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In Laudate Deum (2023), Pope Francis calls on those negotiating today's climate emergency to be "strategists." No organization has a longer history of strategy-making than the pope's alma mater , the Society of Jesus, whose China mission was founded during an ecological crisis. No Jesuit is more celebrated as a strategist than Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who observed the effects of that crisis in 1604 and praised the emperor's response but noted its inadequacy. As a result of this, and the influence of Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), the idea of introducing European science to China materialized as the final strand of the China mission's strategy. Xu's own career was dedicated to preserving Ming China through agricultural and military reform, and his ideas are present in Ricci's work. Thus, Ricci's strategy-making was forged in the context of challenges recognizable today, and its strengths and limitations represent a resource for the strategists addressed by Pope Francis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines preparatory labor practices that South Korean farmers had to undertake to use chemical fertilizers in the 1960s. Preparatory labor, such as learning about and acquiring fertilizers, that came prior to the use of chemical fertilizer in the field was mundane and often invisible. However, it was this logistical and emotional labor that was essential for the maintenance of South Korea's chemical fertilizer system. In the system, which was part of the government's efforts to establish rural modernity through increased crop productivity, the state looked down on farmers as the subject of edification. Nevertheless, the farmers were crucial maintainers of the state-led agricultural reform, realizing the government's vision of modernity. To reveal the hidden relationship between farmers, technology, and the state, this article extensively uses diaries written by two farmers – Yoon Heesoo from Daecheon Village and Shin Kwonsik from Daegok Village. By doing so, this article aims to shed light on the voices of farmers and their roles in the agricultural reform of 1960s South Korea and, more broadly, of the Green Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did North Koreans reform their agricultural technology after the massive famine in the 1990s? While the existing literature focuses its analysis on the nexus between the state and market to assess the possibility of a transition economy, we instead examine agricultural methods and technologies employed in farmlands to evaluate the nature of technological reforms. After identifying technology reforms on the basis of primary sources published in the DPRK such as yearbooks, academic journals, and newspaper articles, as well as other materials published in South Korea, Japan, and the United States and by international organizations, we classify them into two kinds of initiatives: modernization measures that sought to address the earlier failure to modernize agricultural technologies, and ecology-friendly farming practices designed to reduce or reverse the negative externalities of industrial agriculture such as overdependence on chemical fertilizers or erosion of soil fertility. While the two are commonly seen as incompatible by scholars of agriculture, we conclude that North Koreans synthesized the two to transform their decaying industrial agriculture into a more modernized and ecology-friendly sector. They have, through these reforms, maintained food sovereignty as their pillar of agriculture but complemented it with food security on a national scale as a way to maximize their agriculture outputs. Most of these initiatives seem to continue to date although it remains to be seen if they have actually succeeded in increasing overall agricultural productivity and sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decriminalisation of the prodigal "green crop" has left the most vulnerable small-scale cannabis farmers high and dry. In 2018, the South African Constitutional Court legalised the use of cannabis for personal and medical use. The 2018 regulations on cannabis were welcomed as a new lifeline in the eradication of poverty. However, in the haste to join the global urgency in cultivating cannabis, small-scale farmers were left behind and prevented from partaking in the green gold rush. The cannabis legislation and laws that were created to enable South Africans to participate in the lucrative cannabis market have done the opposite and have crafted barriers to entry. This study employed a desk research methodology, deemed optimal for this article's objectives and purpose, to explore how the 2018 regulations on cannabis cultivation prevent small-scale farmers from participating in the legalised market in South Africa. Data were gathered and analysed from diverse secondary sources, encompassing published and unpublished documents, reports, academic literature, and online materials from sources like news websites. The aim of this paper is to highlight the challenges that South African small-scale cannabis farmers face, and how their participation in the newly-opened market would benefit the communities in which they live and operate. The main findings of the research indicate the challenges for small-scale farmers having no support system and still facing transformational issues that persist even after 29 years of democracy in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of History Studies (13094688) is the property of History Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The uncontrolled process of division of farmlands into economically inefficient bodies was an undesired element of the agricultural structure of interwar Poland. This situation made the development of modern agriculture and rational agricultural policy impossible. Furthermore, a comprehensive introduction of the agricultural reform was beyond the state's means, and one of the elements of the reform was the issue of indivisibility of farmlands. Postulates of implementing a statutory prohibition against dividing farmlands already appeared in 1918. This problem was partially solved by the agricultural reform of 1925 which was based on the act of 28 October 1925 on implementing the agricultural reform, which prohibited dividing lands for a period of 25 years. Those regulations were amended by the act of 14 April 1937 on restricting the trading of real estate created as a result of subdivision which prohibited dividing all farmlands created as a result of subdivision. In the scope of indivisibility of agricultural lands, three crucially important projects were submitted to the Sejm, one by Minister W. Stankiewicz and two more by a Member of Parliament, F. Bartczak. The aim of the projects was to limit the division of farmlands. However, they never became a law which was universally in force, while the problem of the indivisibility was not solved until 1939. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an unknown period from the history of the Polish gentry from the Taken Lands at the beginning of the 20th century. It shows the participation of Polish landowners in the work of the Extraordinary Council for matters connected with the needs of agriculture in the Minsk guberniya in 1902-1903, the purpose of which was to describe the state of agriculture in Russia and to indicate ways of its modernization. The Polish landowners, gathered in the Minsk Agricultural Society, were the most active element among all members of the 9 discrits committees in the Minsk guberniya. For the first time since the fall of the January Uprising, they had the opportunity to show their organizational skills and substantive preparation for the discussion on the situation of agriculture in the Minsk guberniya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ekonomika APK is the property of Economy of Argo-Industrial Complex and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Academic Social Science Studies is the property of Journal of Academic Social Science Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyzes agricultural reform as an element of broader shifts in the Japanese welfare regime. In postwar Japan, agricultural support and protection served as a "functional equivalent" to welfare provision in rural and semi-rural areas. However, an ongoing agricultural reform process has put pressure on aging smallholders and on JA, the powerful organization of agricultural cooperatives. This article investigates how these local actors have responded to an increasingly hostile socio-economic and political environment. To address this question, the article focuses on hamlet-based collective farming, which is a form of agricultural production that can reproduce the welfare character of the postwar support and protection regime on the local level. Based on field research in several rural and semi-rural communities, the article argues that the functions and the local proliferation of hamlet-based farming are shaped by village institutions: hamlet-level norms and rules governing land use and agricultural cooperation, as well as social ties between hamlets, local co-ops, and local governments. While the integration of village institutions into local cooperative and administrative structures can support a systematic local proliferation of collective farming, municipal and cooperative mergers have rendered such comprehensive local responses more complicated. More generally, the article proposes to investigate local acts of recombining community ties and norms with changing macro policies as a promising analytical angle to understand the ongoing renegotiation of East Asian welfare regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Textual is the property of Universidad Autonoma Chapingo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Historia (07169108) is the property of Universidad de Concepcion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Z Dziejów Prawa is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The production of public goods like amenity value of the landscape, food security, preservation of rural communities and rural lifestyle, by agricultural sector is a subject that has been widely accepted by experts. However, in many policies and political analyses carried out, solely the production of private goods by the agricultural sector is paid attention and the important function of public goods production is ignored. Given the importance of multifunctional debate of agriculture in policies analysis, this study examined the effect of agricultural multifunctionality in the simulation of the agricultural production subsidiesreduction effects using Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. Simulation results of the effects of agricultural production subsidies reduction in terms of the multifunctionality showed that current practices to support the agricultural sector is non-optimal according to agricultural production and welfare reduction and the optimal level of supports with and without multifunctional agriculture is different. The simulation results showed that the welfare effects of economic reforms in Iran in the agricultural sector in terms of the multifunctionality will be positive. This is on condition that the welfare effects of agricultural reform in terms of the multifunctionality of agriculture are negative.

This book, and the seminar on which it is based, were conceived as elements of a dialogue on the future of the Mexican countryside. Rural Mexico, like the rest of Mexican society, is changing rapidly in response to a variety of circumstances, many of which are very imperfectly understood. This book focuses on a central element in the livelihood of most rural people - the production and consumption of maiz - and on a key component of macroeconomic policy reform, that which has been concerned with reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of the maize provisioning system of the country. The concerted effort to restructure the entire maize pricing and marketing system, which has gone forward in conjunction with a broad ranging agricultural policy reform, affects the economic options, as well as the levels of living, of many different kinds of people in the Mexican countryside, and it does so in complex ways.

This article studies Chinese central government policies in relation to food market building and food security between 1979 and 2008. It investigates major changes in the state's grain purchase pricing, urban subsidized food sales and the state monopoly over rural-to-urban food circulation that were effected in an attempt to ensure both food availability and accessibility under fiscal constraint. By observing the gradual transition from state monopoly to the market, this article traces the mechanisms which enabled the Chinese government to both establish a monopsony by generating artificial price signals for farmers to generate food output, and act as a monopolistic seller by providing subsidized low-priced food to urban consumers in order to fulfil its goal of low-cost industrialization. Thus, China's food security largely hinged on the government's budget to subsidize the price gap. The Chinese government juggled between food security and fiscal affordability to formulate a food budget that would neither excessively impact food security nor cause a crisis to government finance. China's food security puzzle was eventually worked out in the mid-2000s with the boosting of national income, which enhanced the population's access to food and eased the central government's food security concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an empirical assessment of the government finance and food security nexus in China from 1978 to 2016. Using autoregressive distributed lag for linear and threshold cointegration, the results suggest that China’s government finance and food security have reinforced each other throughout the reform era when a structural break was allowed in the model. However, the strength of cointegration and Granger causality in the government-led food security link is stronger, hence supporting the state interventionist view that a strong state has played a dominant role in fulfilling national food security in China. China’s government finance and food security changes indicate food sector reform probabilities under fiscal constraint, as regime-switching indicators have delineated the Chinese government’s difficult fiscal periods and the main reforms in the food sector. In practice, this result implies that further policy reforms can be effective for China’s future food security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar are the main investors in farm animal production outside their territory, prompting a mass-adoption of concentrated animal feeding operations in investment-importing states like Iran and Pakistan. Global actors like the International Finance Corporation and the Food and Agriculture Organization espouse the Middle Eastern states' investment strategy by generously supporting it with direct payments and feed. Because intensified animal agricultural production systems are known to cause environmental pollution, threaten public health and food security, and pose a moral hazard for animals, this article makes use of existing crossborder relationships to the Middle East to counter the growing agricultural trend towards intensification. Specifically, the article examines whether and how international investment standards, export credit standards, bilateral investment treaties, and bilateral free trade agreements can be used to encourage responsible investment and trade flows that factor in the interests of animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a symbol of regulations as 'solid as bedrock,' Japanese agriculture is a key target for structural reform under the Abe administration's 'Abenomics' growth strategy. Its reform proposals have encompassed long-standing rice production regulations, agricultural organizations, including the agricultural cooperatives (JA), and the controlled system of milk distribution. The government also seeks to promote agricultural exports and farmers' participation in processing and distributing agricultural products. Led by the Prime Minister's Office, and taking advantage of changes in the political environment of agriculture that have weakened the political power of farmers and JA, the government has launched a reform offensive with variable impact: progress has been made in some areas (e.g. JA reform) but little change in others (such as rice production adjustment). The most significant challenge lies ahead in reforming the farmland system, which is yet to be tackled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose:To examine the factors that support and hinder farmers’ learning and to investigate the impact of an innovative learning program on farmers’ practice change. Design/methodology/approach:Individual interviews and focus group discussions were held with 24 farmers over 20 months. Observations were made of these farmers as they participated with eight agricultural and social scientists in a range of innovative experiences to learn about chicory and plantain establishment and management. These learning experiences were designed around evidence-informed educational pedagogies. Data sets were analyzed using NVivo to determine common themes of affordances and barriers to learning and actual practice changes. Findings:The affordances for learning and practice change include belonging to a learning community, enhancing self-efficacy, engaging with scientists, seeing relative advantage, reinforcing and validating learning, supporting system’s integration and developing an identity as learners. Barriers to learning and practice change include issues of: trialability, complexity, compatibility and risk. Practical implications:The importance of basing new models of extension around evidence-informed pedagogies known through educational research to promote learning and practice change. Theoretical implications:Sociocultural theory and self-efficacy theories of learning are critical to the success of effective agricultural extension programs. Originality:To date, little empirical research about the affordances and barriers for pastoral farmers’ learning has been based on contemporary educational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Colombiana de Ciencia Animal - RECIA is the property of Revista Colombiana de Ciencia Animal - RECIA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

El estudio del movimiento conservacionista, encabezado por Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, modifica la narrativa dominante sobre la capital urbana: que la ciudad destruyó sin plan o previsión los ambientes circundantes. Los reglamentos promovidos por los conservacionistas limitaron los usos forestales de los pueblos, pero la Revolución mexicana creó una oportunidad para que las comunidades afectadas reivindicaran el uso de sus bosques Después de 1940, los pueblos perdieron el poco control de los bosques que habían ganado debido al cambio de una política que privilegiaba la energía mineral sobre la vegetal, y las compañías de papel sobre las cooperativas.The study of the conservationist movement, led by Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, changes the dominant narrative about the urban capital: that the city destroyed the surrounding areas without any plan or precautions. Although the rules promoted by conservationists limited the villages'use of the forests, the Mexican revolution created an opportunity for the affected communities to claim the use of their forests. From 1940, the villages lost the very low degree of control they had gained over the forests, as the result of the modification of a policy that favored mineral over vegetable energy, and paper companies over cooperatives.

The complex records of the District Land Registry in Cracow contain 916 j. a. records and books – 14 mb and 595 j. map. The most important part of the complex are documents from the Faculty of Agricultural Devices concerning aspects connected with conducting agricultural reform. Statistical materials that relate to large secular and church land ownership are next part of the complex records. They are gathered mainly to establish land supply which can be used to allotment. The separate group of records are matters concerning aspects of land turnover. These are land registries’ permissions for part and entirely sale the properties for one buyer. Materials concerning aspects of financing agri-cultural reform on the Małopolska Voivodeship ought to be searched at the Administra-tive Faculty. A very essential supplement for upper mentioned records is the set of 573 maps and the District Land Registry in Cracow’ plans. The news included in mentioned documents of the District Land Registry in Cracow have an invaluable value, not only for people engaged in polish village issues in the XIX and XX centuary, but they are very es-sential saurce of information for judical and economic purposes. It’s worth remembering of reaching for records of the Provincial Office in Cracow while using with land registry documents, too. There are a lot of materials concerning land registries organization and aspects connected with land allotment and join.

Copyright of Studia Socjologiczne is the property of Studia Socjologiczne and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)