbial symbionts provide foundational services to agricultural crops. Rhizobia alone fix 70 million metric tons of N annually, valued at US $23–$59 billion worth of fertilizer application. Resolving the impact of domestication processes on symbiosis…
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Agricultural pesticides are often detected in rural homes
For the first weigh-in of the day, I use time elapsed since morning check-in to calculate this measure. As reported in table 1.1, average productivity pooled across both farms is just over nineteen pounds picked per hour. This number, however, masks significant heterogeneity across farm, day, and worker. At the San Diego farm, which grows…