Category: hydroponic agriculture

Posted on

Terpenoid synthesis showed clear segregation into the mevalonate and the MEP/DOXP pathways

Airborne dust was ever-present while we sampled, and despite extensive containment efforts, some exposure of the apparatus to dust occurred . However, the rest of the DOM metagenome is remarkably distinct from the other samples, suggesting that, with the exception of the known contaminants, it is still representative of the deep groundwater. We eliminated all suspected contaminant genomes from further analysis.We assembled genomic bins using the following pipeline: IDBA_UD initial assembly, REAPR breaking of misassemblies, VizBin binning of contigs into draft genomes using 5-mer frequency and coverage information for visual aid, additional manual bin cleanup based on contig coverage distribution , taxonomic assignment of bins based on RAPSEARCH to the UniProt UniRef100 database. Selected bins were assembled further by PRICE targeted assembly and REAPR correction of misassemblies. Genome quality was assessed throughout using CheckM. Further details are in the methods. Overall we assembled and refined 79 unique genomic bins from the three groundwater samples . An additional 51 bins were made from the LAG sample and were used to determine probable contaminants in other samples, but no refinement of these bins was attempted, as we were interested in the properties of the groundwater communities. Contamination was only detected for the DOM sample as previously discussed. No evidence of overlap with the surface water was seen in either MW5 or MW6. The most abundant taxa in the partial genomic bins were from the CPR Parcubacteria , followed by the DPANN Woesearchaeota , and the CPR Microgenomates . While the OD1 and OP11 lineages have previously been found in association with anammox communities. The high relative abundance and diversity of CPR and DPANN genomes at over 50% of the community is notably higher than previous reports . The next highest abundance of our genomic bins were from the Planctomycete Brocadiaceae family . We made genomic bins of many of the other key members of the wastewater anammox community, including Omnitrophica , Nitrospirae , Chloroflexi , Chlorobi , Bacteroidales , Acidobacteria , and γ-Proteobacteria . Additionally, we assembled partial genomes from the Nitrospinae/Tectomicrobia group , Spirochaete , a Planctomycete from the OM190 family, an archaeon from the TACK radiation, a Firmicute that was dominant in the DOM well, a Bacteroidetes , an α-Proteobacterium, and a β- Proteobacterium. Finally, we assembled numerous phage bins.

Only one is included here ,hydroponic gutter but evidence of bacteriophage was abundant.While many potentially interesting and novel genomes were isolated from this community, we focus here on the Brocadiaceae Planctomycetes, which oxidize ammonium under anaerobicconditions in a specialized organelle called the anammoxosome that protects the cells from the toxic hydrazine intermediate products of the biochemical reaction. Anammox genomes are highly prevalent in the MW5 and MW6 samples and also occur in the DOM sample . We were able to make several near-complete assemblies of these genomes , however, the genome size of 2 Mb for many of these genomes was well below the 4 Mb seen in other members of this family. The coverage of some of these small genomes is rather high , making it seem plausible that the true genome size is reduced. In an attempt to resolve this discrepancy, we rebinned the MW5 anammox genomes using less stringent criteria, and found increased but still incomplete coverage of the Brocadiaceae reference genomes . These composite genomes were multi-strain chimeras, as indicated by conserved single copy gene occurrences increasing above one . The fact that merging multiple strains of the same species did not give complete coverage of the single copy genes is in agreement with the hypothesis that the true genome size is small but further sampling would be needed to confirm the hypothesis. In any event, we have not been able to resolve the discrepancy in genome size in the present study. The phylogenetic placement is apparent by homology with the Brocadia sinica and Jettenia caeni reference genomes . The separation of genomic bins shown by pentanucleotide clustering suggests multiple Brocadia-like genomes coexist in MW5, MW6 and DOM. A 16S phylogeny supports this observation . We refer to these genomic bins herein as MW5-59_1, MW5-59_2, MW6-02, MW6-03, MW6-13, DOM-02, DOM-03, and DOM-40 . We also assembled an 8.3 Mb Planctomycete genome with similarity to the Planctomycetaceae family within the Planctomycetes . The larger genome size indicates the genome is not of the Brocadiaceae, which have genome sizes around 4 Mb. Whole genome sequence comparison of MW6-09 to the available reference Planctomycetes showed highest similarity to Singulisphaera acidiphilus , however, the similarity even to Singulisphaera was not especially high, indicating that this genome is truly diverged from the reference genomes. Examining the 16S alignment suggests the genome could be from the OM190 group of Planctomycetaceae , a group with no sequenced genomes . We caution, however, that while we could link the EMIRGE-assembled OM190 16S gene with theMW6-09 genome using targeted assembly , multiple 16S fragments could be linked to the genome, thus our placement MW6-09 as an OM190 Planctomycetaceae should be revisited when new, related genomes are discovered.

To determine whether the anammox strains were unique to their respective bins or overlapping, we used VizBin to perform additional kmer distribution-based clustering of all the Planctomycete contigs together. Six distinct clusters are apparent , with MW5-59_1, MW5- 59_2, and MW6-13 overlapping. We next refined the genomic bins by combining the anammox genomes from MW5, MW6, and DOM and repicking chimeric bins. We then performed a single round of assembly using PRICE in order to merge the contigs. Overall, little improvement in bins was made. However, inter-strain contamination was reduced, and the DOM-02 bin was substantially improved by adding 20% more contigs from MW6 that coclustered . The 16S phylogengy indicates the bins come from three distinct lineages . The abundant MW5 and MW6 bins come from a new lineage that is intermediate between Jettenia and Kuenenia. The abundant DOM bins and one of the MW6 bins come from two different lineages within the Brocadiaceae W4 group. As there are no sequenced members of these lineages to use as reference, we aligned our bins to the closest available reference draft genomes of Brocadia, Jettenia, Kuenenia and Scalindua species . Reflecting the 16S phylogeny, the best homology was to Jettenia for the abundant MW5 and MW6 bins, and lower homology was seen for the DOM bins and MW6-02. As previous reports have noted low diversity of anammox genomes within a given sample , we find it noteworthy that as many as three distinct anammox genomes coexist within a single groundwater well. To confirm that all of these genomes were true anammox metabolizers, we checked for hydrazine conversion genes by BLASTX. Confirming that they are indeed anammox organisms, all Brocadiaceae genomes showed good coverage of the hydrazine database, and MW6-09, which is phylogenetically places as a nonanammox Planctomycete, did not have BLASTX hits.We analyzed the biochemical potential of the genomic bins in two ways focusing on pathways and modules rather than on individual proteins . This analysis was based on taxonomic placement rather than on the well of origin. First, we mapped the contigs from each draft assembly to the database of KEGG orthologs and used KEGG Mapper to visualize the results. Second, we used antiSMASH to detect potential secondary metabolite bio-synthetic gene clusters. The results reveal variation between genomic bins as well as pathways for potential community interactions linking nitrogen and sulfur metabolic pathways in the groundwater.To determine what functional genes are present in the water microbiota, we first aligned all of our contigs in each of the dairy water samples to the KEGG prokaryote database and evaluated trends at the whole metagenome level. Overall, we see enrichment of phosphotransferase systems, two-component systems, ABC transporters, and terpenoid production. The PTS systems are particularly high in the nutrient poor DOM sample,hydroponic nft channel consistent with the idea that there is a selective pressure driving acquisition of nutrients in nutrient-poor environments. However, no clear signature of different modes of nitrogen metabolism is indicated when examining the aggregated data for each sample. Thus, we examined the individual genomic bins to get a broad understanding of their biochemical potential. We focused on the KEGG pathways for nitrogen metabolism, sulfur metabolism, flagellar assembly, chemotaxis, ABC transporters, two-component systems, terpenoid synthesis, ATPase family, secretion systems, cofactor F420 , and B12 production since these pathways showed the most variability across the genomic bins. We include nucleotide synthesis as a positive control, since all of the complete bins have good coverage of the nucleotide metabolism pathways.

Because many of the genomic bins were partially incomplete, we aggregated KEGG maps from related species in order to get a more coherent picture of the pathway representation as a function of phylogeny . Overall, we see sparse coverage of nitrogen metabolism by the CPR, and DPANN genomes, while Methylomirabilis, Omnitropica, Nitrospira, Brocadia, and Nitrospinae had high coverage. The Bacteroidales also had sparse coverage of nitrogen metabolism, and the Chlorobi had intermediate coverage of the pathway, indicating that not all genomes in the community are directly involved in nitrogen metabolism. The same pattern was true of sulfur metabolism, with the exception that OP11 has the module for assimilatory sulfate reduction, which is consistent with the work of Canfield showing that sulfur and nitrogen redox pathways are coupled in the oxygen minimum zone of the oceans. Methane metabolism, indicated by presence of the coenzyme F420, was present in one DPANN bin, one OD1 bin, Methylomirabilis, and Nitrospinae. Intermediate coverage of this module was seen for Chlorobi, supporting the observations of Speth et al that species have diverse and overlapping niches within the anammox community and Shen et al that methane oxidation co-occurs with anammox. For oxidative phosphorylation, distinct ATPases were seen between the phyla. OP11, OD1, Methylomirabilis, Omnitrophica, Chlorobi, and Nitrospinae have the F-type ATPase, while DPANN, has the A-type ATPase, and Nitrospira, Brocadiaceae, and Bacteroidales have both F-type and A-type ATPases.In terms of acquiring nutrients from the environment, the CPR genomes were deficient in ABC transporters besides phosphate. The DPANN have slightly more, but the rest of the genomes each have significant coverage of  15 ABC transporters each. Coverage of two-component systems was consistent across all genomes for phosphate, while either nitrogen or nitrate was present for all except OP11. Twitching motility was indicated for OP11 as well as for OD1, and Chlorobi. High coverage of the chemotaxis pathway was seen only in the Nitrospira, Brocadiaceae, and Nitrospinae, with moderate coverage seen in the DPANN, OP11, OD1, Chlorobi, and Bacteroidales. Methylomirabilis and Omnitrophica appear to lack pathways for both chemotaxis and flagellar assembly, whereas Nitrospira, Brocadiaceae, and Nitrospinae have the complete pathways, and Chlorobi and Bacteroidales have most of the chemotaxis pathway but Chlorobi has the complete flagellar pathway and Bacteroidales lack it entirely. In terms of biosynthetic capabilities, Omnitrophica, Nitrospira, the Brocadiaceae, and Nitrospinae have complete vitamin B12 pathways, while Chlorobi and Bacteroidales have the latter half of the pathway as does one OP11 genome, while the other OP11 genomes as well as the OD1 genomes lack B12 production entirely. Methylomirabilis has sparse coverage of the pathway, and the DPANN genomes have genes for converting B12 to the active form. These results indicate that B12 sharing is likely an active part of the anammox community metabolism.Methylomirabilis, Omnitrophica, Nitrospira, Brocadiaceae, Bacteroidales, and Nitrospinae all have only the non-mevalonate pathway, whereas Chlorobi has both pathways, and DPANN use either one pathway or the other but not both. Within the CPR, OP11 has the mevalonate pathway, and OD1 has neither pathway. Wide variation was seen in the secretion systems, with the DPANN, OP11, and OD1 using only the SecSRP system, Bacteroidales using the SecSRP and Tat systems, Methylomirabilis and Omnitrophica using the SecSRP, Tat, and Type II systems, and Nitrospira using the SecSRP, Tat, Type I and II systems. The Brocadiaceae and Chlorobi use the SecSRP, Tat, Type II, IV and VI systems. And finally, Nitrospinae uses the the SecSRP, Tat, Type I, II, IV and VI systems. Comparison of KEGG pathway coverages with the available reference genomes showed similar results, supporting the hypothesis of niche specialization in a shared community metabolism.

Posted on

The tax was finally suspended indefinitely, pending a new proposal from the government

As with past reforms, the Commission’s proposal to place a cap on direct income payments was completely rejected due to widespread opposition from the member states. The final result of the Commission’s proposal income payment cap was a form of degressivity, under which payments over a certain threshold may be reduced. Degressivity was left to the member states as an option, with a very small level made mandatory . Moreover, member states could choose to garnish their total national envelope, as opposed to applying degressivity directly to their largest earnings, allowing them to reduce or entirely eliminate the loss to large farmers. Finally, greening measures were watered down, the end result being that most farmers were exempted from compliance, and overall standards were lowered. Essentially, anything that was contentious or in some way resisted by a member state was handled one of three main ways: the standards for the policy were lowered; the qualifications for an exemption were widened; or discretion for what standards to set and how to enforce the policy was given to the individual member state. In the end, nearly 50% of arable land covered by the CAP and just under 90% of arable goods farmers were exempted from the new greening rules and standards. The remaining more minor elements of the initial reform proposal were also adjusted in the final agreement. Those member states whose direct income payments were 90% or more below the EU average were afforded more flexibility in transferring funds between Pillar 2 and Pillar 1 . The proposal to more rigorously define who counts as a farmer and thus what land can be considered agricultural was significantly weakened. The Commission’s effort to restrict a base payment to individuals engaged in farming as their primary source of income was also completely defeated,hydroponic grow systems meaning anyone with agricultural land could receive this payment, even if they were a non-farmer. A.2.3 which summarizes the changes for these small proposals can be found in the Appendix.

The MFF agreement, which fixed the budget and also included some CAP provisions shaped the course of the CAP negotiations that operated concurrently and ultimately subsequent to the battle over the budget. This effect was perhaps most profound in the area of greening. Greening measures to support the environment and battle climate change were, at least at one point, considered an essential part of justifying the increasingly criticized direct payment scheme. In the initial stages of the CAP reform, when the process began in 2010 before the MFF talks were underway, it was expected that farmers would be required to provide a direct, clear, “public good” in the form of following particular environmental practices in exchange for the receipt of direct payments. However, once the MFF was agreed, the greening push was fatally weakened. With the budget fixed, the threat of imposing cuts if greening standards were not raised was no longer credible. The greening case was hurt more broadly by the fact that there was general uncertainty of the extent to which these measures would deliver real, significant environmental benefits. In addition, many worried about the added financial costs for farmers and more broadly the bureaucratic cost of administering these programs. In the end, the final agreement fell well short of initial proposals. A perhaps overly pessimistic view was expressed by multiple DGVI officials who lamented that rather than making the CAP fairer, greener, and simpler, reform left the CAP still unfair, barely greener, and far more complex . This characterization understates the reform. In fact, there were meaningful changes to reduce systemic inequalities. That said, the reform did make the CAP far more complex and also did little to improve greening. The previous four chapters have explored the major rounds of CAP reform, illustrating my claims about the conditions that affect policy reform, the nature of farmer power, and the links between welfare state reform tactics and agricultural policy reform, including the key strategy of pairing compensation with reform. These chapters have demonstrated that reforming agricultural policy is an exercise in navigating farmer power.

Theories of welfare state retrenchment help to explain how and why the process of agricultural policy unfolds in the manner that it does. Most often, reformers rely on the kinds of strategies described by Paul Pierson in his analysis of welfare retrenchment: compensating farmers, making smaller adjustments to correct existing policies , and introducing changes that may open the door to more far-reaching shifts down the road . When CAP reform is initiated at a time of disruptive politics, like trade negotiations or enlargement, it is much more likely to succeed. The 1992 MacSharry and 2003 Fischler reforms occurred at times of disruptive politics and the end result was major reform to the operation of the CAP payment system. Of course, as my argument requires, these reforms 1) were paired with generous compensation and 2) largely consisted of recalibration, in which the modes of payment were changed, but the amounts remained the same. Under politics as usual, reform proposals are almost always defeated. The 1999 and 2013 CAP reforms occurred in “normal” times- no trade negotiations were occurring and enlargement was not looming. In both cases, despite proposals for extensive change, the CAP remained virtually unchanged. Any minor reforms that did occur were either accompanied by extensive compensation or qualified by massive exemptions. The previous four chapters have demonstrated how theories of welfare state retrenchment, combined with an awareness of the broader context of the reforms, can help explain the process and outcome of the CAP reform. The question remains, however, if the analytical efficacy of welfare state retrenchment theories stems from circumstances particular to the CAP and the EU or if this approach can be applied more broadly. In order to assess the analytic usefulness of my approach, I test it under a variety of different conditions and circumstances in three mini-cases: austerity-driven domestic policy in Europe, domestic agricultural policy reform in Japan, and agricultural trade policy negotiations in the GATT Uruguay Round.

My claims about the politics of agricultural policy reform and farmers’ influence over policy making are not restricted to the CAP and the specific circumstances of EU politics. They can also explain agricultural reform at the domestic level. To make this case, I explore domestic politics and policy making in the wake of the 2008 financial crises. The mini case proceeds in two parts. I begin with a close look at France, focusing on domestic policy reforms, which are not specifically agricultural in nature. An “eco tax” 41, proposed in France in 2013, that was to affect truck transport of goods, including agricultural products, was abandoned due to pressure in large part from farmers. Pension-related cuts, however, went ahead despite mass protests. The second part of the mini case looks at domestic reform in Europe more broadly, and confirms that the French case is not an outlier. Indeed, I find that at the domestic level, European governments largely did not cut national discretionary spending on agriculture, while they did impose significant cuts on pensions. In the wake of the Great Recession and sovereign debt crisis, austerity programs were adopted across the European Union. Spending was cut, programs of support for those suffering financial hardship were canceled or suspended,hydroponic growing and new taxes were created to help generate revenue for cash-strapped governments. One social group that would have appeared to be particularly vulnerable to austerity-imposed policies is the agricultural community. Farmers are a tiny population that is continuing to decline. Any spending cuts or new tax burdens would therefore apply to only a small portion of the population, in theory allowing politicians and policymakers to minimize the negative backlash faced by aggrieved constituents. Moreover, farmers already receive a disproportionate share of financial support, given their share of the population, making their programs and policies low-hanging fruit for retrenchment-minded officials. Yet, since the 2008 financial crisis, farmers have felt little if any of the budgetary pressure that austerity has brought to bear on communities across Europe. As is observed in EU policy making, farmers at the domestic level successfully resist the imposition of new costs that are not paired with compensation. The parallels between the ways that farmers defend their policies and thwart unwanted policy changes at the domestic and EU levels can be made clear by looking at a case in which a national government attempted to impose new costs on their agricultural community without offering compensation. In 2013, Socialist French President François Hollande attempted to implement the so called “eco tax” first put forward by his conservative predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy. The eco tax was intended to promote greener commercial transportation by imposing a tax on heavy vehicles. Under the plan, any vehicle over 3.5 tons would be taxed a flat rate of .13€ per kilometer traveled on 15,000 kilometers of roads included in the scheme. The government expected the tax to generate over €1 billion in revenue annually. The eco tax was slated to come into effect beginning 1 January 2014. The government’s proposal was immediately met with criticism from the main French farmers’ organization, the FNSEA. The organization described the tax as an “usine à gaz”, a situation where pipes are going everywhere and the system is overly complex. Through thus turn-of-phrase, the FNSEA meant to convey that the eco tax was a complicated procedure with little actual value or payoff. The FNSEA argued that the tax would place a significant burden on the agricultural community, particularly farmers in Brittany, who had suffered significantly from the financial crisis, and demanded that it be suspended immediately.

Other critics raised concerns that Breton farmers might be driven out of business as a result of higher transportation costs. In addition to the concerns about its effects on Breton farmers, the FNSEA warned that French goods would pass through the tax gates more often than trucks carrying foreign goods, putting French farmers at a disadvantage compared to farmers’ goods arriving from abroad. Xavier Beulin, the leader of the FNSEA, promised immediate action against the proposal, directing members to target the “portiques” that were intended to scan the trucks as they passed underneath. Beulin called on farmers from other parts of France, even from those areas without the tax scanners, to join the protests. The call for action was successful, as a wave of angry protests erupted in Brittany and across France. In Brittany, the heart of the demonstrations, protesters gathered in main town squares, many wearing red caps, or bonnets rouges in a reference to a 17th-century protest against a stamp tax proposed by Louis XIV. Some protestors threw stones, iron bars, and potted chrysanthemums at riot police, while others destroyed the electronic scanners intended to collect the fee from passing trucks. The protesters included not just farmers, but also the broader public, who were rallying to oppose taxes, with some also supporting the farmers specifically. In addition to the violent actions in Brittany, farmers elsewhere blocked roads with their tractors, including around Paris. Despite the disruptions these protests caused to the daily life of the average French citizen, the farmers did not face any negative public backlash, a further indication of the deep support and connections between farmers and urban France. Indeed, public polling concerning the image of farmers revealed that the public has a strong, positive image of farmers. According to a 2014 survey, shortly after the mass protests by farmers, just 26% of respondents were willing to describe farmers as selfish and only 16% of respondents agreed that farmers were violent. A resounding 80% agreed with the statement that farmers were trustworthy42 . After Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault met with local officials from Brittany, the government proposed to “suspend” the tax until January. This concession, though it was expected to cost the government €800 million in revenue, was seen as insufficient, and tens of thousands of protesters continued to gather in the epicenter of resistance to the proposal, the town square of Quimper in Brittany.France’s eco tax then, like to efforts to change CAP income support systems or greening policies, demonstrates that it is nearly impossible to impose new costs on farmers, without some degree of compensation or widespread exemptions. For example, new CAP greening standards that are costly for farmers to adhere to are typically coupled with subsidies for compliance.

Posted on

Fischler truly viewed his task in these reforms as saving the CAP from collapse

Germany also took action, replacing its SPD farm minister, Karl-Heinz Funke, with Green Party member Renate Künast, a Fischler ally and vocal advocate of CAP reform. Künast advocated strict standards for animal welfare, tough environmental regulation, and greater oversight of and limitations on industrial farming. Prior to the MTR, commitments to meaningful environmental measures were tepid at best. Environmental policies were optional, and implementation was left to the discretion of member states, who mostly ignored them due to farmer resistance. The series of food scares increased pressure on the CAP from consumers, environmentalists, and animal welfare advocates. Public opinion of the CAP in these matters was quite negative. While 90% of respondents in a 2001 Eurobarometer poll expressed a belief that the CAP should “ensure that agricultural products were healthy and safe”, only 36% thought that “food bought could be safely eaten” and just 34% felt that “food bought is of good quality” . As a result, Fischler saw an opening to push for meaningful, mandatory reforms that would increase food safety and security, including the adoption of environmental and animal welfare regulations. There was also a growing recognition among the public that farmers were significant polluters . According to Eurobarometer surveys in 2001 and 2002, just under 90% of respondents stated that the CAP should be used to “promote respect for the environment” while only 41% of respondents across the EU 15 felt that the current version of the CAP actually “promoted respect for the environment” . The environmental goal was second only to the objective of “ensuring the agricultural products are healthy” . The CAP bore the brunt of the blame for agricultural pollution,hydroponic container system given that it allowed for the industrialization of agriculture and by extension tacitly promoted the use of environmentally damaging farming practices, designed to extract the highest possible yields. A final problem confronting the CAP concerned the distribution of benefits. The CAP directed most of its support to only a small number of farmers. For example, in France, 40% of all aid went to fewer than 10% of French farmers, overwhelmingly the large cereal cultivators .

This problem, known variously as the 80/20 problem or the “Queen of England Problem” had plagued the CAP for a number of years. Reformers were under pressure to, if not correct this imbalance in support distribution entirely, at least attenuate it. The unequal allocation of CAP benefits, and reports in the press about disparities in payments received by large and small farmers, led Fischler and his associates to be concerned that public opinion would turn against the CAP. Declining public support was a real worry because EU officials, particularly other Commissioners, already questioned why such a large sum of money was being spent on an increasingly small faction of the population. The challenges and opportunities posed by enlargement, WTO negotiations, and poorly operating CAP programs offered Fischler and his associates an opportunity to propose far reaching reforms of the CAP under the auspices of the MTR. Such reforms were seen by Fischler and his team as necessary to “reduce the ammunition of those demanding large budget cuts and [to] create a new support base for the CAP” . If the CAP remained unreformed, unsustainable spending and environmental destruction would make it an easy target for other commissioners and member states who preferred a much slimmer CAP budget. Their case would be helped by increasingly negative attitudes from the general public. As Pirzio-Biroli, Fischler’s deputy, noted, “[we] concluded that, if we wanted to preserve the CAP, we needed to change it” . Fischler’s agenda was not just about cutting spending . Rather, he sought to reform the CAP to save the CAP- most notably by making it financially sustainable, viable under enlargement, compatible with WTO rules, and responsive to public concerns about food safety and the environment. Some critics saw Fischler as a bean counter, looking to make cuts wherever he could to get CAP spending under control. While it is true that Fischler was attempting to radically restructure CAP spending, these critics misread the motives behind his actions. Fischler was himself a former agricultural minister. He was seeking to reform the CAP and to make cuts not to please his colleagues in Brussels, but rather to make sure the CAP continued to be viable.

Fischler benefited from a high degree of personal credibility within the Commission, having been a minister of agriculture and the leader of Austria’s accession negotiations. He was considered to be both an expert on agricultural policy and a reform-minded official, who was willing to pursue the tough changes necessary for preserving the overall health of the CAP, no matter the criticism he might face from farmers or their member state representatives. As evidence of the high regard in which Fischler was held, Commission President Romano Prodi completely devolved agenda-setting competency to Fischler and reportedly “had no firm ideas one way or the other about agriculture and issued no directive to Fischler about how or whether to reform” . Although the MTR was intended only to be a health check and not a revision of existing CAP policies, Fischler believed that the CAP needed much more than a status report on the functioning of existing programs. A program that could neither work within the EU budget nor meet basic environmental and health standards ran the risk of being cut drastically by European technocrats, if not entirely eliminated. In addition, without reform, the CAP would stand to be an anchor inhibiting the EU’s ability to negotiate in the Doha Round of WTO negotiations. Fischler thus constructed his reform objectives around making those changes necessary to ensure the CAP’s long-term survival. If he did not reform the income payment system, new member states would explode the budget beyond sustainability. If the CAP remained an obstacle for European services and manufacturing in trade negotiations, these external actors would force deep and unpleasant changes to CAP programs such that European agriculture no longer tied their hands. In other words, failure to reform the CAP could spell the end of the CAP. Fischler’s central goals were to decouple CAP payments from production and to expand the environmental scope and standards of CAP policy . The first goal, decoupling, would help reduce the vast disparity in CAP income payments, whereby 80% of CAP income payments went to only 20% of eligible farmers. It would also put CAP spending into conformity with WTO rules. The second goal, improving environmental standards, would address growing public dissatisfaction with the effects of CAP policy on food safety and the environment. Decoupling would go a long way towards ensuring that the CAP remained financially viable in an enlarged Europe,planter pots drainage while mandatory environmental standards and regulations would make certain that newly-added agricultural land was protected as well as guarantee that food produced in Eastern Europe would meet the higher quality and safety standards already in place in the West. While there had recently been high-profile incidents of food-borne illnesses, overall safety and quality standards and rules in the West were much higher than those in the East. Without these changes, the CAP would be overwhelmed by the financial strain of supporting the new member states, would be challenged by Europe’s trading partners, and would lose public support due to its social and environmental consequences. Fischler had learned several lessons from the Agenda 2000 negotiations. During Agenda 2000, the early publication of reform proposals allowed vested interest groups the opportunity to mobilize and undermine initiatives before they could even be launched .

Farmers in particular, once tipped off about the contents, had moved to lobby their governments to oppose reforms before any discussion or formal presentation and explanation of the proposals could occur. Fischler, therefore, resolved to develop the MTR behind closed doors, like MacSharry had done with his 1992 reform. By working first in secret, Fischler would be able to propose a reform that called for dramatic and far-reaching change—more than was expected under the MTR. A more open development process would leave the agricultural directorate susceptible to interference from the member states. Given that a number of member states wanted the MTR to be nothing more than a review, Fischler opted to keep his proposals under wraps until the time was right. Secrecy also gave Fischler and the Commission a research advantage: they could collect and gather evidence so that when the reform proposal was presented, Fischler would be able to provide data to support his proposals . The member states would then be forced to play from behind in order to mount specific, evidence based criticisms of the Commission’s reform package. Because the content of proposals would be a surprise to the member states, they would be unable to make specific, detailed claims about the effects of reform, and any general reactions, like claiming the reforms would hurt farmer incomes, could quickly be refuted by the Commission, armed with data and evidence. Another key and more personal lesson that Fischler had learned was to be wary of French President Jacques Chirac. When speaking about his adversaries in CAP negotiations, Fischler stated, “my biggest opponent was Mr. Chirac” . The two had tangled multiple times in the past. Fischler described Chirac as an “intelligent and crafty politician who knew a great deal about agriculture and could manipulate political rules to his advantage” . Fischler recounted that at the Berlin Summit, where Agenda 2000 would be formally adopted by the European Council , Chirac “used a trick” to reopen and revise the agreement . First, Chirac exploited his personal relationship with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who held the rotating presidency at the time. Because the CAP was part of the new Multi-annual Financial Framework , the summit chair could open any component of the MFF for debate and reform. Second, Chirac used a complicated rule in the operation and calculation of the CAP budget to compel other member states to abandon a dairy reform that Chirac did not like29. Fischler “was furious because the reform was already agreed to, but Chirac went back and undid the work” . Fischler learned the hard lesson that even when the agreement was concluded in the Council of Ministers, he still needed to make sure the holder of the rotating presidency did not reopen the CAP portion of the MFF at the European Council summit meeting. Fischler’s rocky relationship with Chirac continued after the Berlin Summit. Following the Agenda 2000 reform, Chirac unsuccessfully appealed to Commission President Prodi to not renew Fischler’s post as agriculture commissioner for a second term. When asked specifically about the MTR, Fischler again identified Chirac as one of his biggest adversaries . During the MTR negotiations, Fischler, however, benefitted from the lessons he had learned from the Agenda 2000 reform process and was better positioned to manage and respond to Chirac.Fischler’s initial plan was sent to the Commission on 10 July 2002 after months of study and work conducted largely in secret by Fischler and a small group of associates, including his Deputy Director, Corrado Pirzio-Biroli. The small group included only the top officials at DGVI. These officials relied on studies and analyses by experts within the DGVI administration, who conducted preparatory analysis and calculated potential effects of the reforms but were not fully informed of overarching agenda. Otherwise, Fischler and his associates preferred to keep the civil servants in the dark. Because CAP reform would force DGVI civil servants to change how they worked and adopt new, often complex and cumbersome systems, Fischler thought it unwise to reveal the extent of the plan to them. Fischler was also concerned that the civil servants might leak aspects of the program to their permanent representations, allowing the member states to begin to mount a defense before he could announce his reform package . Retrenchment-minded welfare state reformers are also known to work in secret. Keeping potential reform proposals out of the public debate and masking the costs of new policies and reforms are strategies commonly used by welfare state reformers to avoid resistance from those who stand to lose.

Posted on

A quota system would potentially cost France market share both internally and externally

France believed in general that the Commission had far exceeded the negotiating mandate that had been agreed to prior to the start of GATT negotiations. French representatives were particularly upset with the extent to which EU negotiators were willing to reduce or even eliminate export subsidies. The informal deal between Mitterrand and Kohl helped each side advance an interest of particular importance. This agreement was made possible by a meeting in September of 1991 of the Quadrilateral that confirmed that the terms of the MacSharry proposals could unblock the stalemate in GATT agricultural negotiations. Shortly thereafter, the German cabinet formally announced that it would not veto the CAP deal over a cereal price cut . An announcement from the French government in favor of the CAP reform quickly followed. To get to this point each government had to come to some hard realizations about the CAP reform under discussion. Germany was facing a domestic fiscal crisis induced by the costs of reunification. In addition, its farming sector had changed dramatically. While small farms had dominated in the West, the East German model was the factory farm. East German farms lagged in production, but they were expected to rapidly become more efficient with access to improved technology and information. Any surpluses produced by the East would, under the current model, add to CAP costs and expenditures. Germany was already one of the main underwriters of the CAP budget and was confronted with having to pay even more to fund the CAP. These budgetary increases would also come in addition to the growing costs of reunification. While some of the new money from added CAP costs would be filtered back to the East German farmers, Germany’s overall contribution to the CAP would likely increase at a higher rate than its return,blackberry cultivation as CAP costs continued to grow rapidly. It was therefore more economically advantageous for Germany to advocate for a smaller and less expensive CAP, which would reduce Germany’s overall contribution, leaving more money to be deployed as needed domestically. Germany also desired a successful conclusion of the GATT round, which would benefit its industry tremendously.

The MacSharry Reform marked the first time that Germany faced significant resistance to agricultural policy from industrial and economic circles, with the Federation of German Industry stating a preference for agricultural policy reform, albeit cautiously . This opposition from industry marked a major change, given that industrial and agricultural interests had been bonded in a close alliance dating back to Bismarck . A GATT deal could not be reached without progress in the agricultural sector, and a reduction in price supports would go a long way towards making GATT progress possible. Kohl therefore broke with Germany’s traditional stance against price cuts, announcing that “the EC agricultural reform was not possible without substantial price cuts, especially for cereals” . France’s acceptance of reform was made possible by four developments. First, there was recognition that a structural change needed to be made. Production that continued unchecked would lead to increasing expenditure and thus an endless cycle of budget crises. Second, French officials realized that the structural reform on the table, price cuts paired with compensation, favored the French production profile. At the time, France was not only an efficient producer but also Europe’s leading exporter of agricultural goods and the world’s second leading exporter of cereals, a position the French were bent on maintaining. Given the strong position of the agricultural sector, particularly in cereals, the French government and the French Grain Farmers Association recognized that France could remain competitive, if not gain market share, under a system of price cuts while less efficient farmers in other countries would not be able to compete with the French. The status quo in the CAP, with its system of export subsidies, high prices, and import tariffs allowed even small and inefficient producers to sell their goods competitively alongside those of the largest and most efficient producers. If prices were cut, large grain producers would remain competitive, due to their efficiency, but the smaller farmers would be rendered uncompetitive. With these producers driven out of the market, the larger and more efficient French farmers could then gain market share. The third development that pushed France toward accepting the reform was the acceptance that for some products, the status quo was no longer tenable.

The AGPB was warned by Guy Legras, DGVI director and part of the EU’s GATT team, that new GATT rules were likely to require duty free importation of PSCs, or “products to substitute for cereals” and that, without a cereals price cut, French farmers would be unable to compete with PSCs . Cereals producers grow grains for both human and animal consumption. If the system of high prices was maintained and the GATT agreement proceeded as expected, grains produced for animal feed would be far more expensive than the PSCs, and French grain growers would lose market share and revenue as livestock farmers turned to alternative food sources for their animals. So, while the main French farmers’ union, the FNSEA maintained its “no reform and no discussion of reform” position, the powerful grain farmers, represented by the AGPB broke with the FNSEA and lent their formal support to the French government’s acceptance of the MacSharry Reform. The fourth factor that led to France swinging to support the reforms was the fear of the consequences of a failed reform. Specifically, what was most feared was a quota system, a possible alternative way to check spending and production if price cuts failed. In other words, while the possibility existed to impose reform via price cuts now, the failure to adopt reform would put the CAP into a position where the only possible alternative to control CAP spending would be to impose a quota system. At this point, a quota system existed, but only for the dairy sector. It was controversial, because it placed a strict limit on production, dividing up “shares” among producers and prohibiting production beyond the specified amount, even if it could be done more cheaply and efficiently than a competitor. In terms of the internal market, if demand exceeded production limits in France, milk would have to be brought in from producers in countries where quota limits exceeded domestic demand. Externally, efficient French producers would be unable to produce and sell milk beyond their strict quota limit, restricting their ability to expand their market share. A quota system would place a hard limit on production, continuing to prop up smaller and less efficient producers by guaranteeing them a market while restraining the ability of the efficient producers to expand into and serve new markets.

While French farmers were split over price cuts, they were united in their opposition to a quota system. In sum, on this first core issue of the negotiations, price cuts, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom were in favor of them from the start. The southern bloc of Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy were not opposed, as these proposed cuts did not affect their main agricultural products. The final three member states took a more circuitous path to support for the price cut element of the reform. Germany, though traditionally in favor of high prices, ultimately supported price cuts in an effort to ameliorate a domestic financial crisis brought on by the costs of reunification and to help clear the way for a hugely beneficial GATT agreement. Though initially opposed, France ultimately accepted the proposed price cuts thanks to support from the AGPB, an acceptance that reform had to happen in order to preserve the CAP,plastic plant pot sizes and a recognition that the reforms on the table favored the existing French production profile. Finally, Ireland’s stake was only in the beef sector- it did not grow cereals, and its cattle were all grass fed. As in France, support from the Irish Farmers Association led to support for these measures from the country’s representatives. The second major issue under discussion concerned the measures to redirect support to small farmers. The support of the pro-market countries, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK, was won with two key concessions. While none of these countries opposed price cuts, they all opposed modulation. Home to some of the largest farms in Europe, these countries felt that their farmers would be disproportionally punished by a system that reduced compensatory payments for large farmers and redirected those savings to smaller farmers. The Commission ultimately dropped all systems that would modulate income payments to the benefit of small farmers. This concession was necessary for reasons that again echo welfare state reform. Under modulation, it was very clear which farmers would be subjected to financial loses but it was far more uncertain which farmers would benefit, how much, and when. With certain losers but uncertain winners, it was easy to rally opposition to the program. The lackluster defense of the program was exacerbated by the wide variation in production size and style in the member states. The clear losers could rally their leaders against the reform, but winners, not knowing who they would be, did not mobilize. Finally, it was broadly understood that the inclusion of modulation was a deal breaker for Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK. In order for negotiations to proceed, it had to be dropped. Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK also won a concession over their other major sticking point. They objected to the compulsory land set-asides, which would require only farmers with the largest holdings to remove land from production. Under the proposal, farmers would not receive any compensation for this set-aside land. As they were home to some of the largest farms in the EU and thus also the farmers who would be subjected to this set-aside policy, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK staunchly opposed this program, arguing that it was unfair to their farmers.

To quell these objections over compulsory land set-asides, and the “inequity” of small farmers being exempted from them and thus being eligible to receive some form of income support for all of their land, the Commission offered a further concession that all set-aside land would be eligible to receive compensatory payments. The third core issue in the negotiations was the milk quota. While the proposed reform called for a reduction in milk quotas, Italy, Spain, and Greece demanded an increase. This demand was strongly opposed by Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the UK. These “northern bloc” countries were upset that the southern European countries were not respecting the system already in place . These countries, and Italy in particular, were singled out for demanding an increase its quota while not respecting the existing quota. Italy, for example, had still not implemented or adhered to the quota system adopted by the EU in 1984. An agreement was reached that included a guarantee not to cut quotas and an offer for a quota “adjustment” once the previous quotas had been applied satisfactorily . Though not directly specified as such, an “adjustment” was understood to be an increase. The final reform package included four central components. The first component was price cuts for the three sectors most affected by overproduction: cereals, beef, and dairy. These sectors were subjected to price cuts of 29%, 15% and 5% respectively. These cuts were to be lagged, coming into effect gradually over a period of roughly five years. Within dairy, milk production, which is regulated via quotas rather than price controls, was not subjected to any alteration of quota amounts, despite proposals to reduce their levels. The second component of the agreement was the adoption of a series of payments to compensate farmers for revenue lost due to the price cuts. Instead of being paid based on output through a series of high, fixed prices and export subsidies, farmers would now be paid a direct payment that had no connection to current production levels. The direct income payment would be calculated based on the historic yield of a given crop for that region. At this stage, the direct payment based on historic regional yields would only be applied to a portion of the farmer’s land.

Posted on

Three key policy instruments supported the price guarantee system

The most commonly used have been compensation and vice into virtue. Such is the farmers’ influence that is is nearly impossible to impose new costs on them without offering some form of compensation in return. Vice into virtue, meanwhile, has facilitated the successful overhaul of major CAP systems by presenting the task as correcting a malfunctioning program as opposed to simply shutting it down. In sum, the first part of my argument shows why CAP reform is so difficult by revealing both how farmers have managed to retain political influence despite losses in demographic and economic power and by using welfare state theories to identify key obstacles to retrenchment. The second part of my argument identifies the circumstances that may permit systemic reform. The third enumerates the welfare state retrenchment tactics policymakers use to navigate and manage the influence of the farmers. Taken together, my argument accounts for when and why CAP reform occurs as well as the final outcome of CAP reform.Chapter Two describes the history and operation of the CAP leading up to the contemporary period of reform covered in the dissertation’s empirical chapters. The chapter focuses on three main periods of the early CAP: its creation in the 1960s, including early successes and challenges, the failed Mansholt Plan of the 1970s, and the limited changes of the early 1980s. I show that even in these early periods of reform, disruptive politics were a necessary condition for reform and that policymakers utilized welfare-style tactics to achieve what limited success they could. This overview provides the background necessary to understand contemporary challenges to the CAP and obstacles to reform. Chapter Three focuses on the 1992 MacSharry Reform of the CAP. The MacSharry reforms marked the first major overhaul of the Common Agricultural Policy since its adoption in 1962. The MacSharry Reform took place under conditions of disruptive politics,blueberry container size as the negotiations overlapped with the GATT Uruguay Round. The landmark reform paired vice into virtue with compensation in order to transform the CAP’s primary function from production to income support.

Specifically, the MacSharry Reform introduced, in a limited form, a direct payment system that paid farmers regardless of how much they produced, essentially “decoupling” payments from production. Overall, the chapter demonstrates that even when reform was urgently needed, reformers still had to employ a number of welfare retrenchment tactics to overcome farmer opposition and were ultimately unable to cut spending. Chapter Four explores the so-called Agenda 2000 reform. Agenda 2000 was intended to further the objectives outlined in the MacSharry round. However, Agenda 2000 was not negotiated during a time of disruptive politics. The surplus crisis had been resolved by the MacSharry Reform, no GATT/WTO negotiations were scheduled, and the next round of enlargement was far enough in the future that no immediate reform action was required. The Agenda 2000 reform thus allows for the dissertation argument to be tested on a reform that took place under politics as usual. I show that Agenda 2000 ultimately introduced only limited, mostly voluntary change along with substantial financial compensation to farmers. Chapter Five examines the 2003 Mid-Term Review of the CAP, also known as the Fischler Reform, which was not expected to bring about a significant change. This round of reform occurred under disruptive politics, however: the CAP confronted severe financial pressure from enlargement and contentious trade negotiations in the WTO. This round of CAP reform presented a favorable context for reformers to make changes and a challenge for farmers to prevent tough amendments to a flailing policy. Fischler’s reform continued and extended the process of decoupling, begun by MacSharry and also introduced a new version of the compensation scheme called the Single Farm Payment. In addition, Fischler was able to make mandatory environmental policies that had only been optional in previous reforms. Despite these changes, many proposed policy reforms were watered down significantly and reformers had to employ a number of tactics typically used by welfare state retrenchers to achieve their goals. For example, reformers paired a compensation program with the vice into virtue strategy to successfully introduce the Single Farm Payment. Chapter Six investigates the most recent round of CAP reform concluded in 2013, which occurred largely under politics as usual. The budget was not in crisis and the EU was not involved in any WTO negotiations. The only major reform achieved during these negotiations, the recalibration of the direct payment system, is the only one with a clear link to a source of disruptive politics, in this instance enlargement.

The CAP was still contending with the consequences of the previous rounds of enlargement, in particular issues related to an imbalance in payments made to Western and Eastern countries. In order to increase the likelihood of successful reform in at least this domain, reforms linked the policy revisions to the disruptive politics of enlargement, rather than presenting the reforms as routine policy maintenance. Other reform proposals, such as adopting strict greening standards, imposing a ceiling on direct income payments, and restricting the qualifications for receiving agricultural payments, were completely blocked. The within-case variation, then, illustrates the importance of disruptive politics for achieving CAP reform. In Chapter Seven, the conclusion, I demonstrate the applicability of the dissertation argument beyond CAP reform through three mini cases. The first analyzes national government responses to the financial crisis, the second Japanese agricultural policy, and the third farmer influence over international trade negotiations. Across all three cases, each in different institutional settings, a common theme emerges: whatever changes to agricultural policy may be enacted, it is difficult if not impossible to impose spending cuts on farmers. Finally, the conclusion considers the implications of my argument for EU policymakers, for welfare retrenchers, and for scholars of social class transformation and decline.The CAP emerged out of a political deal between France and Germany. France agreed to support the common market, which would be of great benefit to Germany industry, while Germany agreed to support a common policy for agriculture. Essentially, this promise meant that Germany would be paying for French farmer subsidies, and in exchange, France would open its market to German manufactured goods. The Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957, established the European Economic Community , and with it, the common market. It also included plans for a common policy for agriculture to be established within five years. While the Treaty of Rome did not outline the design or operation of the CAP, it defined the objectives of the CAP as follows: “to increase productivity by promoting technical progress…to ensure a fair standard of living…by increasing the individual earnings of persons engaged in agriculture; to stabilize markets; to assure the availability of supplies; to ensure that supplies reach consumers at reasonable prices” . The operational details would be worked out in a series of conferences, meetings, and negotiations that followed the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, culminating in the formal launching of the CAP in 19626 . There was obviously some tension among CAP objectives, and the goal of ensuring products at reasonable prices for consumers would quickly be abandoned: the CAP would be grounded in a system of inflated prices, funded by taxpayers.When the CAP was established,raspberry planter famine was a recent memory, so there was concern for ensuring self-sufficiency in food. During WWII, Europe suffered from food crises ranging from shortages to famine. The Netherlands, for example, endured what is now known as the “Hunger Winter”, when an estimated 22,000 Dutch people died from starvation.

After the war, rationing was common as Europe struggled to feed itself. In Germany alone, the US, with support from the UK had, by 1948, provided nearly $1.5 billion in food aid. The memories of Europe’s food insecurity were, and remain, powerful. Indeed, in speaking to policymakers in the Netherlands about the importance of the CAP, nearly every official referenced the Hunger Winter, even those who would not have been alive at the time . One of the core goals of the architects of the CAP , was to ensure that Europe would always be able to feed itself by boosting agricultural productivity and output. CAP founders also had a social objective, seeking to close the income gap between farmers and industrial workers. In the years just before the creation of the CAP, a noticeable gap had developed between the average earnings of farmers and those of individuals employed in other fields, most notably industry. For example, in Germany in 1958-1959, farm incomes were equal to 76% of non-farmer incomes . The situation was equally grim in the other member states. In France in 1961, farm income was estimated at “3,280 French Francs for farm owners and 2,540 French Francs for farm workers” compared to 4,690 French Francs for industrial wage and salary earners . Policymakers feared that, without intervention, this wage gap would only worsen. The ultimate result would be an uncontrolled rural exodus, collapsing the countryside and overburdening cities, as farm workers sought more lucrative industrial jobs. The CAP sought to achieve the goals of increased production and improved earnings through a system of price guarantees, with agricultural prices set well above world market prices.The first was a set of high import tariffs and other measures to limit the import of agricultural goods. The second was a guarantee to engage in intervention buying, whereby the EU would purchase those goods in excess of EU customer demand at inflated prices. The third was a system of export subsidies that allowed the EU to dispose of the excess product on the world market. Essentially, this system guaranteed that all agricultural output would find not only a buyer, but one who was willing to pay a much higher price than what the market dictated. The CAP registered three major successes in its early years. First, food production, stimulated by high guaranteed prices, increased rapidly. The CAP enabled Europe to attain food security and self-sufficiency. The Continent would never again have to rely on the US to feed its people. The CAP generated a steady supply of core goods including cereals, milk, and butter. In addition, European consumers were provided with an abundant and diverse selection of produce. The second major achievement of the CAP was the modernization of European agriculture. The high prices that incentivized production generated capital that farmers could now reinvest in their farms. In the past, European farmers had tried and largely failed to compete with cheap imports, particularly of cereals, from the United States and Canada. European farms lagged behind the United States, and most farmers did not have the means to modernize and become competitive. The CAP’s high prices and tariff barriers sheltered European farmers from US competition. Farmers who benefited from high prices were able to reinvest their profits into both new technology and more land. New technology facilitated more and faster production at a lower cost. The third achievement of the CAP was to manage Europe’s transition from a primarily agrarian and rural society to an increasingly urban and industrial society. In other words, the CAP allowed for the peaceful management of the rural community’s transformation. The new system which offered higher guaranteed prices allowed smaller and less efficient farmers to stay on the land and eke out a living instead of abandoning it as they otherwise might have done. Thus, instead of a mass rural exodus and the subsequent collapse of countryside, this system slowed the process and cushioned the decline of agriculture. That is not to say that no one left farming under the CAP. Indeed, opportunities for early retirement facilitated the permanent exit of a small number of farmers in a controlled manner. In fact, exit from the sector was used to strengthen it, as the departure of predominantly small and inefficient farmers allowed the larger and more productive farmers to buy up more land. Essentially, exit permitted a transition to a more modern, efficient model of agriculture, grounded in large farms as opposed to small family or subsistence farms that had once dominated the European countryside. Most importantly, this goal was achieved humanely and without democratic collapse, social upheaval, or economic catastrophe.

Posted on

There are also limitations in the measurement of the variables we used for analysis

The exposure variable as well as covariates were all measured using self-reported survey data and subject to recall bias, which has been well described for exposure and disease studies. We limited recall bias in the survey by anchoring the past in memorable events such as recent rainy and dry seasons as well as holidays. While survey respondents sometimes found it difficult to precisely quantify household land area, the evidence for recall bias in agricultural surveys in sub-Saharan Africa is limited. Additionally, infection outcomes are limited by the sensitivity and specificity of available diagnostic methods: urine filtration for S. haematobium and duplicate Kato-Katz examination of two stool samples for S. mansoni. The detection methods used for S. haematobium are more sensitive compared to those used for S. mansoni , but the low sensitivity of diagnostic techniques used to detect S. mansoni infections—especially low intensity infections—may have contributed to the inconclusive results we observed for this parasite species. Our findings add a new dimension to the notion that the benefits of water resources development for food security are offset by infectious disease. While we cannot speak to the dam’s net impact, we find that schistosomiasis risk may be a result of land use for subsistence livelihoods as well as landscape-level environmental change. Residents of the lower basin of the Senegal River face an unfortunate trade-of where the prevailing economic activity may make them sick.Every bio-process in which cells are the final product or used in the production process requires suitable culture conditions for cell growth and product quality. In the rapidly growing cellular agriculture/cultivated meat industry, where cells are grown for consumption to replace carbon‐intensive and often unethical animal agriculture,plastic plant container cost‐effective media has been identified as the most critical aspect in scale‐up and commercialization .

Optimizing these conditions is difficult due to a large number of media components with nonlinear and interacting effects between cells, medium, matrix material, and reactor environment . Typically, culture media used for processes in cellular agriculture consist of a basal medium of glucose, amino acids, vitamins, and salts supplemented with fetal bovine serum for improved cell survival. FBS is an undefined, animal‐derived serum consisting of proteins, hormones, and other large molecular weight components, and contributes substantially to the cost of media . Even when enriched with additional growth factors or FBS, media is often far from optimal for all cell types and requires adaptation and/or optimization , which is difficult for media mixtures with >30 components, as is common in cell culture. To manage this complexity, design‐of‐experiments methods are often employed in which factors are set to a user‐specified value and outputs are measured . These DOE designs are arranged in such a way that statistically meaningful correlations can be found in fewer experiments than techniques like intuition, “one‐factor‐at‐a‐time” sequences, or random designs. A more advanced form of this is to use sequential, model‐based DOEs such as a radial basis function or Gaussian Process , combined with an optimizer/sampling policy, to automatically select sequences of optimal designs. These approaches are often more efficient than traditional DOE at optimizing systems using fewer experiments and allow for more natural incorporation of process priors , measurement noise , probabilistic output constraints and constraint learning , multi-objective , multi-point , and multi‐information source designs . Even with these methods available, limitations still exist. In previous work, we applied a machine learning approach to optimize complex media design spaces but had limited success due to the difficulty in measuring cell number for multi-passage growth . Therefore, in this study, we utilized a multi‐information source Bayesian model to fuse “cheap” measures of cell biomass with more “expensive” but higher quality measurements to predict long‐term medium performance.

We refer to the simpler and cheap assays as “low‐fidelity” IS, and more complex and expensive assays as “high‐fidelity” IS. While not always predictive of long‐term growth, these lower fidelity assays are at least correlated with cell health and can help in identifying interesting regions of the design space for further study with the high‐fidelity IS. We used this model, with Bayesian optimization tools, to optimize a cell culture medium with 14 components while minimizing the number of experiments, optimally allocating laboratory resources, and building process knowledge to improve our optimization scheme and model. In Section 2 we discuss the computational and experimental components of this BO method. In Section 3 we present the results of the BO method in comparison to a traditional DOE method, followed by Section 4 where we demonstrate the importance of fusing multiple sources of information to obtain relevant process knowledge and/or optimization results.The system under consideration was the proliferation of C2C12 cells. These cells are immortalized muscle cells with similar metabolism and growth characteristics as other adherent cell lines useful in the cellular agriculture industry. Cells were stored in 70% DMEM , 20% FBS , 10% dimethyl sulfoxide freeze medium at −196°C until thawed. Vials were thawed to 25°C and the freezing medium was removed by centrifugation at 1500 g for 5 min. The centrifuged cell pellet was resuspended in 17 ml of DMEM with 10% FBS and placed on 15 cm sterile plastic tissue culture dishes . Cells were incubated in a 37°C and 5% CO2 environment. After 24 h the medium was removed, the culture dish‐washed with Phosphate Buffer Solution , and fresh DMEM with 10% FBS was introduced. After an additional 24 h, cells were harvested using tripLE solution , diluted in PBS, and counted using Countess II with trypan blue exclusion and disposable slides . The process of removing cells from a plate, counting, and re‐plating them with fresh medium is called sub-culturing or passaging.

How well the C2C12 cells survive and grow after passaging is indicative of their long‐term potential in a large cellular agriculture process. The design space was comprised of the components and minimum/maximum concentrations listed in Table 1. These components were chosen because they are often used to supplement standard DMEM to improve cell growth; this represents a reasonable test case for the industrial application of these multi‐IS BO methods to the cellular agricultural industry. The composition of standard DMEM , is shown in Table 3, and should not be confused with the base DMEM “supplement” , which contains only amino acids, trace metals, salts, and vitamins and none of the other 14 components. pH and osmolarity are not controlled in this study, so act as latent variables.Production scale cellular agricultural processes will require >10 passages of cell growth so optimizing growth based on single‐passage information is not adequate . However, multi-passage growth assays are difficult/ expensive to measure, and even more difficult to optimize when given many components. We managed this complexity by coupling long‐term cell number measurements with simpler but less valuable rapid growth chemical assays in murine C2C12 cultures as a model system for cellular agricultural applications, capturing a more wholistic model of the process. We combined this with an optimization algorithm that efficiently allocates laboratory resources toward solving argmax D x for desirability function D x , a function that incorporates both cell growth and medium cost. This resulted in a 38% reduction in experimental effort, relative to a comparable DOE method, to find a media 227% more proliferative than the DMEM control at nearly the same cost. As the longer‐term passaging study suggests, our Passage 2 objective function and IS were well‐calibrated to mimicking the complex industrial process of growing large batches of cells over many passages,blueberry container with Passage 4 cell numbers well‐predicted by this objective function. The reasons for the success of the BO are myriad. The BO method iteratively refines a single process model to improve certainty in D x‐optimal regions, whereas the DOE relies on a series of BB designs where the older data sets are ignored because they were outside of the optimal factor space. The BO also used a variety of IS, whereas the DOE only used a single low‐fidelity AlamarBlue metric . Looking at Figure 8c, the AlamarBlue and LIVE tended to cluster around the point y = 1, making it difficult to distinguish between high‐quality and low‐quality media. This may be due to the deviation of linearity of the %AB and F530 metric at high biomass. The BO method also refined its multi‐IS model over the entire feasible design space, allowing it to take advantage of optimal combinations and concentrations of all 14 components over the entire domain, whereas the DOE needed to reduce the design and factor spaces to reduce the number of experiments needed, and may have identified the wrong optimal boundary locations resulting in suboptimal experimental designs. The BO method was also able to leverage information about process uncertainty to improve the model is poorly understood regions of the design space, whereas the steepest accent method used by the DOE chased after improved D x with little regard for overall noise or experimental errors.

This was worsened by the sensitivity of the polynomial model to random inter‐batch fluctuations in %AB, which may have driven the DOE to suboptimal media. Note that the success of our BO method should not be taken as generic superiority over all potential instantiations of DOE or commercial media used for C2C12 growth. While the BO method worked well at solving the experimental optimization problem, the multi‐IS GP accuracy was limited to highly sampled regions of the design space, thus limiting the efficacy of sensitivity analysis. This was a conscious decision made to trade off postfacto analysis for sampling media with high desirability D x . Accuracy was also limited by the low amount of data N available relative to the large dimensionality p, which is inherently the case in complex biological experiments where each batch of q experiments takes >1 week to evaluate. Finally, the hyperparameters θ* used in the multi‐IS squared exponential kernel were deliberately regularized with prior distributions to smooth the posterior of the prediction μ x . Regularization may have diminished the quality of the inter‐IS correlations; the model hyperparameters ignored features where IS differed in favor of a simpler correlative structure to explain the data. This is seen in Figure 8b,c, where the kernel evaluations show nearly equal inter‐IS correlative strength for most IS used. This may have “squished”/ignored features that could have provided additional information, but at the cost of sampling the design space too widely, again a deliberate choice of model skepticism towards outliers. Even with these limitations, the BO method clearly performs well on media optimization systems relevant to cellular agriculture, that is, those with multiple and potentially conflicting information sources with varying levels of difficulty in measuring. The media resulting from the BO algorithm supported significantly more C2C12 cell growth with only a small increase in cost. This algorithm performs better than traditional DOE in this case, especially in incorporating critical data from growth after the multiple passages in an affordable manner. With these results, it should be possible to implement this type of experimental optimization algorithm in other systems of importance to cellular agriculture and cell culture production processes with difficult‐to‐measure output spaces, including for optimization of serum‐free media for cell growth and for differentiation.Water management is becoming more challenging by the effects of climate change, population growth, and severe competition for water by the municipal, agricultural, industrial, and energy sectors. Accordingly, integrated water resources management focuses on water demand and supply management to achieve sustainable development. Water is a scarce resource essential for societal survival and functioning. This makes the application of integrated water resources management essential to cope with scarcity and the challenges posed by climate change and increased water demand to by expanding economies. A conceptual framework combining integrated landscape management and institutional design principles perspectives was applied to analyze cooperation initiatives involving water suppliers and agricultural stakeholders from agricultural wastewater. A national drought risk assessment for agricultural lands taking into account the complex interaction between different risk components was presented. The research showed that crop diversification, crop pattern management, and conjunctive water management can be effective in improving agricultural water.

Posted on

Each of the four output measures has strengths and weaknesses

Many have predicted that such nations must bear much of the responsibility to produce the varieties that will feed the world in the coming decades . The large number of breeding centers in China, the decentralized nature of its research system, and the great heterogeneity among its centers offer a unique research opportunity to identify the relationship between varietal production, size of institute, and mix of crops in the breeding program. Finally, the results are of interest to China’s leaders who recently have announced a new round of research reforms in agriculture . To make our analysis tractable, and because of budgetary constraints, we limited the scope of our study to the breeding institutes of two crops within northern China. We chose crop-breeding institutes because crop breeding has been central to the growth of agricultural productivity in China as well as in the world. In China, crop breeding takes the largest proportion of resources in its agricultural research system . Crop-breeding institutes were chosen also because their research outputs and their consequences can be measured relatively easily—compared with, say, less applied research, research oriented towards natural resources management, or research leading to disembodied technological change. Wheat and maize are two of the most important staple crops in China, ranking second and third respectively after rice in terms of sown area and production. Wheat and maize production occupy somewhat overlapping areas and a large share of China’s wheat and maize breeding programs are located in the same institutes and similar regions,pot raspberries which allows us to measure economies of scope.The small and highly significant coefficients of economies of scale imply a significant cost saving associated with expanding the scale of breeding institutes. Such results are robust Most of the data used in this study were collected by the authors during 12 months of field work in China that began in the summer of 2001. Enumerators assembled panel data from 46 wheat and maize breeding institutes covering the years from 1981 to 2000.

The sample institutes include 40 prefectural-level institutes and 6 provincial-run institutes, selected at random from a comprehensive list of prefectural and provincial institutes in seven major wheat and maize provinces in northern China.Thirty-two of the sample institutes produce both wheat varieties and maize varieties . Four institutes specialize in producing wheat varieties . The other ten produce only maize varieties .To collect the data, teams of enumerators visited each institute for periods of up to one week and completed a set of questionnaires filled out by accountants and by enumerators. In general, the data cover four broad categories: income, costs, research output, and data on other characteristics of the institute. Since the data were not kept by a single department in any of the institutes, a great deal of cross-checking was needed to make the data consistent among the various departments. For example, the research coordination department typically kept information on income and expenditures. Personnel departments provided the data on salaries, educational accomplishments, and other information about current and past staff. Breeders kept the best information on the varieties they produced and the methods that they used in their breeding efforts. To examine cost efficiency, information is needed on two key variables, costs and output, especially since there is an a priori reason to believe that the small scale of many institutes may be an important source of inefficiency. In using our survey data to define measures of these key variables, we have had to deal with several methodological issues. As an economic activity, crop breeding has several characteristics that make it relatively hard to measure output and match measures of output to measures of costs associated with those outputs. These characteristics include the long lags between the time when costs are incurred and the resulting output is realized , uncertainty about what is an appropriate measure of output both conceptually and in practice , and the fact that output itself is uncertain when costs are incurred .Our measure of the total variable costs of each crop’s breeding activities includes the institute’s operating expenses, such as salaries, project administration, and other direct operating expenses. For cost categories that cannot be matched directly to a breeding project , we assigned a share of the costs of each category to breeding according to the number of full-time breeding staff . We deflated total variable costs by a provincial consumer price index, putting our cost figures into real 1985 terms . We assume that the products of China’s wheat and maize variety “factories” are the varieties that the breeders produce that are adopted by farmers. To measure output, we collected information on the number of varieties that were produced by the research institutes , the area sown to the varieties, and the trial yields of each variety . With these data, we constructed four measures of research output: the number of varieties released by the institute sown in the field during a given year, the number of varieties, weighted by the trial yields of the variety , the total area sown to all of the institute’s varieties during a given year ; and the number of varieties weighted by sown area and trial yields .

Although it is the most readily measured, the obvious flaw with number of varieties is that it does not take into account any quality characteristics of each variety, either yield or its other characteristics . Yield-weighted output accounts for the relative productivity of a variety in pure output terms. However, such a measure still leaves out all other quality characteristics, which an earlier study shows may be highly valued by farmers . For this reason, our third measure, area-weighted output, should be superior to the other two measures. If farmers value the characteristics in a variety—whether high yields or some other characteristic—they demonstrate their preference by adopting the variety . The last measure, yield-area weighted output combines the second and third measures. Since the variation in trial yields is small, the correlations between the third and fourth output measures are high . Hence, we would not expect much difference to result from using one versus the other. One special feature of crop variety production is the significant time lag between the time when costs are incurred in a breeding research program and the time when the resulting research output is realized. This issue is commonly discussed in studies of the returns to agricultural R&D , especially in relation to specification of econometric models relating agricultural productivity to research expenditures. In the present setting, the lag between investment and output has some further implications, akin to those that arise more generally in agricultural production economics, associated with biological lags. In microeconomic theory texts, the firm manager first chooses an output level , and then determines the cost-minimizing combination of inputs that will produce that output at minimum cost. The crop breeding institute’s director does not have that luxury, because the output from today’s investment is uncertain and will not be known for many years . As an approximation to this problem of decision-making under uncertainty, we might suppose that the director seeks to minimize the institute’s cost based on current expectations of the output that will be produced in the future as a result of the current research expenditures. Unfortunately,plastic gardening pots we cannot observe or measure, ex post, such expectations. One option is to use the output that was actually produced from the expenditures as a proxy of those expectations, but the problem remains of matching actual outputs to particular expenditures .

To deal with this problem empirically, we defined an average research lag to represent the number of years between the time when a breeding project officially begins and the time when a variety is released for commercial extension to the fields of farmers. Using this defined lag length, we modeled the cost of variety production as a function of the research output produced after a certain lag. To find the length of lag, we designed a section of the questionnaire to ask breeders in each of the 46 institutes specifically to estimate the average lag length for each crop. Based on the data we collected, the average lag length was 5.3 years for wheat and 4.5 years for maize. In our base model, we used a 5-year lag for both wheat and maize variety production. However, we also tried different lag lengths to check the robustness of our results. China’s agricultural research system has produced a steady flow of crop varieties in the past. On average, in each year during the period 1982-1995, China’s farmers grew 200 to 300 wheat varieties and 130 to 180 maize varieties in their fields . However, the number of new varieties being produced by research institutes varied significantly over time and across institutes. Based on our survey, 141 wheat varieties and 155 maize varieties were produced by our sample institutes during the period 1985- 2000 . Nineteen percent of the wheat varieties were developed by provincial institutes. The rate of production of new wheat and maize varieties increased over time. For example, prefectural maize institutes produced 34 maize varieties during 1985-1990, 47 varieties during 1990-1995, and 74 during 1995-2000. The number of wheat varieties created and commercialized by the sample institutes rose from 31 in 1985-1990 to 55 during each subsequent period . The number of varieties, however, varies sharply among institutes. For example, the Henan provincial wheat institute produced 12 wheat varieties from 1985 to 2000. The Mianyang prefectural crop breeding institute in Sichuan produced 14 wheat varieties. In contrast, 24 out of 36 of the sample wheat institutes produced fewer than 5 varieties. In fact, three wheat institutes did not produce a single variety during the entire 15-year sample period. Maize variety production also varies greatly among the sample institutes.In the same way that output varies across time and space, so does total cost. On average, the annual real total variable costs of the breeding program per institute for our sample of wheat institutes increased from 24,000 yuan to 38,000 yuan between 1981 and 2000. Similarly, the average annual total variable breeding cost for our sample of maize institutes rose from 38,000 to 53,000 yuan.The total cost of wheat and maize breeding, however, varies greatly among institutes. For example, the average provincial institute invested five times more in wheat breeding and about six times more in maize breeding than the average prefectural institute did. When comparing prefectural breeding stations, the total cost of wheat breeding in one institute could be more than three times that of the average prefectural institute. Dandong prefectural institute in Liaoning spent five times more than the average maize-breeding institute did. The average cost of variety production also varies from institute to institute and can be seen to vary systematically with research output. To compare costs and output, we have to account for the research lag. In the analysis that follows, research output is the annual mean of five years’ total research output from one of three five-year periods, 1985-1990, 1991-1995 and 1996-2000. The average annual cost associated with this output is the annual mean of five years’ total cost, lagged by five years. Therefore, the corresponding three five-year periods of cost are, respectively, 1980-1985, 1986-1990 and 1990-1995. Unlike total costs, average costs fall as the institutes produce more varieties . For wheat the cost per variety falls from 152,000 yuan for breeding institutes that produce only one variety to 60,000 yuan for those that produce more than four varieties. Similar patterns can be seen in the data when using area-weighted output. A plot of the data reveals a distinct L-shaped relationship between average cost and the size of research output .No matter what measure of output is used, or for what crop, as research output increases, the average cost of breeding research falls. The L-shaped relationship also is robust, holding over time and over institutes . The sharp fall in average costs of breeding as an institute’s output rises suggests that China’s wheat and maize research institutes are producing in an output range with strong economies of scale, such that efficiency might be increased by expanding the scale of production of China’s wheat and maize research institutes.

Posted on

We find striking evidence of strong economies of scale in crop breeding in China

The role and aim of food experiences is, therefore, not necessarily only to provide its customers with fresh produce but also to instill and create a sense of community for both the citizen as well as the consumer, who are no longer viewed as two separate categories. This historical division of consumer and citizen is rather questionable , and in recent literature the meanings of consumption, and thus use of things, are treated, rightly, with much seriousness as the full meanings and uses of objects to the consumer is more fully unfolded and understood. This is done even to the point where the object makes the human actors, involved with its transformation, its subjects. This can be seen in a historical perspective , or using present research methodologies of nonhuman agency . Event studies have, also, recently emerged as an original field of investigation separate from tourism and marketing, traditionally the most prominent areas of event research, although celebrations, events and exhibitions – in all their forms – have been used extensively within anthropology and sociology for multiple purposes. Today, there are entire dissertations focusing on food events, including analyses of different food scapes . The meanings of the “festive and/or affective food scape” in these last writings are multiple and their influence on both individuals and structures should not be underestimated in regards to community building and branding. These works show how certain food festivals thrive in some communities but not in others, and they document the continuing importance of food festivals, both internally and externally, for the hosting communities, as well as their branding of and economic potentials for the hosting city. Food events are legitimized by both social arguments of community building and economic arguments relating more to branding and economic benefits for participating cities. But it is not necessarily the events’ potentials to unite all these well-intended societal/economical intentions,maceteros reciclados de plastico be they based in community, communicative and economic wel-fare and/or reassuring reconciliation between the roles of the consumer and citizen; any surge in planned celebrations and events could also be a sign of what has been labelled a form of neo-localism.

A localism that – paradoxically – might have arisen due to the removal of spatial barriers and the emergence of globalised society: “The elaboration of place-bound identities has become more rather than less important” . Place, and its celebration is, therefore, pursued, valued and marketed more, exactly because its significance, in the traditional sense, is actually vanishing. When you can go anywhere, you want to be somewhere, and somewhere that is perceived as “real.” It should be noted that this form of boosterism using events is not a new phenomenon. In an American context agricultural celebrations and fairs have been used extensively to promote rural places . These events even serving as “feeders” of exhibition materials and activities to the World Fairs, which, arguably, together with the Olympics, have been the events to host for any international metropolis, or those seeking to become one, through the late nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, and to which we will return. There are several explanations and theories as to the rise of the importance of experiences in most developed countries. Pine and Gilmore mention the structural development that people, in general, have accumulated more expendable income to spend on experiences overall. Experiences and events can therefore be seen as the transitory symptom/symbol of moving from an industrial society to a knowledge/service society. This development of an experience economy is also linked to the commercialization of traditions and “glocalization” of culture coupled with a general broadening in people’s cultural orientation, where individuals are not necessarily limited to one way of life, but can throughout their lives experience and/or consume many different lifestyles. It is sometimes suggested that social interaction and related experiences are on the decline in contemporary society . The bedevilled individualization is often accused of being the main perpetrator of this decline, though studies suggest that neither sociability nor its associated experiences and events are under threat. A larger study by Ingen & Dekker makes the case that many perceptions held about the decline of traditional community pursuits and celebrations is not necessarily due to less sociability, but can be explained, rather, by an increase in informalization processes.

This means that traditional social activities, be they through formal memberships in clubs, associations or otherwise, might be replaced, or supplemented, by more informal settings and occasions that do not require memberships or particular spatial environments, for instance. The decline in – say – bowling memberships can thus be offset by other social interaction less recordable, but not necessarily less sociable. This process of informalization could be viewed as part of a larger social “re-arrangement” where individuals partaking in the “Network Society” find new outlets and forms to interact and express sociability: “Knowledge transfer takes place within defined circuits between different groups and ‘scenes’ in the creative sector. One of the essential requirements of this system is physical spaces where people can meet and validate new cultural forms, or ‘play-grounds of creativity’ such as cafes, squares, museum foyers. These are also the new spaces that are often so attractive to tourists” .Castell’s, himself, is an advocate of networks to further sociability for the individual – though admittedly these expressions will be mostly utilized by already well-connected people, and critical voices are heard as to the nature of such “networking individuals and their sociability”: “The mobility and independence of network nomads who swing from contact to contact and project to project, socially and spatially, without insisting on a consistent self image, is now considered the most valuable asset of human capital” . Increased individualization, or individual freedom, might actually lead to more sociability as expressed through events and other informal spatial arrangements. These might differ slightly or significantly from the form and content of their predecessors of yesteryears, but their use as vehicles of expression and meaning to community and beyond surely remains – though, admittedly, community and associated meanings might also be ontologically different than yesteryears’, if we agree, that we are moving from industrial to knowledge society in the developed world. Urbanization has become coupled with the legitimization of new economic instruments and parameters and their importance, where events and cultural symbols play a determining role, as metropolises compete globally for attention and money through culture-economic initiatives, while midsized cities compete regionally, and so on.

The particular frequency and intensity of urban competition and development might be particular to contemporary society, but using events and experiences to further urbanization is not new. The Olympic Games, for instance, have been used extensively as a “catalyst of urban change” throughout the twentieth century: “What began simply as a festival of sport has grown into an unusually conspicuous element in urban global competition and, for its host cities, a unique opportunity to attract publicity, bring in investment and modernize their infrastructures and images” . And it might not just be commercialization of traditions taking place but also traditionalization, or “culturalization,” of commerce or the mix of worldly and spiritual spheres. Marxists might interpret this next step as the ultimate alienation of man and nature secured through an advanced form of commodity fetishism as exemplified by Debord’s “Spectacle Society” , but its materiality and presence in everyday life is undeniable, and perhaps most illustratively performed at the celebrations and events of our times. Could such developments be due to the merger between citizen and consumer? The blurred lines between citizen/consumer might work to influence both market and non-market,fabrica de macetas plasticas as the market is attached to traditional non-market values and vice versa as is evident in the rise of farmers markets, food co-ops, for instance. It should be noted, however, that the strong division between that of the consumer and citizen could be somewhat of an historical illusion, as the two categories have always transgressed and shared common areas . Again such sharp distinctions could be due to an idealization of the past, whose societies so often are narrated as less complex than present society. Food, and to some degree agriculture, and its associated experiences, carry much significance today, as symbols of the longevity, and dare one say the sustainability of societies and communities in general, and as media and/or vehicles for social change, as well as a symbolic and very real mark of distinction and identity. These observations are in themselves nothing new, as previous literature has proficiently shown that food and its associated experiences have been used in multiple ways . But the particular form and associated expressions and meanings associated with these might be, somewhat, unique to our present times. It is hard not to recognise the influence of the “risk society” in the above themes and the themes they invoke, along, or together, with the perceived negative separation between man and nature that is reminiscent of earlier literature also involving the urban/rural continuum, which suggests real differences between urbanity and rurality , dismisses these differences , or suggests that the urban/rural continuum continues to hold real significance as part of an identification of special rural and urban qualities .

The rural/urban continuum illustrates, perhaps better than anything, the condition of post modernity where “imagined” and/or perceived differences are as important as any “real” measurable differences – indeed reality is guided by perceptions of the “other” and associated places. Due to increased mobility, place should, in theory, matter less, but this does not seem to be the case. The importance of place, and its celebration, can be explained by increasing globalization and homogenization – including cultural commodification and standardization – where global structures are often associated with homogenizing markets and local structures associated with diverse community values, the latter often being perceived as intrinsically better exactly because of its locality or adherence to place. Though literature of historic consumption provides ample examples of how global trade interacts and changes the local , and that viewing the local as a separate entity from the global might be counterproductive and/or naïve. The strongly felt presence of concepts such as authenticity, could be explained due to the, perceived, alienation between man and nature/agriculture generating farmers markets, school gardens etc. to cure ills and provide solutions that have barely been articulated before like eco-literacy or food literacy. Authenticity can, also, provide individuals living under the, perceived, fragmented and illusive condition of post-modernism a re-assurance of their future choices by invoking ties to nature and community, which are seen as good due to their perceived universal/stable/traditional structures. Again this complexity, and the acknowledgement of its existence, can actually strengthen the desire for authenticity. Authenticity within food consumption and places can thus be viewed as an elitist concept that through the appropriation of communal spaces and individual consumption patterns makes opaque the ‘actual’ societal and political structures that guide our food consumption and understanding. But also it could be seen as the first step toward a new way of thinking about food and social systems and food scapes that dares to question the productivist rationale of modernism and its spatial expressions, invoking and awakening a new understanding of, and relation between, the local and global – probably it will do both. This conceptual sentiment of doing both is perhaps the “true” lesson of post-modernism, if we accept its premise. Concepts like authenticity have the thematic potentials to address conflicting messages and provide contradictory explanations to societal issues. Maybe this ability is also mirrored in our materiality of the twenty-first century and the growing acknowledgement that we can produce more of everything for everybody and still – even if it is “only” on a perceptual level – miss that something of the past, imagined or otherwise. The increased individualization might run parallel to an increased socialization. But both are different forms and hold different aspects and experiences than individuality and sociability thirty, or even a hundred years ago. Providing credence to the concept of a universal humanism that is shared, but also one that is provided new meanings and forms by its participants, both good and bad, throughout history. Indeed, and this is the paradox, the mastery and control of nature which is the basis of our modern food systems can be perceived as alienating and unnerving.

Posted on

Concentrations were calculated using an established air-sampling rate

At the 15 targeted nephelometer locations, plus an additional 14 locations near the burns, trained local personnel placed passive samplers to measure particulate matter and naphthalene for 24 to 120 hours and then sent the samplers to our laboratory for analysis. Due to winds shifting from the predicted direction, our samplers were directly downwind only at the Dunham burn. At that burn, although passive samplers were mounted on several telephone poles immediately adjacent to the burned field, only one PM10 nephelometer was successfully deployed. Highly elevated PM10 values were observed at the Dunham downwind monitor: a maximum hourly concentration of 6,500 µg per cubic meter occurred from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m., then a dramatic decline to 4.3 µg per cubic meter by 4:00 p.m. The average 24-hour PM10 concentration at this Dunham location was 276 µg per cubic meter, well above the federal criteria for unhealthy air, 150 µg per cubic meter . Although we only successfully deployed one monitor, the highly elevated concentrations were consistent with PM10 levels reported in another study of a burned field . Photo evidence was also consistent with visibility of less than 1 mile, which is expected at hazardous air levels . As noted, wind speed at this burn was somewhat higher than at the other burns . At several of the other 12 nephelometer locations, much smaller peaks were apparent in PM2.5 and PM10 after the burns were initiated, up to 57 µg per cubic meter of PM10 within the hour. Similar to the E-BAM findings, evening-to-morning peaks in PM2.5 and PM10 were observed. Although all of these peaks were relatively brief , these measurements were collected at places of public access, and even short-term exposures may have health risks. An increase in PM2.5 concentrations in air samples from city centers as low as 10 µg per cubic meter for as little as 2 hours has been associated with increased daily mortality in the surrounding population .At the laboratory, computer-controlled scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy were used to obtain the individual sizes and chemistry of particles collected on the samplers. Then, PM2.5 and PM10–2.5 concentrations and particle size distributions were calculated using assumed particle density and shape factors and a particle deposition velocity model . In samples from the downwind locations at the Dunham burn,macetas plásticas por mayor concentrations of both PM2.5 and PM10–2.5 were elevated compared to an upwind sample. The fine fraction was primarily carbonaceous with a peak at the sub-micron range , while the coarse fraction had a lower carbonaceous percentage .

These carbonaceous percentages were higher than those measured upwind for fine and coarse fractions, as well as those reported for fine and coarse fractions in San Joaquin Valley ambient air . The coarse fraction in the downwind sample also had higher percentages of potassium, phosphorus and chlorine . Potassium and chlorine are considered potential indicators of biomass smoke , and phosphorus is found in most plant material. We also analyzed samples of unburned and burned bermudagrass and found that among inorganic elements, they contained similar peaks of potassium, phosphorus and chlorine . Their identification here may assist air pollution researchers attempting to identify sources of particulate matter in air samples. Naphthalene. Samples were analyzed for vapor-phase naphthalene by gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy.Naphthalene was occasionally detected at the five targeted burns with levels above the reportable limit at seven of the 23 locations near the burns and at one of the six more-distant locations . The highest level was detected in a sampler placed directly downwind of the Dunham burn. That highest level was lower than a reference level for respiratory effects , but only two samples were collected directly downwind and concentrations elsewhere in the plume could have been higher or lower. To compare, vapor-phase naphthalene measured in a laboratory from directly above the burning of agricultural debris was 60 µg per cubic meter . To assess health educational needs, we interviewed community leaders, community residents, farmers and school representatives from the agricultural area of Imperial County. We used a qualitative method called Key Informant Interviews , which allows for candid and in depth responses and the characterization of how interviewees discover and act on information. Potential participants were informed that the interview would take 30 to 60 minutes and that responses would be anonymous. If a respondent declined an interview, no information was recorded. Community leaders. Ten community leaders were interviewed out of 15 contacted. Those interviewed held management positions within either county environmental health agencies, nonprofit agencies that supported agriculture, or environmental organizations that promoted clean air. More than half of the community leaders ranked burning as a medium or high concern for their organization. Respondents representing the agricultural industry considered outreach important because, as one respondent said, “The public’s view of burning is fairly negative.” Suggestions for educational outreach included training for staff on the health impacts of smoke and “simple recommendations, options of actions to take during a burn.” Residents. 

Seven interviews were conducted after we contacted 15 residents who lived either in single-family homes or apartments within 2 miles of fields. Most considered burning a high or medium health concern compared to other community health concerns. One person said, “You’re closing doors and windows, just trying to keep the smoke out.” No respondent had ever called or inquired with government agencies. One respondent explained, “We all have to live with our neighbors. . . it would be difficult to file a complaint or inquiry.” None of the respondents were aware of any educational materials. Farmers. Of 30 farmers that we contacted, three agreed to participate. All three burned bermudagrass or wheat fields, thousands of acres in some years. The farmers discussed the benefits: as one explained, “Burned fields are more profitable.” All had considered disking their fields or using minimum tillage as an alternative to burning, which they had learned about by trial and error. All three discussed a certificate program used by the Air Pollution Control District to accredit and stimulate financial rewards for farmers who do not burn . All three also had voluntarily notified their neighbors about planned field burns. .School representatives. Out of 30 contacted, we interviewed five teachers or superintendents who each worked at a separate school or district near historically burned fields. School representatives were concerned about enforcement. Their suggestions included: “Have people call a number if they notice illegal burning or something suspect” and implement “stiff penalties for those who don’t [follow burning rules].” They had ideas about community education, such as public service announcements on television. Two respondents, who were not enthusiastic about doing outreach, said, “There’s so much that we have to do.” This consideration may have also been part of the reason why the participation rate was low for key informants in this group, and possibly the farmer group.Responses from our key informants indicated that educational messages were needed. We developed two-page fact sheets for three Imperial County audiences — the general public, school representatives and farmers. These covered the reasons for burning, burn regulations, potential health impacts and behavioral recommendations to reduce exposures. In our studies,cultivo del arandano azul elevated particulate matter levels and visible drift were observed as far as 500 feet from the edge of burning fields, and wind directions could quickly change. We advised that anyone who could see or smell smoke or was within 300 feet of a burning field should go inside. If people had to be outside near a burning field, we recommended face-piece particulate respirators , which are available at most hardware stores. A worker who must be outdoors and near a burn must be in a respiratory protection program that includes medical evaluations and fit-testing of the respirator’s seal on the worker’s face . A draft of the fact sheet for the general public was tested with community members at a health clinic and shopping center. Although there were complaints about its length, the fact sheet was highly rated for usefulness: all 20 participants gave it either a four or a five on a scale of one to five . The final fact sheets were distributed to local organizations and are available on the Internet .In our studies, agricultural burning created potentially hazardous air levels immediately downwind; during evening-to-morning hours, PM2.5 levels increased 2 to 8 µg per cubic meter.

Many studies have associated total daily human mortality with mean daily particulate matter levels measured in urban centers, and some have observed a relationship at levels as low as 2 µg per cubic meter . In California, increases in children’s total daily hospital admissions for respiratory problems are also associated with increases in daily PM2.5 and potassium air levels, the latter an indicator of biomass smoke . To protect public health and potentially reduce exposures to smoke from agricultural burns, we recommend additional health education, smoke management and air quality research. Health education. Fact sheets are needed for other California counties where agricultural burning takes place, as well as educational materials for outdoor and field workers about respiratory mask protection and smoke visibility guidelines . As interviewees suggested, broader community education could include public service announcements. Smoke management. Currently, CARB declares a permissive-burn day when meteorological conditions ensure the regional dispersion of smoke, for example, a wind speed at 3,000 feet of at least 5 miles per hour . Imperial County’s smoke management plan states that the Air Pollution Control District may put in place additional restrictions based on meteorological and air quality conditions, including strong ground-level or gusty winds . We observed substantial drift at a slightly greater wind speed than that previously suggested for a vertical column of smoke to occur . Local Air Pollution Control Districts could reduce ground level drift by specifying a ground-level wind speed above which burns should not take place. Additionally, evening to-morning levels of particulate matter could be reduced if warranted by other restrictions, such as shortening allowable burn hours. Interviewed residents expressed reluctance to report neighbors who might be out of compliance. Supplemental Imperial County Air Pollution Control District activities could include online instructions about how to make a complaint. In addition, posting visibility guidelines for hazardous drift and a daily listing of the areas in the county where burns were scheduled would improve community notification. Research. Additional air monitoring is needed to further characterize the nature and extent of ground-level plumes and how they are affected by local crop type and conditions. Although crop-specific particulate emission factors from burning bermudagrass stubble have not yet been developed, factors for other grasses, such as Kentucky bluegrass, are about twice those for rice and wheat . The moisture level of burned residue can also significantly affect particulate matter emissions, with a change in moisture from 10% to 25% more than tripling particulate emissions during the burning of rice, wheat and barley straw . Ambient monitoring should also include indoor air, as outdoor PM2.5 may substantially infiltrate buildings , and we observed that outdoor particulate matter increases overnight when people are likely to be inside. Residents may be amenable to researchers installing unobtrusive passive samplers to monitor indoor air. In further studies, methods might be modified to allow the further identification of carbonaceous material, the gaseous component of other PAHs and some of the thousands of other volatile gases found in smoke . Information is also needed on whether residents are following recommendations to reduce their exposure to smoke from agricultural burning. Finally, farmers expressed a willingness to try alternative farming practices, notably tilling. We recommend further study of alternative farming techniques such as conservation tillage, which may reduce the need for burning, conserve water and soil, and reduce air quality impacts . In addition, integrating livestock grazing with grain and hay farming as a substitute for burning or tilling may reduce pests, herbicide use and erosion and provide additional income . Further study is needed on how farmers could viably integrate alternative techniques into current practices, particularly for local crops such as bermudagrass, and the estimated human health impacts of such changes.

Posted on

Penal farms were laboratories of economic botany and labor control

The implications of this coincidence in timing were not lost on the USDA officials who rallied behind annexation of the Philippines. OFSPI director David Fairchild thought the USDA should “send an expedition with the invading army to gather together such information and material, plants, seeds, etc., as would give an idea to the resources of the country.” USDA Secretary James Wilson pushed for direct oversight of the archipelago.Both men anticipated opening a tropical research institute in the Philippines modeled on the Lands Plantentium in Buitenzorg, Java—then the premier colonial research institute in equatorial Asia.Fairchild, who had studied at Buitenzorg during his collection expeditions in Southeast Asia, wrote that the institute awakened him to “the possibilities there are in the organizing of such colonies if they are properly managed.”American annexation of the Philippines the next year did not result in formal USDA offices in the colony. Instead, USDA botanists and crop and farm machinery specialists staffed a separate Philippine Bureau of Agriculture that retained close ties with the USDA. Secretary Wilson urged the PBA’s first director, Frank Lamson Scribner, to work with the needs of an industrializing American economy in mind. “Fibers, coffee, rubber, spices, and such things as we cannot produce should have most attention.”Coconuts, notably, were missing from this list. Coconuts came onto the radar of the Philippine Bureau of Agriculture through the food experiences of soldiers and trans-imperial scientific exchanges facilitated by research centers like Buitenzorg. Wary of canned commissary foods following the “embalmed beef scandal” in which cheap meat tinned in Chicago poisoned soldiers in Cuba, US privates flush with cash turned to the communities they were occupying for food. René Alexander D. Orquiza’s mining of soldiers’ letters shows how a taste for coconuts and native foods turned soldiers into boosters for the development of Philippine food industries.Private Andrew Pohlman wrote home that, “[w]e learned that the interior of a young coconut tree would furnish a meal which was not complete for heavy marching but it did not make us sick,cultivo de frambuesas as some meals in the company mess.”

The PBA sent economic botanists and plant explorers to Java, Sri Lanka, and Ceylon to investigate tropical crops. These travels resulted in the PBA’s first report on the coconut plant and copra trade, authored by William S. Lyon in 1903. Lyon’s report detailed the impressment of the coconut into an emerging military-industrial complex as an oleochemical, a general term for a vegetable fat with industrial applications. “Chemical science,” Lyon wrote, “produced from the cocoanut a series of food products whose manufacture has revolutionized the industry and placed the business of the manufacturer and of the producers upon a plane of prosperity never before enjoyed.”French chemists in Marseilles distilled from copra lauric acid, an essential washing agent, and incorporated coconut oil into oleomargarine, a solid fat composed of beef tallow, water, and a vegetable oil such as coconut valued for its shelf stability. By 1902, four or five large factories in France met the “world’s demand for ‘vegetaline,’ ‘cocoaline,’ or other products with suggestive names, belonging to this infant industry.”The high triglyceride content of coconut oil led British chemists to investigate its potential as a source of nitroglycerin when heated under pressure with an alkali such as lye. According to one mid-twentieth century account, the “recovery of [nitro]glycerin” from copra was twenty-five to thirty percent higher than that of other high lauric acid vegetable oils.The coconut tree—and by extension its planters, pickers, and Pacific landscapes—were incorporated into an industrial war machine. So valuable were coconuts during the Great War that the British Home Office imposed high duties on copra exports from the colonies. The shredded husks, meanwhile, became gas mask filters protecting soldiers from chemical weapons. The war that began as a response to the geopolitical rivalries of technological imperialism was fought over and with the biological materials of empire.In addition to detailing the economic potential of copra, Lyon offered a set of proscriptions for the growth of a Philippine copra export industry. This included bioengineering a tree best suited to the needs of a plantation economy. Coastal palm trees fruited infrequently due to the need to expend more energy on root growth in search of subterranean nutrition. Inland trees, by contrast, directed that energy toward trunk growth which, when paired with top pruning, encouraged greater flowering. Far from the spindly tree of the tropical imagination, the coconut tree of the plantation economy was a short and squat prolific flowerer.

Further travels through the coconut zone endowed PBA botanists with insight into how to manipulate trees to frequent flowering. Thomas P. Hanley, a special agent in charge of farm machinery, reported that a chance train ride from Colombo to Kandy placed him “in the acquaintance of an educated Singalese” who owned a plantation “upon which he made coconut growing a specialty.” The unnamed informant shared that the trees generated best when spaced twenty-five to thirty feet apart, which in turn mandated more acreage for each plantation. The resulting dwarf trees better withstood strong winds and “the fruit can easily be gathered by our native boys, who are accustomed to the work.”The biggest challenge to the potential coconut planter, though, was attracting investment capital while the tree took seven years from planting to mature. Here, agents of the colonial state filled in, proving the efficacy of large coconut plantation by using forced labor on penal farms. PBA scientists and colonial administrators moved seamlessly between service to the colonial state and their own private agricultural entrepreneurial schemes. Key to this rotation was their access to unfree Filipino laborers and their ability to attract American investors to the archipelago. No figure better embodies this set of relations than Dean Conant Worcester. Worcester, a University of Michigan-trained zoologist, made two late-nineteenth-century collecting expeditions to South America and Southeast Asia along a Brazil to the Philippines route first blazed by British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace.Worcester may have remained in Michigan had not the American war against Spain generated press and political interest in its largest Pacific colony. Worcester and his former expedition partner, Frank S. Bourns, published a series of articles detailing the history of Spanish misrule, the archipelago’s untapped natural wealth, and the Philippine “types” too divided to constitute an independent nation.Worcester’s deft pen and expert self-promotion earned him a post on the governing Philippine Commission, a seven-member body appointed by the US president. Worcester served as the commission’s “director of the interior” until 1913, making him one of the longest-serving US administrators in a colonial government known for short tenures. Worcester’s longevity was due, in part, to his portrayal of US rule as a defense of upland “tribal peoples” from more Hispanicized yet vicious lowland “Malays.” The portrayal earned Worcester the enduring ire of the Philippine landowning elite but was nonetheless embedded into the racial geography of empire.

While elite power forced Philippine commissioners to work out power-sharing agreements in the form of an elected Assembly, commissioners and the American military retained direct oversight in areas deemed “non-Christian.” The racial division effectively gave Worcester’s Interior Bureau an open hand to mine Luzon’s upland Cordillera for mineral wealth and to work alongside the US military government in the southern “Moro Province,” a vast area that included the island of Mindanao. Among Worcester’s many initiatives were explorations into gold mining in Benguet, Luzon; the introduction of cattle grazing in Bukindon, Mindanao; and ample assistance to Bourns’s Philippine Lumber and Development Company,maceta 40 litros which maintained interests across the islands. Finally, with the PBA under his purview, Worcester was in close touch with Lyon and the chemists who had turned their attention toward the copra.Worcester’s 1911 pamphlet, “Coconut Growing in the Philippines,” beckoned investors to the islands.His rhetoric is an exemplar of the strategies agricultural entrepreneurs invoked to draw financial capital to the growing fruit empires in the Pacific and Central America. Agricultural entrepreneurs balanced their praise for the natural capacity of equatorial lands with a condemnation of the “native” practices that failed to develop robust export economies. “The agricultural methods of the natives,” Worcester wrote, “have violated every known rule. Seldom has the ground been really prepared for planting. The trees invariably stand too thickly. The Filipino cannot rid himself of the idea that the more seed he sows the greater will be his harvest.” Such carelessness produced the dreaded “tall spindling trees” that bore “nuts sparingly.” Yet, despite the waste, “the Philippine Islands produced during the fiscal year ended June 30, 1909, approximately 231,787,050 pounds of copra … This output excels that of Java, of the Straits Settlements, of Ceylon, or of the South Sea Islands, and places the Philippines at the head of the list of coconut growing countries. In fact, during the year mentioned the Philippines produced about one third of the world’s output.”Worcester asked his investor-reader to imagine the potential if Philippine labor could be disciplined to scientific methods. “If this result has been obtained under the haphazard methods in vogue, what may be anticipated when due care is exercised in selecting suitable land, when it is properly cleared and planted, and when suitable cultivation is continued while the young trees are growing and after they begin to produce?”The pamphlet paid immediate dividends. Worcester boasted to the army general Frank McIntyre that he was “glad the publication was insisted upon, because it has already brought a good bit of money out here for investment in coconut growing. There are two men in the islands now hunting land.

One of them has $250,000 available, and the other has $50,000 with the assurance of more as fast as it is needed.”The prison was the institution by which Americans disciplined Philippine labor to copra exports. The declared end of war in 1902 saw the transformation of insurgents from enemies of the state to criminals. The Philippine Constabulary, an archipelagic wide police force composed of American leadership and Philippine recruits, continued the wartime practice of concentrating subversive communities, policed new crimes such as vagrancy, and accompanied US land surveyors and scientific expeditions throughout the islands. The Constabulary’s arrest policies effectively created a pool of laborers to build an extractive infrastructure of roads, plantations, and penal farms. Five hundred “well-behaved” prisoners constructed a road between the Province of Albay’s Tabaco and Ligao municipalities. “In this way,” wrote one commissioner, “one of the most beautiful roads in the archipelago was constructed, and served a most useful purpose, as it tapped a region very productive of Manila hemp.”In southern Luzon’s Laguna province, an additional five hundred prisoners constructed roads to serve the young coconut industry. Laguna Provincial Governor Cailles requested that “Moros, Ilocanos, Bicols, and Visayans, but not Tagalogs” be sent to the Tagalogspeaking province so that the prison laborers would not escape. Cailles ordered each man to wear a “light chain welded around his ankle and fastened to his belt, so that he cannot move without making a slight clanking sound” and displayed the bullet-ridden body of one unfortunate soul who attempted to escape.In Mindanao, military governor Leonard Wood oversaw a prison labor road-building project between Overton and Marahui, an area that American officials hoped to devote to rubber plantations.The two largest were the San Ramon colony in Zamboanga, Mindanao and the Iwahig colony on the island of Palawan. The San Ramon penal farm in Zamboanga, Mindanao housed Muslim dissidents and an early order called for the planting of cacao, rubber, hemp, coffee, and a variety of vegetables in addition to coconuts on the prison’s approximately one thousand four hundred and fifteen hectares.The cacao orchard failed, and rubber did not take but coconut thrived. Bureau of Agriculture officials “urgently” recommend that “labor, farming tools, and draft animals be found to ready the ground for an additional 200,000 coconut trees.”By 1915, the colony’s coconut plantation had twenty-five thousand mature trees, nine thousand seedlings awaiting transplanting, and five thousand sprouts in seed beds. The penitentiary also included a state-of-the-art drying house, which sped the drying process by controlling the heat. Officials selected Iwahig for a penal farm due to its proximity to the deep-water port, Puerta Princessa. As “virgin” land, that plantation required vast amounts of wartime labor to clear the site’s dense and bio-diverse rain forest.