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This study uses news media discourse analysis to investigate the highly contentious process of pension privatization retrenchment in Lithuania. In 2016, Lithuania began debating reforms on restructuring its poorly performing "second pillar" pension scheme – statutory funded individually defined contribution plans managed by the private sector. Pension reform is here conceptualized as a process of discursive contestation of the orthodox neoliberal consensus that prevailed in designing and introducing a private pension system in the early 2000s. By 2018, when a new Law on Pensions institutionalized a subsidized "nudge‐type" private retirement saving scheme, this process was legitimized by a newly prominent libertarian paternalistic ideology. Impacts of the discursive framing of pension reforms on their outcomes are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called 'Baltic model' of austerity sometimes receives uncritical praise from advocates of tightened austerity. This model has achieved an almost uncontested vogue among international finance officials and European Union policy makers who portray it as a 'socially costless' template for other crisis economies. The article examines the impact of austerity on Baltic Lithuania, a peripheral newer EU member state, and suggests that the harsh austerity measures adopted by its government in order to restore fiscal balance have been far from socially costless. Austerity has accelerated fragmentation of the labour market into a differentially advantaged primary (largely public) sector, and an increasingly informalised secondary (low-skill manufacturing and services) sector, stimulating extraordinarily high levels of emigration as the population, especially younger persons, depart from the country. We describe this here as the formation of a new austeriat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s the number of rural community development groups in Lithuania has grown exponentially. The article presents the results of one of the first representative surveys of rural NGOs ( N = 326) in Lithuania designed to evaluate their structure and resources. Unlike civic organising during the perestroika period, which was characterised by charismatic personalities and organisational innovations, the most recent surge in rural activism follows a path-dependent trajectory. The movement is lead by representatives of former collective farms, or kolkhoz intelligentsia (white-collar professionals who served in collective farm social infrastructure during Soviet times) engaged in reconstituting volunteer groups based on a modified Soviet institution of the rural ‘culture house’ or Soviet civic centre (SCC). The prevalence of the SCC-based rural organising model provided opportunities as well as imposed limitations on post-socialist civic activism. Community development groups were relatively successful in the types of activities in which SCCs were effective as well (such as culture, leisure and sports), while their capacity to deliver social services were marginal. Although this survey reported relatively high levels of engagement by the community groups with local and county governments, their influence remains constrained by the paternalistic, client–patron type of power relationships that prevail in rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1990s the rural community development movement led mostly by educated, professional women emerged in Lithuania. These were loose organizations, typically made up of 5–10 core activists, engaged in mobilizing local communities in dealing with their social, cultural, political and economic problems. It is argued that the rise of the rural community movement represents one of the responses to the post-socialist crisis in agriculture as well as a strategy in dealing with growing economic, political, and social marginalization of the rural population in Lithuania. Three interacting developments that contributed to the rise of rural civic activism are analyzed: (a) structural change in the rural economy that lead to a growing stratum of rural population being displaced from commodity agriculture; (b) favorable political opportunity created by the completion of collective farm privatization and the advancement of the process of land restitution, changes in the government's policy, and the rise of NGOs activism supported, in part, by the foreign donors; and (c) innovative strategies and alliances formed by activists, foreign donors, academicians, and local politicians in promoting rural development. Ethnographic research in the village of Balninkai (pop. 496) is used to analyze the dynamics of building of one of the most successful rural community organizations currently active in Eastern Lithuania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we examine corporate and state actions implicated in manufacturing the extension, and precipitating the collapse, of the fictional distance separating production from consumption in contemporary agro-food systems. We investigate this phenomena via the case of the U.S. beef industry. Specifically, we examine regulatory initiatives and corporate responses aimed at addressing the two most important issues confronting the industry today: bacteriological meat contamination and an over-reliance on Latino immigrant labour. We focus most intently on two U.S. government regulatory initiatives and accompanying strategies of resistance. The first of these regulatory initiatives is Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, or HACCP as it is commonly called. HACCP was designed to enhance meat safety regulations inside packing plants and in the face of a rising number of bacteriological infection outbreaks. The second initiative, `Operation Prime Beef', later re-named `Operation Vanguard', was launched by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) responding to public pressures to eliminate meat packing as a powerful 'magnet' for undocumented workers. State efforts to introduce new regulatory requirements in meatpacking plants, especially in the current neoliberal climate, are met with intense resistance by meat corporations - often successfully. However, these regulatory activities, the public debates that often surround them, and the increasingly dense and politicized networks they engender, also serve to mobilize social actors interested in alternative food provisioning systems. The analysis is informed by an eclectic combination of insights from Political Economy and Post-structural approaches such as Actor Network Theory or ANT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on changes that have occurred in bacteriological meat contamination standards in the U.S. since the early 1980s when E. coli O157: H7 was identified as a new foodborn pathogen associated with the consumption of undercooked meat. Standards regulating bacteriological meat contamination in the U.S. were allegedly enacted in 1906 when the Pure Food and Drug Act was signed into law banning adulterated and mislabeled products from interstate commerce. Perceptions about risks associated with bacteriological meat contamination, and about who should be regulated, have changed since then. Therefore ranchers' definitions of safe meat will be different from those advanced by packers or consumers. Differences or incompatibility of meat safety standards can and often do lead to conflicts. Especially prone to contestation are locales in between commodity chain segments that are directly linked through commodity and financial exchanges. For example, conflicts over bacteriological food safety will tend to be more pronounced between fast food chains and consumers or between packers and consumers than between consumers and feedlot operators. Conflicts can arise because of technological changes such as introduction of bioengineering or growth simulating hormones.

A crucial issue in the theory of technological change-the transformation of knowledge into commodities in agriculture-is examined through the role that technoscience played in the transformation of rapeseed (Brassica campestris and B. napus) from a minor crop used largely for marine lubricants into a major global competitor in edible oil markets. The study is based on a content analysis of the worldwide bibliography of rapeseed. A network approach is used to show that emergence and successful development of the rapeseed commodity subsector included three simultaneously occurring and interacting developments: production of new knowledge, modification of commodities, and extension of rapeseed production networks. Implications of the network approach for the analysis of agricultural development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the interaction between agricultural research and production activities, and argues that technoscience simultaneously affects and is affected by the globalization of agriculture using the case of the globalization of rapeseed. Information on the establishment of the rapeseed research between 1942 to 1948; Discussion on the changing of the rapeseed research strategies from 1949 to 1975; Conclusion.

Discusses how the pressures to increase the uniformity and productivity of rapeseed agriculture led to the creation of favorable conditions for the spread of blackleg in the crop. Effects of blackleg on crops; Reference to some of the measures taken to alleviate the problem; Factors which influence the cause of disease in plants.