Emerging research suggests that decolonizing the international view of seal products and shifting the ontology around the definitio of sustainability would be a step toward increasing food security and correspondingly, food sovereignty for the Inuit . The Nyéléni Declaration and La Vía Campesina imply, but fall short of, explicitly advocating for local control and resource ownership. This is likely because the movements inclusively advocate on behalf of tenant farmers, landless people, and other marginalized populations. However, local governance and ownership over resources and supply chains, including processing and distribution channels, are critical to upholding the right to food and to ensuring that future agricultural production is sustainable over time . Local control over resources, including the supply chain, facilitates local harvesting and access to fresh food that might otherwise be viewed as valuable export commodities. In North America, the gradual transition of returning land and resources to Indigenous populations is expected to gain momentum in years to come. There is opportunity to “relearn” the cycles of nature that have sustained Indigenous civilization over time. However, there is also growing awareness that boreal environments are dynamic; climate change presents uncertain impacts on future food harvesting practices. Moreover, resource transitions and co-governance with Indigenous communities has not necessarily been particularly smooth, as the Atlantic lobster fishery and building of the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric dam have shown.Food sovereignty is often interpreted to entail necessary conditions of local food consumption and distribution. Practices of and returns on trade directly would support food sovereign practices through commodity supply chains that closely connect farms and consumers, reducing the involvement of third-party intermediaries,flood tray particularly when profits are not locally reinvested. Food sovereignty advocates for small farms to hold providence over all aspects of their crop production, distribution and consumption.

This creates paradoxical tension with gains from comparative advantage and international trade, where the value of maintaining sovereignty typically isn’t reflected in food prices. Reconciliating food sovereignty and agricultural trade, especially at an international scale, is a difficult endeavor . As Edelman writes, “‘food sovereignty’ advocates rarely consider what sort of regulatory apparatus would be needed to manage questions of firm and farm size, product and technology mixes, and long-distance and international trade.” As discussed throughout this article, local food system disruptions accentuate differences between those who “have” and “have not.” In order to shift to a system that supports food sovereignty, the right to food, and local supply chains, regulatory support will be necessary. Regulation may be necessary to ensure that food from locally owned food processing and distribution centers remains available to local communities . One suggestion is to foster community-level ownership and regulatory mechanisms that involve equity and joint ownership. Returning to the Newfoundland and Labrador study region, in 1967 the Fogo Island Co-operative and Shorefast Foundation embraced these principles to “rebuild” the local fishing and harvesting processes into a community-owned enterprise, in a manner that has been dubbed the “Fogo Process” . The Fogo Island Co-op was initially established as an alternative to federal and provincial initiatives to relocate residents to the mainland. Rather than relocate to mainland, like most communities, local inshore fishers and processing plant workers instead took control over the fisheries and supply chain. It provides the quintessential and perhaps most renowned example of food sovereignty stemming from the residents’ awareness of the need to maintain local control over resources. Providing each citizen with a universal basic income has gained appeal as a policy tool for addressing food insecurity . As the economic impacts of universal income supports are being evaluated, it’s worth evaluating whether a universal income might provide much needed income to cultivate local agricultural supply chains. In sum, the scales required to attain food sovereignty may initially seem daunting. However, if agricultural production is introduced in a stepwise manner, there is opportunity to slowly foster supply chains at small scales or in pilot programs that can eventually be replicated. My research team and I conducted a scoping review on food sovereignty and international trade to demonstrate that the vast majority of literature focuses on either food as a basic human right, or food production models, but that there is little intersectionality between the two.

Research in this area is necessary in order to identify models of success, and policies, that can be replicated elsewhere. To investigate the co-occurrence between research on food sovereignty and international trade and gaps in the literature, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and MetaAnalyses guidelines were used as a methodological and analytical framework . The Binimelis et al. framework was used to guide the scoping review. The framework consists of five axes or evaluative categories delineated from the Nyéléni Declaration: access to resources, production model, transformation and commercialization, food consumption and right to food, and agricultural policy and civil and social organizations. A stepwise search covered all journals indexed by OVID journal databases, accessed through the University of Toronto’s Gerstein Library research portal. The stepwise search of the terms [“international trade” and “food sovereignty”] yielded 213 net results. A second search was conducted via the ProQuest portal of the 3,236 publications indexed by the Social Sciences Combined Databases using the search terms [“trade” or “import” and “food sovereignty”] for a total of 645 results, and a combined total of 858 articles. After sorting for duplicates and other criteria, 34 articles were retained from the first literature search and 29 articles from the second search, yielding 63 articles for further semantic analysis of paragraphs. Nearly all of 63 articles on food sovereignty focused on either the production model, or the right to food model, but there was little co-occurrence between the two categories. This builds upon observations made by Edelman and others that food sovereignty remains an elusive term that is aspirational in principle, but difficult to implement. This scoping review fortifies the observation that two aspects of the food sovereignty movement, the “right to food” and “international trade” involve a tricky balance, which will be challenging inregions where imports and exports have been a legacy and a necessity. In summary, upholding the basic right to food, a central tenant of the food sovereignty movement, provides promise for regions of the world whose food systems have paradoxically been full of abundance and scarcity. Freshwater scarcity is a global problem with local solutions.

The connections between water supply, demand, and quality must be carefully examined at a local scale to understand and respond to water shortages. Balanced solutions that require the cooperation of water managers and users can address deficits that threaten households, major economies, and endangered ecosystems. The culminating effects of global climate change and variability, such as changes in precipitation, drought persistence, and shrinking rivers, impact both surface and groundwater systems . Furthermore, population growth, urbanization, economic development, and the industrialization of food production have intensified water management challenges worldwide . These challenges are well illustrated in California, where the water landscape has been manipulated to meet human demand; wetlands were drained, land use was modified, rivers were re-engineered, and entire ecosystems were endangered . The complex network of water reservoirs, aqueducts, and transfers have allowed for the state’s expansive growth of the industry, agriculture, and population . California’s water demand continues to grow due to the agriculture’s expansion and shift from annual to perennial crops, although supply has become less reliable, in quantity and quality, due to climate change, droughts, and environmental demands. At the same time, there is a new focus on the state’s natural river systems, and in stream flow requirements are being established to protect and restore riparian ecosystems. While less water enters the hydrologic system as snow and precipitation, and a larger amount of water is allocated to environmental flows, irrigated agriculture continues to expand . Insufficient surface water supplies have led to the exploitation of groundwater throughout the state to meet urban and agricultural demands.This industry produces half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, including many high-value crops, and accounts for the largest source of freshwater demand . Currently, over 400 crops grow on almost 4 million ha of mostly irrigated cropland . This industry was able to flourish in arid parts of the state due to skillfully engineered water transfers from the north and unregulated groundwater pumping statewide.Groundwater is valued highly for irrigation because of its superior quality,ebb and flow tray ease of accessibility, and reliability. However, sustainable and continual reliance on groundwater depends on management activities and local practices.Demand for high quality groundwater was exacerbated by the most recent multiyear drought that depleted surface water supplies throughout the state. As farmers in California increase their reliance on groundwater, the natural infiltration of rainfall, stream flow, and percolation of irrigation water can become insufficient to maintain supplies. Furthermore, groundwater basins are being stressed as a result of disproportionate water withdrawal. This ongoing imbalance has severe consequences, namely basin depletion, which can cause loss of storage or seawater intrusion on the coast, both of which produce an unreliable water supply . The culmination of climate change increased demands, and mostly unregulated groundwater use has led to severe water shortages in California. The state legislature addressed these concerns with the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014. SGMA mandates the implementation of sustainable groundwater management plans in critically over drafted basins by 2020, defined by the California Department of Water Resources .

Agriculture is a central point of discussion on how to improve groundwater management because of its future hinges on sustainable groundwater management, which requires mitigation of overdraft. Agricultural water management research is necessary to address the needs of current and future farmers and water users. The goal of this case study is to identify the sustainable carrying capacity of a single groundwater basin in California that maximizes the agricultural profit in the region to address both environmental and social sustainability. For this study, sustainable carrying capacity refers to the land use that will result in the maximum amount of water that can be withdrawn without over drafting the aquifer. First, a groundwater box model was built and calibrated, in comparison to results of the simulation model used by water managers in the Pajaro Valley to represent hydrology, water use, and groundwater storage . Second, an optimization model was built to determine crop acreages that maximized agricultural profit given water and land use constraints. Third, results from the optimization model were used as inputs into the groundwater box model to calculate the aquifer storage and assess the sustainable carrying capacity of the Pajaro Valley groundwater basin. Even though the location of the case of study is in California, this methodology can be applied to any ground water dependent agricultural region. This study shows a practical and innovative approach for the sustainable management of agricultural groundwater basins that emphasizes the interdependence of water and land use planning.Pajaro Valley is located within the central coast region of California and comprises southern Santa Cruz, northern Monterey, and a small part of San Benito counties. Watsonville is the principal city where residential, industrial, and commercial land uses predominate. The Pajaro Valley groundwater basin is bounded to the San Andreas Fault to the east and connected to Monterey Bay in the west, covering a surface area of 311 km2 and with a total storage capacity of 9,584 million m3 . The basin recharges through rainfall, irrigation water, and stream flow seepage from Pajaro River and its tributaries, and it includes unconfined and confined aquifers and semi-confined transition zones. This region is an ideal case study location because of its unique and threatened water supply, historical use of water management strategies, and the lucrative agricultural industry. Water supplies for the area include 2,700 groundwater wells, recycled water supplied by the Central Distribution System , and in a small portion, water from Pajaro River. Over 90% of agricultural and municipal water demands are met with groundwater resources because surface water supplies are insufficient and the area is not connected to the federal or state water projects. Reliance on groundwater has repercussions, including the lowering of the groundwater levels that has caused saltwater intrusion from the adjacent Monterey Bay since the 1950s .

All previous studies consistently show that research-led technological change is the main engine of agricultural growth . Technology produced by China’s agricultural research system accounts for most of the rise in the cropping sector’s total factor productivity between 1980 and the late-1990s . Despite this past record, China faces considerable challenges. Although as a publicly funded agricultural research system, it functioned well and addressed many important problems, its expenditures have been tied to public budgets. Falling fiscal support has taken its toll. Currently, there is much concern that agriculture research investment intensity has declined since the early 1980s and reached a dangerously low level, only 0.44 in 1999 . At the same time, the increasing evidence of overlapping, inefficiency, over-staffing, and inappropriate technology make fundamental reform of the current research system an essential task.Price and market reforms were key components of China’s policy shifts from a socialist to a market-oriented economy. The reforms associated with China’s policy reforms, however, began slowly and have proceeded gradually. Market liberalization began with non-strategic commodities such as vegetables, fruit, fish, livestock, and oil and sugar crops. Little effort was made on the major crops. And, although the aims of the early reforms were to raise farm level prices and gradually deregulate the market, most of the significant early reforms were done by administrative measures . However, as the rights to private trading were expanded in the early 1980s, and official allowed traders the to buy and sell the surplus output of almost all categories of agricultural products,mobile grow rack the foundations of the state marketing system began to be undermined.

Since the mid-1980s, market reforms have continued though only in a stop and start way. For example, after record growth in agricultural production in 1984 and 1985, a second stage of price and market reforms was announced in 1985 aimed at radically limiting the scope of government price and market interventions and further enlarging the role of market allocation. Because of the sharp drop in the growth of agricultural production and food price inflation in the late 1980s, however, implementation of the new policy stalled. Mandatory procurement of grains, oil crops, and cotton continued. After agricultural production and prices stabilized in 1990-92, another attempt was made in early 1993 to abolish the grain compulsory quota system and the sale at low prices to consumers. The state distribution and procurement systems were substantially liberalized, but the policy was reversed when food price inflation reappeared in 1994: government grain procurement once again became compulsory. As well, a provincial governors’ grain responsibility system was introduced in 1994-95, aimed at encouraging greater grain self-sufficiency at the provincial level. Further retrenchments followed; in 1998 the central government initiated a controversial policy change prohibiting individuals and private companies from procuring grain from farmers . Grain quota procurement prices were set more than 20% higher than market prices, which meant a transfer in favor of those farmers able to sell at that price . Not surprisingly, stocks started to accumulate and procurement and market prices had to come down relative to international prices in 2000. Despite these periodic cycles in the reform process, markets have gradually emerged in rural China.According to Lardy , the share for agriculture was just 6% in 1978 but had risen to 40% by 1985, 79% by 1995 and 83% by 1999. Moreover, the state’s intervention was unable to halt the flow of grain across provincial boundaries.

Huang and Rozelle find that agricultural prices for all major commodities, including rice, wheat, and especially for maize and soybeans have moved together across far reaching localities within China. Continuing the trends found in Park et al. , China’s markets are becoming more integrated and efficient, and increasingly resemble those in more market-oriented economies. What have these policies meant for nominal rates of agricultural protection in China? Tables 3 and 4 show recent estimates based on quota and negotiated procurement prices and on wholesale market prices since 1985 for selected agricultural commodities. The requirement that farmers submit a mandatory delivery quota at below market prices has represented a lump-sum tax on farmers and lump sum subsidy to the urban consumers who were able to get access to sales at below-market value . Between 1990 and 1997 the average price farmers received for compulsorily delivered grains and soybean was between one-eighth and one-third below the border price. In the late 1990s, however, those prices were above the border price. Although all of China’s major crops were affected, wheat and cotton, the nation’s main imported farm commodities, received relatively favorable treatment relative to rice. That is true not only in each price category , but also in that a higher proportion of rice production is procured at the low quota procurement price. Meat producers, by contrast, still appear to receive less they would if they could sell their output at international prices. More-recent estimates by Huang and Rozelle , however, take quality differences into account more carefully. Their estimates suggest there is less protection in place than Table 3 implies. In particular, wheat wholesale prices may be no higher and possibly even lower than import prices of similar-quality grain. Recent structural shifts in soybean markets have made it so domestic soybean prices are only 15%, not 40%, above border prices. In sum, despite substantial efforts to liberalize the price and market structure of China’s agricultural sector, producers of major agricultural commodities continue to be penalized by commodity-specific policies of procurement. Despite that migration of farm workers to rural industrial and service activities, the average farm size and the share of farm household income from farming have fallen steadily since the late 1970s . When the impact of the recent re-appreciation of the domestic currency is also taken into account, the situation is even worse . It is therefore not surprising that many farm families have invested their surplus funds and labor in non-farm activities rather than back into agriculture. Much of that investment has gone to REs and family-owned businesses. Employment, output and exports in these sectors have increased rapidly. The share of non-farm income reached 50% in 2000 , and the per capita income differences between eastern, central and western provinces have persisted and even expanded.

In its most basic terms, the commitments in agricultural sector can be classified into 3 major categories: market access, domestic support, and export subsidies . The commitments on market accession will lower tariffs of all agricultural products, increase access to China’s markets by foreign producers of some commodities through tariff rate quotas , and removes quantitative restrictions on others. In return, China is supposed to gain better access to foreign markets for its agricultural products, as well as a number of other indirect benefits. Domestic support and export subsidies are the other two critical issues that arose during the course of negotiations. Together with a number of other market-access commitments make China’s WTO accession unique among all other developing countries that have been admitted to the WTO’s new environment. The import market access commitments that China has made to WTO members appear to be substantial. Overall agricultural import tariffs declines from about 21% in 2001 to 17% by 2004. The simple average agricultural import tariff reduced from 42.2% in 1992 to 23.6% in 1998 . Although important, when taken in the context of the discussion in the previous section about China’s external economy reforms of the last two decades, one would have to conclude that the commitments are merely an extension of China’s past changes. WTO in this way can be thought of as just another step on China’s road to opening up its economy. With a few exceptions , most of agricultural products will become part of a tariff-only regime. According to this part of the agreement, all non-tariff barriers and licensing and quota processes will be eliminated. For most commodities in this group, effective protection will fall substantially by January 2002 and fall even further by 2004 . To the extent that tariffs are binding for some of these commodities, the reductions in tariff rates should stimulate new imports. It is important to note, however, that although published tariff rates will fall on all of these commodities,ebb and flow table imports will not necessarily grow summarily. Indeed, for many products, China has comparative advantages in many commodities presented in Table 5. For example, lower tariffs on horticultural and meats might impact only a small portion of domestic market. Although tariffs fall for all products, since China produces and exports many commodities at below world market prices, the decreases will not affect producers or traders. Hence, the real challenge for agricultural products with tariff-only protection will be for crops such as barley, wine, and dairy products. In order to attempt to understand what may happen for some of these crops, it is instructive to examine the case of soybeans.

In this case, producers in China clearly did not have a comparative advantage. Before 2000, the import tariff for soybeans was as high as 114%, importers required licenses, and China’ farmers grew most of the nation’s soybeans. However, in anticipation of the China’s WTO accession, tariffs were lowered to 3% in 2000. After this lowering, officials also phased out import quotas. Consequently, imports surged from 4.32 million metric tons in 1999 to 10.42 mmt in 2000. In 2001, most observers believe soybean imports exceeded 14 mmt. Prices also fell and the nominal protection rates of soybean declined from 44% in the early 2000 to less than 15% in October 2001 . From this case it is possible to see that when the protection rates are high and there is high demand for a commodity, imports can move up sharply. Such movements, however, can be limited for a class of commodities called “national strategic products.” China’s WTO agreement allows officials to manage trade of rice, wheat, maize, edible oils, sugar, cotton and wool with tariff rate quotas . These commodities are covered under a special set of institutions. As shown in Table 6, except for sugar and edible oils , the in-quota tariff is only 1% for rice, wheat, maize, and wool. However, the amount brought in at these tariff levels is strictly restricted. For example, in 2002, the first 8.45 mmt of wheat will come in at a tariff rate of 1%. The in-quota volumes, however, are to grow over a three year period at annual rates ranging from 4% to 19%. For example,maize TRQ volumes increase from 5.70 mmt tons in 2002 to 7.20 mmt in 2004. China does not have to bring in this quantity, but provisions are in place that there is supposed to be competition in the import market so if there is demand inside China for the national strategic products at international prices, traders will be able to bring in the commodity up to the TRQ level. At the same time, there are still ways theoretically to import these commodities after the TRQ is filled. Most poignantly, tariffs on out-of-quota sales will drop substantially in the first year of accession and fall further between 2002 and 2005. If the international price of maize were to fall more than 65% below China’s price after 2004, any trader is allowed to import maize. But, during the transition period, most people believe such rates are so high that in the coming years they will not bind.After the first 4 to 5 years of accession, a number of other changes will take place. For example, after 2006, China agreed to phased out its TRQ for edible oils. State trading monopolies also will be phased out for wools after 2004 and gradually disappear for most of other agricultural products . Although China National Cereals Oil and Foodstuffs Import & Export Co. will continue to play an important role in rice, wheat and maize, there will be an increasing degree of competition from private firms in the importing and exporting of the grains in the future. In its commitments to WTO accession, China also agreed to a number of other items, some of which are special to the case of China. First, China must phase out all export subsidies and not to introduce any these subsidies on agricultural products in the future.

They estimated that the number of undocumented immigrants rose monotonically from only 3.5 million in 1990 until it peaked at 12.2 million in 2007. However, the number of immigrants fell to 11.3 million by 2009 during the Great Recession. In contrast, they found that the supply of immigrant labor rose during relatively mild 2001 recession.These results are consistent with U.S. border patrol reports from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics. Apprehensions by the U.S. border patrols dropped from 876,803 in 2007 to 556,032 in 2009. Because immigrants often send money home, we can use remittances from the United States to Mexico to infer whether the number of immigrants changed substantially during a recession. Figure 2 shows quarterly remittances to Mexico in millions of U.S. dollars as reported by Banco de México . The figure shows that remittances increased during the relatively mild 2001 recession but decreased substantially during the 2008–2009 Great Recession. These data again support the view that the number of Mexican immigrants to the United States fell during the Great Recession but not during the previous, milder recession. Moreover, Warren and Warren estimated that the net change of undocumented immigrants was negative during the Great Recession, which was related to a sharp decrease of new undocumented immigrants. The United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service estimated number of full- and part-time agricultural workers fell from 1.032 million in 2007 to 1.003 million in 2008 and 1.020 million in 2009, before rising to 1.053 million in 2010.5 That is,vertical grow tables the number of workers in 2008 was 3% to 5% lower than in the years before and after the Great Recession. Presumably the share of workers dropped by even more in seasonal agriculture, which employs most of the undocumented workers.

Our agricultural workers data comes from the National Agricultural Workers Survey. The NAWS is a national, random sample of hired seasonal agricultural employees, who work primarily in seasonal crops.The NAWS is an employer-based survey. That is, it samples worksites rather than residences to overcome the difficulty of reaching migrant farm workers in unconventional living quarters. These employers are chosen randomly within the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 12 agricultural regions .Surveyors randomly select 2,500 employees of these growers to obtain a nationally representative sample of crop workers. Surveyors interview the more than 2,500 crop workers outside of work hours at their homes or at other locations selected by the respondent. The NAWS has a long, visible history within farming communities, and the survey design incorporates questions aimed at data validation about legal status. Respondents receive a pledge of confidentiality and a nominal financial incentive for participation. As a result, only one to two percent of workers in the overall sample refuse to answer the legal status questions. The NAWS contains extensive information about a worker’s compensation, hours worked, and demographic characteristics such as legal status, education, family size and composition, and workers’ migration decisions. We dropped workers from the sample who were missing any relevant variable, 23% of the original survey sample. The NAWS is conducted in three cycles each year year to match the seasonal fluctuations in the agricultural workforce. Unfortunately, the public-use data, which we use, suppresses information about the cycle and aggregates the 12 regions into 6 regions. As a result, our data set consists of repeated annual cross sections of workers from 1989 through 2012. Column 1 of Table 1 presents national summary statistics for the variables used in our empirical analysis. Columns 2 and 3 provide data for California and for the rest of the country, because 37% of the sample works in California.

Compared to workers in the rest of the country, Californian workers tend to have less education; have more farm experience; are more likely to be non-native, Hispanics; and are more likely to work in fruit and nut crops and less likely to work in horticulture. After analyzing the effects of recessions on agricultural workers, we replicate the analysis for workers in construction, hotels, and restaurants, which also employ many immigrants. The data for workers in these sectors come from the March Current Population Survey . In March of each year, workers in the basic CPS sample are administered a supplemental questionnaire in which they are asked to report their income such as hourly wage rate and additional labor force activity such as hours worked in the previous week.Because information on immigration is available only since 1994, our sample period is 1994–2013. We include all workers who are 18 years and older.Three recessions occurred during our 1989–2012 sample period . The economy recovered quickly from the first of these recessions in 1990–1991. The second, 2001 recession was also relatively mild. However, the third recession, the 2008–2009 Great Recession, was much more severe and had longer-lasting economic and labor market effects than the first two. We analyze the effects of recessions on hourly earnings, the probability of receiving a bonus, and weekly hours of work of employed workers. For workers paid by time, hourly earnings are a worker’s hourly wage. For piece-rate workers, we use the workers’ reported average hourly earnings. The bonus dummy equals one for workers who receive a money bonus from an employer in addition to the wage, and zero otherwise. Weekly hours of work are the number of hours interviewees reported work at their current farm job in the previous week. The explanatory variables in all these equations are the same. The explanatory variables include all the usual demographic variables: age, years of education, years of farm experience, job tenure , gender, whether the workers is Hispanic, whether the worker was born in the United States, and whether the worker speaks English.

The specification uses a legal status variable to capture the bifurcated labor markets for documented and undocumented workers. It also includes crop and regional dummies. We have seven main explanatory variables: dummies for each of the three recessions, the recession dummies interacted with the legal status dummy , and regional unemployment rates for workers in all sectors of the economy. We use separate dummies for each recession to allow for differential effects across the recession . The interaction terms capture whether employers treat undocumented workers differently than legal workers during a recession. We include the unemployment rate because it peaks after the end of each recession . We do not report the unemployment rate interacted with the undocumented dummy because we cannot reject that its coefficient is zero in any equation. We treat all these variables as exogenous to the compensation and weekly hours of individual agricultural workers. We start by examining the effects of recessions on NAWS workers’ hourly earnings. Column 1 of Table 2 presents regression estimates for the ln hourly earnings equation. The coefficients on the demographic variables have the expected signs and are generally statistically significantly different from zero at the 5% level. Undocumented workers’ hourly earnings are 2.1% less than those of documented workers. Females earn 6.4% less than males. Hispanics earn 4.9% less than nonHispanics. Unlike most previous studies, we find a statistically significant effect of education. English speakers earn 3.9% more than non-English speakers. The coefficients on the recession dummies reflect the effect of the recession on documented workers. Documented workers’ hourly earnings rose 1.8% during the 1990–1991 recession, 4.2% during the 2001 recession, and 6.9% during the Great Recession. We draw two conclusions about the effects of recessions on documented workers. First, the hourly earning effect of the Great Recession was larger than that of the relatively minor recessions, which is consistent with literature on business cycles and the farm labor market in the 1970s . Second, in all recessions, documented workers’ wages rose, which suggests that recessions cause the hired-agricultural-worker supply curve to shift leftward relatively more than did the demand curve. The sum of the coefficients on the recession dummy and its interaction with the undocumented dummy captures the effect of a recession on undocumented workers. The 1990–1991 recession did not have a statistically significant effect on undocumented workers. Hourly earnings for undocumented workers rose by 3.4% during the 2001 recession and 1.9% during the Great Recession. In contrast to the pattern for documented workers,flower pot the undocumented workers’ earnings rose by less during the Great Recession than during the 2001 recession. Thus, not only do undocumented workers earn less than documented workers do in general, but their hourly earnings rise less during recession than do the earnings of documented workers. That is, the wage gap between documented and undocumented workers widens during recessions. In addition to hourly earnings, 28% of the workers in our sample receive bonus payments , which supplement relatively low wage payments. These deferred payments play a similar function to that of efficiency wages in other sectors .

We use a binary indicator equal to one if a worker receives a money bonus. Column 2 of Table 2 shows the results of a regression using a linear probability model . For documented workers, the probability of receiving a bonus did not rise during the two relatively minor recessions but increased by 5.8 percentage points during the Great Recession. Thus, the Great Recession not only raised documented workers’ hourly earnings, but it raised the probability that they received a bonus substantially. For undocumented workers, the probability of receiving a bonus fell by 2.9 percentage points during the 1990–1991 recession and rose by 9 percentage points during the Great Recession. Again, this result is consistent with the theory that the Great Recession caused a large supply side shock. Thus, for both documented and undocumented workers, the Great Recession had a larger, positive effect on the probability of receiving a bonus than did earlier recessions. The unemployment rate has a statistically significant effect on the probability of receiving a bonus payment. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate raised the probability of receiving a bonus by 0.9 percentage points.Because our data set includes information about only employed workers, we cannot directly observe the effect of a recession on total employment. However, we can examine the effect on workers’ weekly hours. When employers have difficulty recruiting workers, they have employees work more hours per week to compensate for an unusually small workforce. For documented workers, weekly hours fell by 2.2 hours during the 1990–1991 recession, but rose by 1.1 hours during the 2001 recession, and 2.3 hours during the Great Recession. For undocumented workers, weekly hours were not statistically significantly affected during the two relatively minor recessions, but rose by 2.6 hours during the Great Recession—more than for documented workers. An increase in the overall unemployment rate by 1 percentage point lowered the weekly hours by 0.3 hours. Thus, an increase in the overall unemployment rate lowered weekly hours, but weekly hours rose during relatively large recessions.We conducted five robustness checks. First, we estimated all three equations separately for documented and undocumented workers. That is, we allowed all the coefficients to vary between these two groups instead of only the recession dummies. The coefficients on our seven key recession variables were virtually unchanged . Second, we estimated all three regressions eliminating all newcomers , about 3,300 people or 7.5% of the sample, to see if compositional changes in the workforce during recessions are driving our results. However, the coefficients were virtually unchanged . Third, we estimated all three regressions leaving out the unemployment rate.Fourth, we excluded the crop dummies, in case they are endogenous. The recession variable coefficients were unaffected .Fifth, to check for regional differences, we estimated separate regressions for California and for the rest of the United States . With the exceptions of the coefficients on bonus pay for the 2001 recession and the coefficients on log hourly wage for the regional unemployment rate , the seven key coefficients have the same sign in each pair of regressions. Do recessions have different effects in agriculture than in other sectors of the economy that employ many undocumented immigrants, such as construction, hotels, and restaurants? To answer this question, we constructed a comparable data set based on the March Current Population Survey for 1994–2013.

These ailments, diseases and disorders, were part and parcel of life in the tropics, a life that brought out “man’s most lascivious and debased urges.” Yet, contrary thought posited that “the white race was inherently aggressive and migratory [and] Caucasians could survive in the tropics, but only as a master race.”Those colonists who embraced hard, physical labor, tailored their diet to the new, debilitating tropical climate, and “took special sanitary precautions…had a reasonable chance of adaptation to the climatic conditions.” Josef Rosen was a firm believer that physical activity was a key to adaptation for the Jewish refugees who were, in the main, an urbanized lot. Indeed, in his optimistic opinion, “the key to success was for settlers to remain active.”Sosúa had attracted malcontents despite the fairly rigorous pre-screening of settlers. Recall that both Rosenberg and Rosen had warned DORSA recruiters such as Trone, to be aware of “problem cases” that were likely to be among the potential recruits. In spite of the efforts to keep the colony free from unproductive or ‘lazy’ charity cases, some had fallen through the cracks. Known to DORSA as “non-settlers,” they never “had any intention of becoming farmers,” which created a “combustible combination that had a pernicious effect on morale.”Division among the members, and inherent differences of opinion, were an inevitable consequence of life at the colony. The life of the Jewish refugee at Sosúa was by no means an idyll. The hard work of the farmer began in earnest after a short period of adjustment that allowed the newly arrived to acclimate to the tropical climate. Indeed, the settlers were given “all of three days to get accustomed to their new surroundings.” Well noted that “For the great majority,stacking flower pot tower enervating manual labor was the norm during the first year.” This included “clearing land with tractors, building and repairing roads and constructing houses.” Building houses right away meant that the settlers could leave the group barracks and move “onto homesteads as soon as possible.”

The newly arrived rookies were given a brief tour of the settlement and then provided with basic supplies such as quinine pills for malaria, some work clothing, mosquito netting and bedding. According to Rosen all arrivals had to abruptly alter their habits, “particularly eating and drinking.” Yet it was the tropical climate that most concerned Rosen. The refugees were coming from the temperate climates of European countries and would inevitably suffer from the debilitating climate which was ‘fiercely hot’ during the day. The ability of Jewish people from the cool, seasonal climate of Europe to adapt to the tropical climate of the Dominican Republic was put to the test at Sosúa and, for the most part, the settlers did adapt despite some initial difficulties. A radical alteration to the European diet was also an inevitable hurdle that would have to be overcome. Gone, at least for a while, was the bread and meat diet of the European, substituted by the ubiquitous Latin American staples: rice and beans.Recall that the settlement’s water supply, from both the Sosúa River and wells on the property, were already polluted to the extreme.The first settlers to come to Sosúa, a small group of about ten ‘Pioneers’ were already in the capital city, Ciudad Trujillo, and were relocated to the opposite end of the island on March 16, 1940. DORSA had found them in the city “living among other new refugees eking out a living,” and transported them across the island to Sosúa.The families of Jakob Weinberg, accountant, and Max Sichel, civil servant, began life as the first European Sosuaners. They were joined in April by Marec Morsél, merchant, all of whom “would serve as an unofficial welcoming committee for the first group from Europe.”It is significant that all were professionals, as both DORSA and Trujillo wanted people with some degree of agricultural experience. Later that year on the 8th of May, some 37 “hapless” refugees arrived at Sosúa to begin life anew as tropical farmers. They were at first housed in barracks and divided into groups that were given names such as the ‘Swiss Group’ or the ‘Drucker Group’ that identified either their leader or their original locale. Symanski and Burley note that the land allotment was proportional to the size of the group and the “average amount was approximately 30 hectares for each family or unmarried male within a group.”

The groups were part of “communal units who were expected to grow crops sharing the work and profits equally.”Individual families were given an additional two hectares that were for the exclusive use of the family. These plots which, invariably, grew crops that were familiar to the European diet such as spinach, eggplant and beets. In addition each family was given barn animals, livestock farming implements, some cash and a line of credit at the colony store. Symanski and Burley note that “a horse and mule, a number of dairy cattle, other small livestock,” were given to each family.Farm implements and tools given to the settlers included the basic hoe and shovel, yet as time went by and the colony matured, machines such as the farm tractor were introduced. It should be recalled that the use of farm machinery- superior U.S. technology, was part of Rosen’s three part plan to ensure success of the colony as an agricultural concern. However, many of the novice farmers shied away from the labor necessary to get Sosúa up and running and “seem to have an inborn fear and mistrust of tools, and certainly lack all too often a pride in owning and using them.”Thus the beginning of the settlement at Sosúa was indeed, a slow, steady, trial-and-error process, and a baptism by fire for those fortunate few who now called it home. DORSA sought solutions to the problems that arose, experimenting with “crops and agricultural innovations and also encouraged a mixture of projects such as animal husbandry, banana cultivation, intensive truck and garden farming, tomato crops and cash crops.” Yet all efforts to establish a profitable crop-based economy failed almost from the beginning,” with construction of houses for the homesteaders, barns, schools, irrigation systems, road building and repair, continuing as the colony grew in size and importance.In less than two-year’s time the colony was a functioning entity that could “boast some notable accomplishments: 60 houses, 9 dormitories, 12 shops and warehouses, a small clinic, and a schoolhouse had been constructed.” Plots of land were ready for planting and pasturage.

Expansion of the colony necessitated additional infrastructure that Sosúa lacked, although one should recall the reasons that Rosen chose Sosúa over other, more suitable tracts, was because it had some infrastructure already in place such as electricity and running water. The only obstacles to building new and modern infrastructure were sufficient capital and a workforce. Rosenberg in New York would press wealthy donors who were also ‘shrewd business leaders,’ for additional funding. These efforts were, for the most part, successful, considering that the donors had other equally worthy causes to support.The able and willing workforce was in the main staffed by local Dominicans. Indeed, many refugees disdained physical labor. Dominicans worked all jobs at Sosúa, particularly as domestics and farmhands, but also as builders of roads and structures. This ran counter to an agreement that each prospective settler signed before leaving Europe. The “Rules for the Establishment of the Settlement” strictly limited the employ of native workers to “cases of emergency or when the additional labor is needed during harvest time.” DORSA however, caved in to the demands of the settlers, so that whenever one needed labor he could hire local Dominicans without any repercussions from DORSA. According to Wells the local workforce was an ‘elastic and inexpensive’ source which was immediately available for hire. Certainly, there were upwards of several hundred Dominicans who worked at Sosúa at any given moment.Relations between the natives and the refugees were at first congenial, but this friendly posture changed into a strained tolerance as time progressed. Wells noted that the divide between the two groups was sufficient to warrant one settler to write to Rosenberg complaining that “Our settlers do not behave very civilly to the working population. They consider themselves a higher race. They consider the natives peons.” In fact, “some colonists were arrogant, and believed los muchachos, as they referred to them, inferior.”Symanski and Burley further stated that “The Jewish view of the Dominican was that he was lazy,ebb and flow had little sense of investment or hard work, and multiplied much too quickly.”The insularity of the colony, compounded with the language barrier, ‘perpetuated misunderstanding’ between the two. Most settlers spoke German, a few Hebrew, Yiddish and English and all had yet to learn Spanish. Aside from everything else that DORSA provided the settlers: food, lodging, and tools, was instruction in the Spanish language.Entertainment at the colony took the form of the occasional movie shown in a barracks ‘theater’ at the ‘urban center’ known as El Batey. El Batey was the hub of social life at the settlement and was also home to the general store known as El Colmado. One would travel by horseback, burro or buggy to El Batey “to go to a dance, sponsor an occasional Dominican concert, or dine with friends.” Residents would catch up on the news, both international and national, through the colony’s bi-lingual newspaper, The Voice of Sosúa which, over time, was printed under several other banners. The Voice was a source for poetry in German and also a source for free Spanish language lessons. Settlers could check out a book at the small library which was subsidized by DORSA.Communal Sunday beach outings were where the settlers could frolic and enjoy sunbathing, diving, swimming and other ocean sports.

Despite its rural and isolated location, Sosúa offered plenty of diversion for those who knew how to take advantage of what was immediately at hand. The education of children took place at Sosúa’s elementary school, at first located in a barrack and later moved to its own two room building in El Batey. The aptly named Christopher Columbus School included a kindergarten and a primary school that served both the settler and Dominican children, who “benefited from the extraordinary qualifications of their teachers.” Many of the settlers were professionals, some of whom served as faculty. The children were taught math and science by a former surgeon, Dr. Bruck, and liberal arts instruction was done under a former professor of languages at the Sorbonne, Mr. Ferran. Religious instruction consisted of lessons in Jewish History and the Hebrew language. The polyglot settler and instructor of language for DORSA, Luis Hess, also taught language and served as the principal for 33 years. Instruction in the fine arts and music was provided by the Viennese trained Felix Bauer, who was later to become a professor in the U.S. These notable talents were among the “six full and part-time teachers employed by the school, five settlers and one Dominican.”In 1943 there were 30 children at the school, and by 1945 there were 60, with 40 of them in kindergarten. Again, Bruman has given some figures culled from the 1950 Report of Mr. Rosenzweig that pegged the attendance of the elementary school at 50: 33 children of settlers and 17 Dominicans. The Rosenzweig Report pointed out that a “Deficiency is felt in the lack of educational films, as well as in material and equipment for experiments in physics and chemistry.”Health care in the colony was of high standards and quality given its rural location and distance from any sizeable city. Sosúa had its own hospital which treated both Dominicans and settlers. DORSA paid the salaries of most medical personnel that included Dominican doctors acting as consultants. The Dominican physicians were experts in tropical diseases, many of which the settlers had never heard of. In what Kaplan termed DORSA’s ‘small social welfare state,’ medical treatment was free to both settlers and local residents.The hospital clinic treated major tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, but also “established a VD clinic, prenatal services, and a baby clinic.”However, those who needed “x-rays or other special treatment were sent to Ciudad Trujillo or Santiago.”Religious life at Sosúa revolved around the colony’s small synagogue which held semi-regular Friday evening services.

To account for sequence read depth variation per sample, the fungal OTU table was normalized by rarefying to equal fungal sequence reads , using the ‘rarefy’ command in VEGAN in R to account for uneven sequencing depth across samples.Our study demonstrates that greater crop diversity in intensive agricultural systems drives a richer and more diverse AMF community. We observed nearly twice as many AMF taxa in poly cultures than in mono cultures, while accounting for variation in soil properties that also significantly affected AMF richness. The AMF community composition in poly culture sites was also distinct from that in monoculture field sites, but soil properties played a stronger role in structuring the AMF community. Contrary to our expectations, we also show that AMF colonization of roots is probably driven by plant host identity rather than farm management practices . For both AMF diversity and colonization responses, soil properties were important factors that influenced the outcomes, but did not dominate relative to the important effect of higher crop diversity. Overall our findings indicate that managing for crop diversity in agricultural landscapes can strongly influence AMF community composition, including richness and diversity, across heterogeneous soils. Further, our results support the notion that plant diversity is key to below ground biodiversity, which in turn could support multifunctional agroecosystems , including those that have been intensively managed in the past. We show that poly culture fields harbor a richer and more diverse AMF community than do monoculture fields, suggesting that poly culture plantings may promote recovery of AMF richness following a long period of monoculture farming, which is known to be associated with decreased AMF diversity . Our poly culture sites were formerly farmed intensively as mono cultures, as recently as 7 yr before sampling, and thus were likely to have had a depauperate AMF community.How to build a vertical hydroponic system? Soil properties also contributed to explaining some of the variance in AMF richness and diversity, but overall they played a minimal role. While AMF are ubiquitous across landscapes, AMF are obligate symbionts with a degree of host specificity; thus, AMF associations with plant hosts are typically not random . Variation in plant traits, including phenology, root architecture and other factors, impacts the distribution and composition of AMF,and thus functionally different plants can associate with distinct AMF communities.

In our study, we found evidence that different AMF taxa occur in poly cultures vs mono cultures. A Rhizophagus taxon was the top indicator of mono cultures, whereas the top indicator taxon in poly cultures was in the genus Glomus. While research on AMF functional traits is still emerging , these taxonomic differences , coupled with greater AMF diversity in poly cultures, could indicate differences in AMF community functionality with implications for plant performance and ecosystem processes. Future research should focus on these possible functional differences among AMF taxa. In poly cultures, functionally distinct plant hosts are planted across space and time, creating a mosaic of diverse microhabitats, varying in microclimatic and microedaphic properties, as evidenced by our finding that poly cultures have a more heterogenous soil environment compared with mono cultures. Across poly culture fields in our study system, crop type can be distinct row by row in space, but single rows can also shift from crop to crop at different times throughout the year. For example, annuals and perennial crops are grown together at the same time, grasses and tubers can be grown adjacent to each other, and leafy greens and legumes could be grown sequentially in poly culture fields in this study system. In fact, the presence of perennials and legumes has been shown to increase AMF diversity. In the poly culture field sites, not only are legumes present, but functionally distinct leguminous species and cultivars are planted . Therefore, the likely mechanism that fosters a richer and more diverse AMF community in poly cultures is the heterogeneity in plant composition: over space, across time within a space, and as different species or varieties across and within functional types such as legumes. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi communities also depend, in part, on the composition and pattern of past plant communities . This may explain why in poly cultures we do not find a more diverse AMF community in the more plant-rich transects when compared with the single species transects. Instead, the legacy of poly culture management, specifically the temporally, spatially and functionally heterogeneous plant community, leads to an overall richer and more diverse AMF community in poly cultures than in mono cultures. Poly cultures also harbored a distinct AMF community from mono cultures. However, AMF communities were quite heterogeneous across both monoculture and poly culture field sites, reflecting a high turnover among sites. The heterogeneity and high turnover of the AMF community are evident in the fact that average site-level AMF richness is much lower than total AMF richness recorded across all sites: the average AMF richness was c. 5 in monoculture and 10 in poly culture field sites, compared with a total AMF richness in the whole study of 244. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi communities tend to be heterogeneous even at fine scales.

Our expectation that AMF communities on poly culture farms would be more heterogeneous at a fine scale than those on mono cultures was not borne out; specifically, we found no interaction between farm management and transect for composition. This is further evidence that poly cultures may impart a legacy effect on AMF communities. Despite possible AMF compositional differences between mono cultures and poly cultures, our results show that soil properties played a larger role in explaining AMF community composition than farm management, with pH being a significant predictor, consistent with other studies , especially at finer spatial scales . The greater heterogeneity in soil edaphic properties in poly cultures than mono cultures suggests that crop diversity may indirectly underlie these edaphic-driven patterns of AMF community structure. Regardless, these findings suggest a role for soil properties in structuring AMF community composition across farms and a role for farm management in shifting the available AMF community into more or less diverse communities at the site level. The role of plant diversity vs plant host identity on AMF associations was most evident in our measurements of AMF colonization in roots. Our study design allowed us to explore whether crop diversity impacted AMF colonization in the same crop species, and also whether different crop plant hosts in poly cultures play a role in determining AMF colonization. Contrary to our expectation, we found no difference in AMF colonization across the same crop host when planted in poly culture or monoculture fields. In part, this may be explained by fertilizer usage across all farms, which may mask or suppress changes in AMF root colonization as a result of increasing crop diversity because fertilization decreases the dependency of plants hosts on AMF . But AMF colonization has been shown to increase in plant host roots within more diverse plant communities , especially when highly mycorrhizal plants are present . Instead, we found similar degrees of AMF colonization on the focal crop host between poly culture and monoculture farms, but greater degrees of AMF colonization on other crop hosts on poly culture fields. Recent research has found mixed results about the extent to which plant host identity determines the quantity of AMF colonization. Some studies show that plant identity rarely plays a role , while others, like this study, demonstrate that plant host identity does impact AMF colonization, especially at local scales.

Thus, our study strengthens the body of research showing that AMF colonization is dependent on specific AMF–plant host associations. While this finding could suggest that agricultural systems with higher plant diversity may not benefit from greater AMF colonization, AMF colonization may not actually be the most important indicator of AMF benefits and functions for crops in agricultural systems . Colonization does not indicate the extent of nutrient transfer or the degree of ecosystem services provided by AMF . Instead,vertical plant growing there is a growing understanding that AMF composition is an important determinant of the benefits received by ecosystems from AMF communities . A richer and more diverse AMF community could indicate differences in ecosystem functioning between monoculture and poly culture farming, with important implications for agricultural management. Previous research has shown that mono cultures contribute to reducing AMF richness and can change community composition to favor less beneficial AMF taxa, in turn contributing to yield declines . Although empirical evidence from field studies on AMF remains rare, a positive relationship between AMF diversity and ecosystem functioning is expected because AMF taxa differ in their functions . For example, studies have shown differential plant productivity responses to different AMF taxa or communities . Other studies have demonstrated that productivity, phosphorus uptake, soil aggregation and pathogen protection increase with AMF diversity . In short, as AMF taxa are functionally heterogenous,a more diverse community could provide a wider array and/or stability of functions.Therefore, crops grown in poly cultures may benefit from the enhanced and/or stabilized ecosystem functions and services of a richer and more diverse AMF community.As pressures from habitat loss increase, there is growing interest in agricultural landscapes as potential habitat or movement areas for wildlife. Agricultural landscapes are potentially rich in structure, food, and cover, and many native species forage and reproduce in these landscapes. These lands can support moderate diversity of birds, mammals, arthropods, and plants, depending on the intensity of agriculture and on configuration of natural land cover. Mammalian carnivores are frequent targets of conservation efforts, and they play a key role in food webs, for example via mesopredator release or trophic downgrading. Because carnivores are typically wide-ranging, it is especially important to consider agricultural landscapes as well as protected areas when forming conservation plans for these species. Wildlife managers and conservation planners currently have little knowledge of carnivore use of agricultural landscapes, but this subject will become increasingly important as agricultural systems continue to expand and protected areas become more isolated. Connectivity between habitat patches is especially critical in human-dominated landscapes, but most connectivity models focus on natural vegetation types, not on differences between human-dominated land cover types within such landscapes. When evaluating landscape connectivity for large carnivores, conservation planners have often relied on expert opinion and considered all agriculture as having uniformly low connectivity value . Many members of the order Carnivora are omnivorous and feed, in part, on anthropogenic food sources. Scat analysis has identified cultivated fruit in the diets of carnivores, particularly foxes and stone martens, and Borchert et al.found that at least one orchard type – avocado – was regularly used by carnivores in California. California is a major producer of avocados, with 23,500 hectares of orchards spread across five southern counties. Because avocados grow well on steep slopes, they are planted in a variety of landscape contexts, including hill slopes adjacent to native vegetation as well as valley bottoms adjacent to other types of crops. We examined the use of avocado orchards by mammalian carnivores across agricultural-wild land gradients in southern California. We assessed whether occupancy of carnivores at motion-activated camera stations was a function of surrounding land cover, and in particular, whether area of orchards influenced carnivore occupancy. If orchards constitute poor quality carnivore habitat relative to natural areas, we would expect to observe carnivores less frequently in orchards than in nearby wild lands.Coastal southern California is highly urbanized and contains about two thirds of California’s 38 million residents; it also has relatively little remaining undeveloped land, yet is experiencing rapid population growth. This region has a Mediterranean-type climate, and the dominant natural vegetation types areoak woodland, riparian woodland, sage scrub, and annual grassland. Eleven native members of the order Carnivora occur in this region: American badger , American black bear , bobcat , coyote , gray fox , long-tailed weasel , mountain lion , raccoon , ring tail , striped skunk , and Western spotted skunk . Our study area included avocado orchards and wild lands in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties selected for their position in the landscape and for landowner cooperation .

This is the chief evidence supporting our general finding that growth originating in different sectors has different effects on households in different parts of the expenditure distribution. Re-estimating this relationship with different unobserved effects strategies yields results that are slightly weaker but broadly consistent—in any event a joint test of the equality of coefficients across sectors for all deciles leads to a rejection of the null hypothesis of equality. The third thing to notice is that while growth from agriculture has a positive and significant finding effect on expenditure growth for the bottom five deciles, growth from other sectors is never significant. One cannot reject the null hypothesis that no decile benefits from non-agricultural sources of GDP growth.13 Point estimates associated with growth from non-agricultural sectors are in fact negative for the bottom eight deciles, but little should be made of this fact, both because none of these coefficients are significant and because even if significant these negative coefficients would only be an indication that non-agricultural income growth reduced expenditure growth relative to the positive mean levels reported in Table 2, not that it actually makes it negative. Taken together these results suggest a progressive effect of income growth originating in agriculture: a one percentage point increase in GDP due to agricultural income growth is associated with a 6.8 percentage point increase in the growth rate of expenditures of the bottom decile, declining to 4.4 percentage points for the fifth decile, and with no effect at all on the highest decile. Note the differences between our instrumental variables and OLS results. Estimated coefficients associated with agriculture are much higher in Table 5, suggesting that the OLS coefficients were attenuated by measurement error,potted blueberries in line with our discussion above in Section 4.2. At the same time coefficients associated with non-agricultural income growth are lower finding and have considerably higher standard errors than in the OLS case.

The results we have which seem quite robust are finding monotonicity of the effects of agricultural income growth across deciles, indicating a certain progressivity in the effects of agricultural income on the distribution of expenditures; and finding significantly different effects from income originating in different sectors. We next turn our attention to the question of whether the effects of income growth from different sectors on expenditures differ across countries. We are interested in particular in whether there is heterogeneity across different particular observable groups. We might expect such heterogeneity to stem from differences in endowments or social conditions across countries. We consider four ways of dividing countries: the initial level of poverty; the initial level of inequality; the initial level of adult literacy;and conclude with the contrast across continents, which of course may capture many differences in endowments and social structures.Our work so far addresses the question of how income growth from agriculture affects the distribution of expenditures within countries, rather than across them. We are now able to say something about the effects of such growth on the global distribution of welfare by asking whether the effects of income growth from agriculture on distribution are different for poorer and wealthier countries within our sample. We group countries by initial level of finding poverty rates and report results in Table 6. In our sample, the median poverty rate across countries is 15.27%, ranging from a minimum of 0.04% in Bosnia and Herzogovina to 81.32% in Burundi.Because we are interested in whether there is heterogeneity in elasticities across the global ranking of poverty rates, not the ranking within continents, we produce these results without the extra continent dummies that we have used in most of the analysis above. There are several things worthy of note in Table 6. First, one can reject the null hypothesis that there is no heterogeneity by country poverty level.

Specifically, one can reject the hypotheses that coefficients are equal across poorer and wealthier countries in the bottom three deciles finding. Second, the robust pattern of monotonicity observed elsewhere for the coefficients associated with agriculture is preserved for poor countries, but the direction is nearly reversed for wealthy countries. Thus, the progressive effect of agricultural income growth on distribution seems to be confined to the poorer half of the countries in our sample. Third, we can reject the hypothesis that agricultural and non-agricultural coefficients are equal within the poorer half of countries finding for the bottom six deciles, in line with the baseline results of Table 5. However, we cannot reject equality among the richer half of countries. This is additional evidence that the progressive effect of agricultural income growth on the welfare of the poor may be confined to the poor in the poorest countries. Our findings here are related to results found by other authors. For example, Christiaensen et al. finding finds that agriculture growth matters most for poverty reduction when using the poverty line of $1 per capita rather that $2 per capita. Though our results are not directly comparable finding, in our analysis the income level of the deciles nevertheless directly measures the intensity of poverty, since lower deciles in poorer countries are typically poorer than lower deciles in richer countries. All of the three notable findings discussed above turn out to also be true when we look at poverty across countries within a continent, by estimating finding while including continent dummies. However, in this specification the addition of extra controls causes the significance of the individual coefficients seen in Table 6 to disappear. Thus, though income growth from agriculture affects the expenditure distribution differently in poor and wealthy countries, the fact that with the addition of continent effects the individual significance vanishes suggests that the continent finding may matter in understanding these patterns, a question we return to below. One interpretation of the results of last section is that it is not really poorer countries, but less equal countries to which this applies, and we only find our earlier results because less equal countries also tend to be countries with more poor. This certainly isn’t a new idea: Datt and Ravallion finding, Ravallion finding, Suryahadi et al. finding, and Christiaensen et al. finding all argue for the possible importance of initial inequality in understanding the effects of aggregate sectoral income growth on poverty. We do not really have the data to distinguish between these two hypotheses adequately, but we can at least divide countries according to initial inequality and see what happens. We divide countries into groups depending on whether their initial Gini coefficient is above or below the median.

Results from this exercise are reported in Table 7. In contrast with our poverty results, dividing countries by initial inequality preserves our earlier monotonicity results for both more and less unequal countries, with agriculture tending to differentially benefit poorer households in both groups. However, we can no longer reject the hypothesis that coefficients are the same across groups, whether we include continent fixed effects or not, leading us to conclude that initial inequality may be a less salient dimension of heterogeneity across countries than is initial poverty.Soils are an important consideration for individuals, community groups, and local governments becoming involved in urban agriculture. In many situations, urban soil has been contaminated and degraded by past uses and activity, including industry,square plastic pot unauthorized dumping, construction, heavy traffic, and adjacent buildings where lead based paint has been applied. Elevated levels of lead in particular are fairly common in urban soils and pose health risks, especially to young children who can ingest soil while playing or helping in gardens. Ongoing exposure to lead can damage the nervous system, interfere with brain development, and create other health problems. Arsenic, cadmium, copper, zinc, and other naturally occurring trace elements in soils, especially heavy metals, can also be elevated to unsafe levels by past land uses. Although soil degradation and contamination are important concerns and should be addressed, they are not always a problem with urban agriculture sites. A study conducted at several community gardens in the Los Angeles area by University of California researchers found that “in nearly all cases concentrations of trace elements were well within natural ranges” finding. In contrast, a study conducted in San Francisco found that “a majority of the gardens exceeded the California Human Health Screening Level for arsenic, cadmium, and lead” finding.Even where there are elevated levels of lead or other heavy metals or contaminants in soil, relatively little is absorbed by plants that can be harmful to humans, although this depends on soil and other environmental conditions as well as on the plant’s characteristics. Accidentally swallowing or inhaling contaminated soil or dust is the most likely way urban farmers will be exposed to unsafe levels of lead or other contaminants. This can happen easily, for example, when people put their fingers in their mouths without thinking. Beyond heavy metals, other sources of soil contamination and soil hazards might include solvents found at sites with a history of manufacturing use, various petroleum-based chemicals common at former gas stations and other industrial sites, chlorinated pesticides and residual herbicides on former agricultural lands or public landscaped areas, saline soil, and sites where a contaminant may not be harmful to people but may prevent plant growth or production.

Physical debris such as lumber, concrete, wire, broken glass, and discarded syringes can also create hazards for the urban farmer. Clearly, there are no easy answers: each site and situation is unique. However, establishing reasonable policies and encouraging sustainable practices will help to ensure that urban farmers and consumers of urban agricultural products are not exposed to unsafe levels of contaminants, including lead and other heavy metals. This publication outlines strategies for urban soil contamination assessment, testing, and remediation; explains best management practices for urban agriculture; and discusses municipal policy concerning safe soils for urban agriculture. This publication does not cover soil fertility or other important soil science topics in depth; additional resources on these topics are presented in the section “Sources of More Information.”Overall soil conditions should be a consideration when selecting a site for urban agriculture. If plants, even weeds, are growing abundantly on the site, it is a good indication that the soil will be able to support crops. If the soil is reasonably easy to dig, it is a positive sign as well. The presence of plant roots and earthworms can indicate soil health. However, these indicators do not guarantee that soil is uncontaminated. When assessing potential sites, be aware that properties with considerable amounts of trash and rubble or obvious dead spots where plants do not grow may pose challenges.A simple test for evaluating soil fertility is to plant bean seeds in soil from the site, perhaps in a pot or biodegradable paper cup, and compare their germination and growth with an equal number of beans grown in purchased potting soil. It is also advisable to dig a hole 1 to 2 feet deep in several places to assess the presence of debris on the site.Learn as much as possible about the history of a proposed site and how it has been used in the past. Walking around the site may provide some clues. Adjacent older homes with peeling paint, paint chips, or evidence of sandblasting finding indicate potential soil lead contamination. Any building built before 1979 that has old or peeling paint may be a hazard due to use of lead based paint. Proximity to a freeway or a heavily trafficked road is also a source of lead. Although leaded gasoline has not been in use since the 1980s, lead particles in vehicle exhaust may have settled from the air into the soil. Talking to the property owner and neighbors is a good strategy, as neighbors are often familiar with past uses of the property. It may also be necessary to do some Internet or library research. For example, at some public libraries and online sources it is possible to access Sanborn maps, which were used by insurance companies to determine the risk involved with insuring individual properties. These maps can provide information about prior uses of a proposed site. Old aerial photographs, which can also be found in local libraries or online, can help identify a site’s history as well. The local city hall may have aerial photographs accessible in their archives.

Generally, it would be beneficial for society to pollute less than what is observed under a free market system. Yet, eliminating pollution altogether is too costly and regulation is needed to keep it at desirable levels that maximize societal welfare. Regulation, on the other hand, is always defined for, and often differs among, given regions. In the United States, regulation of water quality is guided by the federal Clean Water Act finding. States emphasize designing, imposing, and enforcing the actual regulations imposed at the federal level. When regulating concentrated animal feeding operations finding, for instance, states may establish rules that influence manure-application practices. As our economic analysis will demonstrate, regional regulation has serious caveats. For this study, we create a stylized framework to illustrate regional regulation and its potential failure. Hereby, we establish a need for applied economic analysis to further clarify the problem and help improve existing policies. We examine the effects of regional finding regulation on the generation of residual nitrogen and phosphorus from animal and crop production. We also show that stricter but uncoordinated environmental protection in one region may lead to increased environmental damage in the other. The two main reasons for this are: 1) Measures that reduce nutrient residuals, particularly crop choice, exhibit trade-offs between phosphorus and nitrogen residuals; and, 2) The role of nitrogen and phosphorus in generating externalities differs between regions. The crucial difference between manure and chemical fertilizers is that a farmer is only able to choose the overall level of manure application, which determines the applied amounts of both nutrients. With chemical fertilizers, any combination of nitrogen and phosphorus are commercially available. Nutrient requirements of crops vary significantly. Corn needs about 140 pounds of nitrogen and between 20 and 30 pounds of phosphorus per acre finding.

Soybeans, on the other hand,fodder system can utilize atmospheric nitrogen and recommended phosphorus rates vary between 20 and 45 pounds per acre. Also, the concentration of phosphorus and nitrogen in animal manure differ. Dairy manure contains about 1.5 times more nitrogen than phosphorus, while dry hog manure contains roughly equal amounts of both. To avoid the costs of applying both chemical fertilizers and manure,farmers choose the manure quantities on the basis of one nutrient, often nitrogen; while the other, often phosphorus, is applied excessively. Residual nutrients, often coming in the form of runoff, are harmful for ground and surface waters. Protecting groundwater requires controlling nitrogen loading, and mitigating eutrophication requires reducing loading of either or both of the nutrients, depending on the watershed characteristics. Arid regions with little surface water, like California, tend to suffer from groundwater quality problems but face very little eutrophication. Agricultural regions draining into the Chesapeake Bay, on the other hand, may suffer from both problems. Regions located directly on the Bay may be more concerned with phosphorus than nitrogen, depending on the finding effects nutrients have on eutrophication. This discrepancy may cause one region to emphasize controlling nitrogen and another to control phosphorus. Problems can arise if regions share common surface waters, as one region may undertake measures that mitigate problems they experience but aggravate problems experienced by the other. We consider a stylized model of an upstream and a downstream region.The downstream recreational region has no agricultural production but derives benefits from surface water quality. Nutrient residuals in the agricultural region are the only determinants of nutrient loading in both regions. We assume that the agricultural region suffers from elevated nitrate concentrations in its groundwater and nitrogen-driven eutrophication in its rivers. Hence, its regulation focuses on nitrogen. The downstream recreational region is concerned with regulating phosphorus to protect its coastal waters. The decision-making framework for total livestock and crop production relies on basic economic and technical characteristics. While it does not capture the complexities of economic decision-making or the nutrient loading governed by hydrology, it allows for sufficient details needed to obtain qualitative policy conclusions. The objective in our model is profitability of the farms while accounting for the adverse effects of nutrient loading on the downstream region.

We vary the way that profits and nutrient loading are weighed by assigning four alternative decision makers to conduct the optimization: the crop farmer, the livestock farmer, a regional policy maker, and a global finding policy maker. The farmers’ choices and the associated costs and benefits are presented in Table 1. The dark green color in Table 1 stands for revenues and the light green for costs associated with the choice variable given in the left column. Manure nutrients used as substitutes for chemical fertilizers create economic value. The costs are created by hauling and application. The environmental damage is linked to residual nutrients, i.e., the differences in nutrients applied and nutrient uptake. The literature recognizes that under expected profit maximization of the farms, there will typically be some residuals generated. We want to focus on characteristics of residuals when manure is the source of nutrients and policies differ regionally. Therefore, we assume chemical fertilizers create some residual nutrients, but we normalize this to zero. Furthermore, we assume that manure is applied at least according to crops’ agronomic nitrogen needs but, due to the nutrient phosphorus ratio of manure, phosphorus is always applied excessively. Given these guidelines, what do the choices of our decision makers look like? Table 2 considers three alternative situations representative of Midwestern farms. First, both livestock and field crop farmers interact, pursuing profitability without awareness of nutrient loading to ground and surface waters. This prompts policy makers to intervene. The regional policy maker considers only surface and groundwater quality problems in the agricultural region, while the global policy maker additionally considers the eutrophication of surface waters in the recreational region. We assume a cow produces 12 gallons of fresh manure daily, and 126 pounds of plant-available nitrogen and 115 pounds of phosphate phosphorus annually. The crop choice is between corn and double-cropped soybeans after small-grain silage. The agronomic needs for corn and soybeans are 140 and 85 pounds of nitrogen and 25 and 52.5 pounds of phosphorus per acre, respectively finding. The first row in Table 2 presents the choices of the farmers who do not consider nutrient loading. Considering only profits, the livestock farmer ends up having 1000 animals finding, which generate about four million gallons of fresh manure annually. The most profitable crop choice is the double-cropped soybean. In this case, the farmer substitutes chemical fertilization with manure as long as the costs of hauling and application are below or at the costs of buying chemical fertilizers. Regarding this, the farmer ends up applying manure on all her farmland, but does not import anything. The price received from the crop farm does not cover the costs of hauling and applying for farther distances.

The excessive manure application is about two million pounds. The farmers’ overall solution generates residual nitrogen of 72.5 pounds per acre and residual phosphorus of 97.7 pounds per acre. Regional policy standards aim to eliminate nitrogen residues from the upstream region. At the livestock farm level, it leads to a switch to corn, a slight reduction in herd sizes, export of manure to the crop production farm, and reduced profits of the livestock farmer. Since corn consumes less phosphorous than soybeans, transition to corn increases the phosphorous residual. This happens despite the fact that the regional policy maker’s solution utilizes the almost two million pounds of manure that were applied excessively. The global policy maker finding recognizes that rivers carry most of the dissolved phosphorus to the other region, and places more weight on phosphorus loading. She concurs with the regional policy maker’s slight cut on animal numbers but maintains the farmers’ initial choice of crops. She requires farmers to incur high costs from hauling manure to the crop production area,fodder system for sale but allows some excessive application of manure. This creates about 15 pounds per acre of residual nitrogen and about 40 pounds of residual phosphorus per acre. As a summary, the regional policy maker’s intervention always improves surface and groundwater quality in the upstream region, but may simultaneously worsen surface water quality downstream. This follows from reductions in residual nitrogen but potential increases in residual phosphorus, which occur because the agricultural regional decision maker does not account for the phosphorous loading problem in downstream regions and simply focuses on the nitrogen loading problem of the agricultural region. In the United States, nutrient management plans finding are key to mitigating the impacts of excess nutrients from animal waste. Concentrated animal feeding operations finding, i.e., large animal facilities, have to conduct and follow NMPs to balance the application and uptake of nutrients. NMPs follow either nitrogen or phosphorus standards and, in most cases, only apply to farmland controlled by the livestock facility. In accordance with the Clean Water Act, each state has created a list of impaired waters and defined their critical pollutants. A phosphorus standard should be followed if local waters are designated phosphorus-critical and if there are significant risks for phosphorus loading. Otherwise, a nitrogen standard is often followed due to its lower compliance costs. If it is designated as critical for certain downstream waters to be free of phosphorous loading, a regional approach may aggravate downstream pollution. In our example, the regional policy maker’s solution coincided with a nitrogen standard. Our framework could be used to assess manure regulation in California. Here, two relevant pollutants for NMPs and environmental concern would be nitrates and other salts. Choosing techniques that allow nitrogen to evaporate in compliance with a nitrogen standard might aggravate problems of salt sequestration in soils and groundwater.

If these techniques allow farmers to meet regulatory standards while applying more manure per acre, more salts per acre would be applied. This paper raises further questions for economic and empirical analysis. Since NMPs are controlling the manure applications only on livestock farms, will tighter nutrient-use limitations as a result of residual effects induce unwanted and even illegal manure-handling practices? Dairy management plans in the San Jac into watershed report manure as being both imported and exported from the region. They also suggest that illegal dumping is taking place. The challenge is not only to introduce regulation but also to enforce it; and the more costly the regulation, the more incentives there are for noncompliance. Furthermore, there are suggestions that NMPs should be applied not only to livestock farms, but also to all farmland utilizing manure. This, too, might have unintended consequences. Crop farmers’ willingness to accept manure as a substitute for chemical fertilizers depends, for instance, on his/ her perceptions of its nutrient content. If these do not coincide with those set by NMPs, crop farmers’ willingness to substitute manure would decrease. This would force the livestock farmers to either directly subsidize crop farmers’ manure applications or to find manure application areas farther away. Both practices would increase livestock farms’ compliance costs–and strengthen the desire for noncompliance. Finally, introducing policies based on a global perspective may be very beneficial to the United States or the state as a whole, but could have negative impacts in some of the affected regions. An example of this would be seen if the upstream region is forced to take uncompensated actions that improve the downstream region’s water quality. This distributional conflict may lead to the use of political processes to prevent enactment of certain policies. Lobbying by different regional groups could carry major implications for policy formation. Therefore, policy design may require incorporation of compensation mechanisms that will reduce the loss to upstream producers as they modify their actions to improve water quality downstream. The incorporation of political-economic considerations is becoming an important part of environmental policy design, and will have major effects on total societal welfare as well as the welfare of individual groups. Given the size of the Korean economy and the high trade barriers now being erased, the agreement with Korea is considered the most important U.S. trade agreement since the North American Free Trade Agreement finding. Throughout this article, we refer to the Republic of Korea simply as Korea; isolationist and communist North Korea is a separate country for which no free trade agreements could be applicable.

Qualitative interview suggest that sellers often posted prices that reflected strategic price offers, fishing for higher prices, much in the way that one would typically make offers in more traditional, in-person negotiations. In fact, sellers often posted prices that were not only higher than their local market price, but even in excess of what was being paid in hubs or super hubs. As a result, ask prices were on average substantially above bid prices.Buyers’ average bid prices, on the other hand, track hub market prices very well. Figure B.8 plots these values over time for maize, and Figure B.9 provides a box-and-whisker plot of bid and ask prices within each season, in which we can see that the median bid price is typically at or below the 25th percentile of ask prices Nonetheless, about 7,300 tons of grain were successfully transacted, worth about ✩2.3 million USD. 22% of treated traders and 2% of treated households successfully traded on the platform. Figure B.10 shows the cumulative sales over the platform during the duration of the study. We now turn the impacts of the platform. We first explore the effects on market integration and trade flows. Figure 2 presents impacts of the platform on several outcomes: whether any trade is occurring between sub-counties, the number of traders engaged in trade between sub-counties, the volume of trade flowing between sub-counties, and price dispersion between markets. The first three of these outcomes is drawn from our panel survey of traders, in which we asked detailed questions about their trading behavior at the sub-county level finding. The last is drawn from our market-level price surveys and is therefore at the market dyad level. Within these dyads, we analyze the experiment using indicator variables for dyads in which both markets are treated and dyads in which one market is treated,dutch buckets using no-treatment dyads as the control.

Figure 2 presents Fan regressions of each outcome on the distance between the pair, estimated separately for our three treatment groups. Distance is measured as the road distance of the shortest route connecting the two. Before examining treatment effects, we first note some important patterns observed among our control-only pairs. In the upper left panel, we see that while the probability of any trade is high for nearby sub-counties, this diminishes rapidly with distance. The probability of any trade occurring between the sub-counties is close to zero beyond 200km distance. Consistent with this, the number of traders finding and total trade volumes finding also falls quickly with distance.These increasing trade costs with distance lead to notably higher price dispersion between markets located at further distances, as shown in the bottom right panel. What is the effect of introducing a mobile clearinghouse? In Figure 2, we see increases in the probability of any trade occurring, the number of traders engaged in trade between sub-counties, and the volume of trade flowing between sub-counties. We also see a drop in price dispersion.Again, we see increases in the probability of trade occurring finding, increases in the number of traders operating between sub-counties finding; increases in trade volumes finding, and reductions in price dispersion finding.Returning to Figure 2, we also note a striking pattern by distance. Treatment effects are strongly concentrated among nearby markets. In fact, we see almost no treatment effect beyond 200km, the point at which the probability of trade drops close to zero. The one exception to this is price dispersion, which continues to drop in our treated market pairs beyond 200km, albeit at a slower rate. This may be due either to treatment effects on large, long-distance traders not included in our sample as resident in study markets. Alternatively, we may observe transitive convergence finding or to transshipment finding. Table 2 explores this further, estimating Equation 1 separately for market pairs above and below the median distance observed in our sample finding.

We again see that treatment effects for all outcomes are concentrated in nearby sub-counties and markets, with significant increases in the probability of trade occurring finding, significant increases in the number of traders operating between sub-counties, significant increases in trade volumes finding, and significant reductions in price dispersion. In contrast, we see almost no effect of the platform on direct trading outcomes finding for markets that are at above median distance, though the point estimates suggest that price convergence results may persist along a farther distance, albeit at a smaller rate. The platform is therefore quite successful in generating additional short-distance trade. However, it falls to live up to the often-touted promise of such online marketplaces to directly connect remotely-located farmers and markets with urban consumers finding. While perhaps initially surprising, this pattern of large effects over the shortest distances is consistent with Figure 1, which shows that very little of the existing price dispersion at short distances is explained by transport costs. Given the ubiquity of mobile phones even in the control group, it is likely that the very large price gaps necessary to motivate long-distance trade are already arbitraged away, meaning that the more marginal improvements in information revealed by our system typically only exceed the pecuniary of trade over shorter distances.We have already seen in the previous section that the platform encouraged greater intermediary activity in treated sub-counties and markets. Here, we explore in greater detail trader take-up of the platform and effects on their businesses. Table 4 presents trader take-up results. We see that, by the endline survey, 91% of treated traders report having heard of Kudu, while only 32% of control traders have heard of the platform. Therefore, while Kudu was not restricted to be operational only in treated areas, we do see a significant and large difference in awareness of the platform generated by our encouragement design. We also observe a 42 percentage point increase in the likelihood of receiving any price information via SMS finding. However, in terms of knowledge of prices, we do not see a substantial treatment effect. We ask traders to report their best guess of the current market price in their local market, their hub market, and their superhub market, which we then compare the the actual price as measured by our market surveys. We call the absolute value of the gap the “error” in price knowledge. Although traders’ knowledge of nearby local and hub markets is slightly better than their knowledge of superhub prices, we see no differences between treatment and control traders in knowledge for any market type.

This may be because knowledge in our control is already quite high, as demonstrated by the relatively small error size. We do, however, see strong treatment effects in terms of self-reported impacts on negotiations, both with farmers from whom traders buy and with buyers to whom they sell. Treated traders are more likely to report that they are aware of farmers and buyers receiving price information via SMS. They are also more likely to state that this information changed how they negotiated with their trading partner. Finally, in terms of Kudu take-up, 80% of treated traders used Kudu finding, while 22% successfully completed a deal on the platform. In comparison, only 12% of control traders tried Kudu, and only 3% successfully completed a transaction. This appears to come mainly from a reduction in trader markups finding; point estimates suggest a reduction of about 8%, though this effect is measured with imprecision and is not significant finding. Volumes traded appear to increase, perhaps sizably, though again, this point estimate is not significant finding. Columns 4-5 present effects on the price at which traders sell maize, while Columns 6-7 present treatment effects on the price at which traders purchase maize. Similar to results presented in Table 3, we see no significant effects on the level of prices finding. However, looking at heterogeneity by relative deficit and surplus areas finding, we see that in relative deficit areas finding, treatment results in trader sale prices that are significantly lower finding. Conversely, in areas that are relative deficit finding, we observe that treated traders sell at higher prices. We see similar, albeit slightly muted, effects for the trader purchase price in Column 7. We will return later to discuss the relative magnitudes of the sale vs. purchase price treatment effects. Finally, we explore treatment effects based on baseline heterogeneity. Figure 4 presents treatment effects on profits, markups, and trade volumes based on their baseline levels finding. The top panels plot Fan regression estimates of the outcome at endline on baseline levels separately by treatment and control, while the bottom panel presents the difference finding, along with the 90% and 95% confidence intervals. Density in the baseline measure is presented in red. While the negative effects on profits and positive effects on volumes traded appear fairly consistent across their baseline distribution, we do interestingly see that markups are higher among treated traders at the low end of the baseline markup distribution and lower among treated traders at the high end of the baseline markup distribution. These estimates therefore suggest that the introduction of the mobile marketplaces appears to lead to convergence in markups, helping low markup traders and harming high markup traders. This is consistent with the idea that trading in the absence of our intervention is skill- and human capital-intensive,grow bucket in which case those with stronger trading networks and superior information can reliably reap greater profits.

Our intervention, by reducing the cost of information to a symmetric low level appears to have removed a substantial portion of the heterogeneity in trader markups. We have seen thus far that the introduction of a mobile clearinghouse platform induces greater market integration and lowers intermediaries’ profits. These results are often seen as stepping stones along a causal chain ending in the ultimate goal of improving the welfare of smallholder farmers. We turn now to effects of the platform on farmers. First, we explore measures of awareness and take-up of the platform among farmers. Table 6 presents these results. We see that 52% percent of farmers in treated sub-counties have heard of Kudu, compared to only 12% in control sub-counties. Similarly, 55% of treated farmers have received price information via some form of an SMS-based platform, compared to only 16% of control farmers. Next, we explore impacts on price knowledge. We first note that overall price knowledge is lower among farmers than among traders, with error rates that are 42-84% higher than observed among traders. This is consistent with the presence of information asymmetries between farmers and traders. Similar to those of traders, farmers’ error rates grow with distance. In contrast to traders, however, we do find some suggestive evidence that information to farmers improves their knowledge of prices; errors rates are smaller among treated farmers than among control farmers, albeit not quite significantly so finding. 23% of farmers in treated sub-counties report using price information received via SMS when negotiating prices in the past year, compared to only 1% in control sub-counties. Turning to take-up of Kudu itself, we see that 26% of treated farmers have ever used Kudu finding, compared to 2% of control farmers. However, the success rate for study farmers managing to transact on Kudu is relatively low; only 2% of treated farmers completed a transaction on Kudu. Though this rate is significantly higher than the 0% observed in the control group, this low adoption of Kudu is notable, and suggests that farmers either see low benefits or high barriers to adoption of the platform. We will explore determinants of adoption below. Columns 2, 4, 6, and 8 of Table 7 present results. The coefficient on β2 helps to characterize likely adopters. Who is likely to adopt Kudu depends on who faces the largest benefits to adoption, relative to the cost. One might predict that smaller, poorer farmers who currently receive low prices would have the most to gain from access to a new platform on which to sell their crops. However, one could also imagine that the platform would have a hard time finding a buyer for farmers who sell relatively small surpluses, and therefore that it may be the larger, wealthier farmers who are best positioned to use Kudu. Consistent with Allen finding, our evidence suggests the latter interpretation. We see that take up is significantly higher among farmers with higher total revenues and higher prices received, as evidenced by the statistically significant correlation between the propensity score and these outcomes.

Such a pattern of findings is consistent with a story that although the focus of the CG system on tropical and subtropical wheat and maize varieties has limited its impact on China productivity as a whole, it has played a role in increasing technology in poor areas, a chronic weakness of China’s research system.Our results for the TFP equation, presented in Table 4, also generally perform well.The goodness of fit measures range from 0.80 to 0.85, quite high for determinants of TFP equations.In other work, in India for example, the fit of the specification was only 0.17.The signs of most of the coefficients also are as expected and many of the standard errors are relatively low.For example, the coefficients of the weather indices are negative and significant in the TFP equations in the rice, wheat, and maize specifications.Flood and drought events, as expected, push down TFP measures, since they often adversely affect output but not inputs.Perhaps the most robust and important finding of our analysis is that technology has a large and positive influence on TFP.The finding holds over all crops, and all measures of technology.The positive and highly significant coefficients on both measures of the rate of varietal turnover show that as new technology is adopted by farmers it increases TFP.Following from this, the positive contributions of China’s research system and the presence of CG material both imply that domestic investments in agricultural R & D and ties with the international agricultural research system have contributed to a healthy agricultural sector.Further analysis is conducted to attempt overcome one possible shortcoming of using VT as a measure of technological change.As varieties age, the yield potential may deteriorate.We add a variable measuring the average age of the varieties to isolate the age effect from the new technology effect.Although we find no apparent negative age impact on TFP in any of the equations,hydroponic nft channel in a number of the regressions, the coefficient ofVT variable in the TFP equation actually rises, a finding that reinforces the basic message of the importance of technology.The role of extension is less simple.

The impact of extension can occur through its effect on spreading new seed technologies and through its provision of other services enhancing farmer productivity.The positive and significant coefficients on the extension variable in all of the VT technology equations for all crops demonstrate the importance of extension in facilitating farmer adoption.Extension, however, plays less of an independent role in increasing the yield potential of varieties that have been adopted by farmers, perhaps an unsurprising result given the reforms that have shifted the extension from an advisory body to one that is supporting itself, often through the sale of seed.In recent years, both growers and consumers have become increasingly interested in direct marketing as an alternative to conventional marketing outlets.Further, as more consumers develop an appreciation for fresh food produced close to home, they’re turning to farmers markets and other direct markets that offer not only locally grown food, but a connection with those who grow it.In the search for alternatives to the current food system, Community Supported Agriculture offers an increasingly popular option.In the CSA arrangement, consumers get much of their weekly produce by picking up a box of organic, fresh-picked fruits and vegetables grown on a farm in their community.A farmer commits to growing food for a group of people , and the people support the farmer by paying for their shares of produce ahead of time, often at the beginning of the season.CSA members thus ideally share both the risks and the bounty of farming.Although community supported agriculture farms have only been operating in the U.S.since the mid 1980s, there are now between 800 and 1,000 CSAs in the United States.As CSAs have proliferated in this country and elsewhere, CSA and sustainable agriculture advocates have professed a number of hopes and dreams for this approach to farming and marketing.Many see CSA as a vehicle for increasing small farm viability and for encouraging the use of ecologically sound farming practices.CSAs have also been promoted as a way to connect people to their food and each other by building personal relationships between farmers and consumers, as well as by educating people about the food system and its issues.

In 2001, the social issues staff of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz initiated a study of California central coast CSAs, Research Brief #1 covering Monterey, San Benito, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz Counties.This research aims to: 1) describe how the CSA model has been implemented on the central coast, 2) determine the extent to which CSAs on California’s central coast are manifesting the hopes that people hold for them, and 3) identify constraints and opportunities to reaching these ideals.The project was designed to contribute to the small number of studies focusing on CSAs in California, and to provide information to people interested in understanding, supporting, or furthering CSAs.This research brief focuses on one aspect of the CSA study: the profiles and experiences of CSA members.Member attitudes, experiences and perceptions are summarized, and then used to explore the extent to which CSAs are meeting the ideals that many hold for them and to identify some opportunities and challenges that they face in meeting these goals.The survey asked members to write in their most important reasons for joining the CSA.As shown in table 1, the most frequently reported “important reasons” members expressed were to purchase organic3 , fresh produce.The members also wanted to buy local produce or support “local”.When focus group members were asked why they wanted to “support local,” several themes were mentioned.Some people felt that local farms benefit the community in some way, such as by adding jobs, green space, and diversity.Other reasons mentioned include that local farms allow for connection—to the farmers, other people, the land, or farming itself.Finally, others think that supporting local is more ecological, in that less resources are used shipping the food to distant outlets, and having a farm nearby allows people to make sure their farmer is actually using ecological farming methods.Considering that several of the primary reasons given for becoming a CSA member could also be met by going to the farmers market, focus group members were asked what they receive by participating in a CSA rather than by shopping at a farmers market.Although not everyone participated in a CSA to the exclusion of farmers markets, there were still themes regarding their preference.Convenience was frequently mentioned by focus group members—that CSA is less work than going to the farmers market.Some preferred CSA because it allowed them direct contact to a farm, which, as one member said, is “…much different than going to a farmers market and just seeing the produce on the table—you see…the whole process.” Others mentioned that it helped support eating habits that they wanted to have.These responses show some of the unique aspects of CSA, and offer insights for promoting this new aspect of the food system.One goal of this study was to see how people’s habits around shopping and cooking changed as a result of joining a CSA.We assumed that CSA membership would create another task for people; in addition to picking up their weekly share, they would still have to go to the store for food that the CSA did not supply as well as process the food.

Interestingly, we found that half of the respondents’ households reported that they spent less time obtaining food after becoming members than they did before joining.Based on our conversations with CSA members, it is possible that they actually spend more time, but that it ‘feels’ like less.On the other hand, most people reported that they spent more time preparing food than they did before, since CSA produce is usually minimally processed.Participating in a CSA appears to decrease the amount of time spent on some food-related household tasks while increasing the time spent on others.Changes in eating habits was another area we explored.Survey results show that 81% said that they had some type of eating habit change; 79% of the 221 noted that they eat more vegetables or eat a greater variety of vegetables.This finding is encouraging since eating more fruits and vegetables, including a wider variety, has been suggested as a sound way to address and prevent health problems.The next most frequently cited eating habit changes are behaviors related to better health.Shareholders noted that they are eating healthier , eating at home more and out less,nft growing system and eating better quality food.Focus group participants partially explained this phenomena.The CSA structure helped to support these types of eating habits: for example, some people felt compelled to eat the produce that they had already paid for, and others just couldn’t stand throwing vegetables away.We also wanted to identify what people learned from their experiences with the CSA farm, and how their lives changed.We asked members if there have been any other changes in their own or their household’s life since participating in CSAs.The most frequent responses were that people cook differently.This includes people who say they now plan their meals around the vegetables, cook more creatively, enjoy cooking more, and use different recipes/try new things.As one woman said, “I usually plan a week’s menu in advance of going shopping.With CSA I planned the menu around the CSA produce, e.g., ate more stuffed chard and cabbage, fruit desserts, etc.” Some members also noted that they now have a connection with the farm or the farmers , that they are more aware of agricultural or environmental issues , and that they are more active regarding agricultural issues.These effects—learning more about the food system, and doing something to improve it—are changes that some CSA advocates hope will take place as a result of CSA membership.Although the numbers are low, CSA participation does appear to lead to an increased awareness of food system and environmental issues.In addition to exploring why members may leave, we also looked at factors that are related to returning to the CSA.

Respondents appeared more likely to re-join when they were satisfied with the quality, quantity, and product mix of the produce; when picking up the box was convenient; and when people felt the share price was fair.Also, members were more likely to return the next year if the payment schedule did not pose a financial hardship, and they were not throwing away or composting more produce than before they joined the CSA.One interesting finding is that those who said they or their household experienced a change as a result of participating in a CSA were also more likely to rejoin.For example, 82% of households that experienced a change in eating habits would sign on again, whereas 65% of those without such a change were not likely to rejoin.It appears that learning to incorporate or adapt to the new way of eating and cooking helps increase the likelihood of staying with the CSA, as well as encouraging desirable/valuable lifestyle changes.The CSA member survey and focus group findings reveal both positive results and future challenges for those running CSAs or growers who are considering starting a CSA.On the positive side, CSA farms have succeeded in producing high quality produce, have helped people develop healthier eating habits, appear to have addressed some ecological issues , and have connected some people back to their food source.Conversely, the data point to several challenges, particularly regarding long-term CSA viability.Addressing the issue of choice appears to be a persistent dilemma.Most people leave the CSA due to lack of choice, yet the idea of “receiving what is available when it is available” is an integral part of the CSA concept.Therefore, turnover is likely to always be an issue, and thus finding new members will continually be required.Some people look at the small number of members currently participating in CSA and see a huge untapped market.However, there are also several indicators that point to obstacles to CSA growth.The limited demographics of people participating, the availability of organic food from other sources , a culture based on convenience and choice, and having to spend more time preparing food and eating what is seasonally available could limit the number of potential members available for both current and future CSAs.Ultimately, it appears that while CSA is not a quick answer to problems in the food system, it definitely offers a needed alternative.Providing fresh, local, and organically grown produce; a connection to where food is grown; and education about agricultural and environmental issues are important and necessary services for those seeking options in today’s food system.