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Antimicrobial use in animal agriculture is often perceived to play a role in the emerging threat of antimicrobial resistance. Increased consumer awareness of this issue places pressure on animal husbandry to adopt policies to reduce or eliminate antimicrobial use. We use a scoping review methodology to assess research on consumer perceptions of antimicrobial drugs in meat products in the United States, Canada, or the European Union. Evaluating peer-reviewed and grey literature, we included studies for assessment if they met these topical and geographic requirements, involved primary data collection, and were originally published in English. Our screening process identified 124 relevant studies. Three reviewers jointly developed a data charting form and independently charted the contents of the studies. Of the 105 studies that measured consumer concern, 77.1% found that consumers were concerned about antimicrobial use in meat production. A minority of studies (29.8% of all studies) queried why consumers hold these views. These studies found human health and animal welfare were the main reasons for concern. Antimicrobial resistance rarely registered as an explicit reason for concern. A smaller group of studies (23.3%) measured the personal characteristics of consumers that expressed concern about antimicrobials. Among these studies, the most common and consistent features of these consumers were gender, age, income, and education. Regarding the methodology used, studies tended to be dominated by either willingness-to-pay studies or Likert scale questionnaires (73.64% of all studies). We recommend consideration of qualitative research into consumer views on this topic, which may provide new perspectives that explain consumer decision-making and mentality that are lacking in the literature. In addition, more research into the difference between what consumers claim is of concern and their ultimate purchasing decisions would be especially valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we consider the stalled implementation of two state policies among recipients of land reform in Costa Rica: the transfer of authority over forests on state agrarian reform lands over to the Ministry of the Environment, and the Rural Development Institute’s requirement to issue land title to the recipients of its land reform projects. To date, neither of these policies is even partially implemented, resulting in both forests and marginalized landholders existing in a state of dual tenure limbo. In this article we draw on document analysis, interviews with policymakers, and interviews with recipients of land reform to determine why these policies have not been implemented. In addition, we assess the potential consequences for forest conservation that this situation has produced by mapping the extent and characteristics of forests that occupy this state of uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines why some kinds of households are positioned to take advantage of carbon offset projects that target secondary forest fallow. It does so by assessing the results of two offset projects targeting this land use in the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve, Costa Rica. For one project, it finds that a small group of male landowners have most of the land in fallow; however, the presence of this land use is subsidized by the productivity of female land in cash-crop production. In the second project, payments were targeted toward land in the area's fertile floodplain, and resulted in an exclusion of some households from the area's dominant livelihood activity: cash-crop production. These results demonstrate the difficult trade-offs involved in designing equitable and attractive offset projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an error in affiliation for author Amelia Greiner Safi. The correct affiliations are: B 1 b Department of Public and Ecosystem Health, College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States of America, B 2 b Department of Communication, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States of America. [Extracted from the article]

ABSTRACT Using Costa Rica's experience with its payments for ecosystem services (PES) programme, this article examines how and why some groups come to be excluded from participating in the programme. It demonstrates that Costa Rica's PES programme results in payments that generally go to larger landowners and tend to exclude certain kinds of smallholders, and that these patterns occur despite concerted state efforts to include the rural poor. The author argues that access exclusions found in PES are the result of historical patterns of agrarian settlement interacting with the state's inability to recognize certain forms of property claims in the context of PES, with the latter condition emerging through ongoing efforts to transform the administration of the nation's property regime in ways that will render it more legible to markets. This case study shows the importance of understanding how access restrictions emerge from the complex relations between multiple state institutions and agrarian producers in the implementation of PES. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I provide a first-hand account of a trip designed to verify the existence of a carbon forestry offset in Costa Rica. In so doing, I reflect on how various actors become the stabilized calculative agents of scientists, state bureaucrats, indigenous leaders, GPS devices, trees, signs, and field reports that such trips require. In addition, I show how various articulations of these actors, and their emergent agencies, simultaneously maintains both the carbon offset as a commodity object as well as a field of action and communication that allows for such an object to be exchanged. In short, I consider the verification of an offset as a performance. Doing so, I examine the agency of some actors in this process, and account for the uneven power relations inherent in such a process. Specifically, I advance three arguments. First, the agency of actors is constituted, in part, by various calculative devices, which themselves simultaneously occupy an unstable position of being both a material object and an abstraction. Second, the normative power of the performance I witnessed derives from its relation to the abject: spaces and ways of being that are unintelligible to the logics of offsetting that nonetheless serve to further reiterate the need for an offset's calculative frame. Third, performing an offset is a self-reflexive process, and it is through the self-reflexivity of actors involved that the qualities of 'the forest' emerge in ways that confound the stability of an offset commodity. In this way, the biophysical qualities of the forest are not necessarily barriers to its commodification. Instead, it is the reflexive practices inherent in performing 'the economic' that can serve to confound the emergence of the commodified forest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relation between discourse and value in the production of a carbon forestry offset project among indigenous smallholders in Costa Rica. By analyzing a pivotal cost-benefit calculation that changed the trajectory of the project, this article makes two principal claims. First, the intelligibility of the calculation is grounded in a discursive formation that is emergent from a history of development projects in the region, where particular ways of speaking about the relation between indigenous bodies and agriculture have allowed carbon's commodification to emerge as a desirable project. Second, the calculations resulted in quantified representations of space that were necessary for the offset to become useful within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. In this case, the forestry offset's use value derived from quantified representations of agricultural space; a process that opened some forms of land use for receiving carbon while foreclosing on others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the practices of calculation needed to create carbon forestry offsets in Costa Rica, paying special attention to the spaces that are produced through such practices. I argue that the calculations needed to bring a carbon offset into being as a commodity is a process that results in the coconstitution of relational space, absolute Cartesian spaces, and the bounded territory of the nation-state. I develop my argument by drawing on Martin Heidegger's writings on calculation, technology, and the question of being and examine the spaces that result from carbon offset calculations performed by the Costa Rican state. Central to my argument is the idea that the practices of calculation are productive of a technological metaphysics, where the world becomes disclosed to us as an object of orderability. This ontological orientation allows for the objects and subjects of the world, in this case carbon commodities as well as producers and consumers of carbon offsets, to become relationally embedded in the world through the production of bounded Cartesian space. The production of such 'graspable' spaces simultaneously reinforces and undermines the territoriality of the Costa Rican state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Where large-scale plantation agriculture spatially coexists with smallholding agriculturalists, they interact in multiple ways. A number of researchers have addressed the broader social, environmental, and economic consequences of smallholder/plantation relationships. Few studies, however, have examined the household-level conditions that drive smallholders to engage in plantation wage work. Research from off-farm and non-farm labor markets offer a number of clues to what types of households participate in plantation wage work. These studies, however, use aggregate economic categories and fail to consider the specific case of plantation wage work. Utilizing household survey data, this paper seeks to understand the relationship between smallholders and plantations by examining the household-level conditions that lead to engagement with plantation wage work within Costa Rica''s Dos Novillos watershed. Our principle findings are: (1) agricultural assets are negatively predictive of engagement in plantation wage work; (2) a household''s male labor availability is strongly predictive of a household''s level of engagement in the plantation economy; (3) participation in plantation wage work appears to be an income strategy for asset-poor households more generally. Overall, this study finds little engagement in plantation wage work by smallholding agricultural households. Instead, this type of work appears to be the domain of asset-poor households that are marginally engaged in agriculture. This paper concludes by suggesting policy prescriptions and an agenda for future research in this watershed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]