. / This study is about the on-ground implementation of sustainable farm practices supported by policies and directives that form the core of the European Union’s sustainability policy. Its goal is to identify the blockers to effective policy implementation in order to improve the approach to sustainability in the agricultural sector. Exploring ways to engage local stakeholders in farm sustainability has been central to create a holistic understanding about the processes that drive practices in agriculture systems, and the extent to which these processes can be transformed. Sustainability in agriculture is a broad topic, hence this study focuses on one segment of sustainability namely the use and management of water resources in irrigated agriculture. The study’s final recommendations to improve policy design and interventions, however, are general and apply to the implementation of all sustainable farm practices. Practical effectiveness of EU policies and directives for sustainable agriculture is constrained by: a lack of evaluating criteria to measure policy impact and communicate progress; incentives for growers to commit to more than the minimum required, and continuous local renegotiation of proposed measures and programmes which have contributed to a weakening of initial policy proposals. This study demonstrates that policies serve different purposes for different people at different social and political levels. However, sustainability comes into practice on the farm, which is why farmers’ perspective about a sustainable agricultural sector and the proposed voluntary and mandatory policy measures is so important. Farmers’ perspectives are still missing elements in policy design for sustainable agriculture. Co-developing and testing technologies that are meant to deliver sustainability in practice, as well as farm decision support tools, are critical in engaging farmers and other local stakeholders in sustainability and to transform embedded practices and institutions. Collaboration across disciplines is also important to address environmental goals and farmers’ needs in order to extract substantial environmental benefits as well as a long term commitment from land managers in sustainability. This study shows that there are many insights to be gained and learnings to be extracted from scrutinizing policy interventions. It raises awareness about improving policy implementation by providing practical examples from case studies conducted in Spain and in Italy. These insights encourage the use of interdisciplinary approaches, including socio-technical approaches, for an integrated people and technology based perspective on natural resource management to better policy design and interventions and make sustainable agriculture real.

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Allen M. Featherstone / Crop insurance, in recent years, has displaced U.S. federal farm program payments as the most important safety net for net farm income. The business climate that crop insurance purchasers and providers face in the future is one of increasing premiums for producers and decreasing commissions for crop insurance companies and agents. The primary objective of this thesis is to assess the desirability of crop insurance agency acquisitions to increase market share for Farm Credit Services of America, considering the significant uncertainties in the future subsidy levels and commission levels for these products. Financial analysis and modeling crop insurance agency acquisitions is completed under a wide range of future economic and political scenarios. The wide range of assumptions, however, does contribute to a wide range of potential purchase prices and rates of return on crop insurance agency acquisitions. The crop insurance industry faces uncertainty in the future and general industry profitability will likely decline. However, an expansion strategy in a period of reduced commissions can be profitable if acquisitions are priced appropriately and can be made in locations where existing support services can be leveraged to support the acquisition.

Cette thèse développe et discute différentes approches micro-économiques de modélisation de l’agriculture pour représenter l’effet de changements globaux et de politiques de gestion de l’eau sur l’adaptation de l’agriculture et sur les ressources en eau. Après un chapitre de synthèse et une revue de la littérature, quatre essais sont présentés. Le premier essai décrit la représentation du comportement de dix exploitations agricoles en Alsace et en Bade (Allemagne) à partir de modèles de programmation linéaire qui intègrent la prise en compte du risque. Après extrapolation, les résultats de simulation sont couplés à une chaîne de modèle plante-sol et de transfert hydrogéologique afin d’estimer la concentration future en nitrate dans l’aquifère du Rhin supérieur. Les simulations des trois scénarios de changements - tendanciel, libéral et interventionniste - suggèrent que les concentrations en nitrates baissent dans les trois cas par rapport à la référence. Le second essai explore l’effet de l’incertitude de changements globaux sur les ressources en eau par des simulations Monte Carlo pour le modèle alsacien (premier essai) et un modèle de demande en eau agricole (Sud-Ouest). Plusieurs niveaux de dépendance entre les paramètres incertains sont caractérisés. L’analyse des résultats montre que les objectifs environnementaux peuvent être déterminés avec suffisamment de précision malgré l’incertitude forte. Le troisième essai développe un modèle agricole régional de programmation mathématique positive avec élasticité de substitution constante entre l’eau et la terre afin d’explorer comment l’agriculture, partiellement irriguée, de Beauce s’adapte à une baisse de la disponibilité en eau. La réponse du rendement à l’eau est calibrée à partir d’information agronomique. Les adaptations à la baisse de disponibilité en eau sont distinguées selon qu’elles correspondent à des baisses de dose d’eau d’irrigation ou de changement de culture. Environ 20% de la réduction est due à la baisse des doses d’eau (marge intensive). Le dernier essai présente un modèle hydro-économique “holistic” de l’agriculture et de l’aquifère de Beauce afin d’évaluer plusieurs politiques de gestion quantitatives de l’eau ainsi que d’évaluer le cas où l’accès à la ressource n’est plus régulé. Des simulations dynamiques sont réalisées à l’horizon 2040 en tenant compte de l’incertitude liée au changement climatique. La politique actuelle de quotas annualisés semble être plus coût-efficace que les autrespolitiques testées (taxes, transferts etc.). / This thesis develops and discusses agricultural-supply modeling approaches for representing the adaptation of farming to global changes and water policies: their effects on agricultural economics and water resources comprise critical information for decision makers. After a summary and a review chapter, four essays are presented. The first essay describes a representation of the behavior of ten typical farms using a risk linear programming model connected to a plant-soil-hydrodynamic model chain, to assess the future level of nitrate contamination in the upper Rhine valley aquifer. The baseline, liberal, and interventionist scenarios for 2015 all result in lower nitrate concentrations. The second essay explores the effects of the economic uncertainty of global changes by means of a Monte Carlo approach distinguishing various levels of dependence on uncertain parameters. Analyses for a nitrate-oriented and a water-use model (in Alsace and southwestern France) show that the environmental objectives can be targeted withsufficient confidence. The third essay develops a flexible specification for positive mathematical programming - constant elasticity of substitution with decreasing returns - to explore how irrigated farming adapts to increased water scarcity in Beauce, France. The possibility of adjusting the application of water per hectare accounts for about 20% of the response. The last essay presents the development of a holistic hydro-economic model of Beauce’s agriculture and aquifer under climate-change uncertainty, so as to evaluate various water policies, as well as the open-access case, up to the year 2040. The results show that the baseline policy is more cost-effective than the other instruments tested (tax, transfer,etc.).

Orientador: Tullo Vigevani / Banca: Sebastião C. Velasco e Cruz / Banca: Amâncio Jorge S. N. de Oliveira / O Programa de Pós-Graduação em Relações Internacionais é instituído em parceria com a Unesp/Unicamp/PUC-SP, em projeto subsidiado pela CAPES, intitulado "Programa San Tiago Dantas" / Resumo: O objetivo da dissertação é analisar a capacidade de eventos internacionais gerarem modificação em políticas públicas nos Estados Unidos. Para tanto, dois desafios internacionais a uma política tradicional dos Estados Unidos, a Farm Bill, foram analisados. Os casos são o contencioso do algodão entre Brasil e Estados Unidos na OMC e a ratificação pelo Congresso do CAFTA-DR. A análise foi conduzida à luz da literatura que trata das relações entre política doméstica e relações internacionais. Concluiu-se que os desafios internacionais tiveram sucesso parcial e que esse sucesso teve relação com o engajamento de atores domésticos norte-americanos, sobretudo do Executivo, em modificar a política agrícola em uma direção convergente com a pretendida pelos desafiadores. Os desafios, no entanto, não geraram estímulo suficiente para uma reforma estrutural abrangente da política agrícola até o momento. Palavras-chave: Estados Unidos; política agrícola; política comercial; algodão; CAFTADR Abstract This dissertation has the purpose to analyze the capacity of international events to cause changes in U.S. public policies. To do so, two challenges to a traditional U.S. policy, the Farm Bill, were analyzed. The cases are the cotton dispute between Brazil and the U.S. in the WTO, and the ratification of the CAFTA-DR by Congress. The analysis were conducted in the light of the literature about domestic politics and international relations. It is concluded that the international challenges had partial success and that that success was related to the engagement of U.S. domestic actors, mainly the Executive, in changing the agricultural policy to challengers' intended direction. The challanges, however, didn't produce enough incentive to a comprehensive structural reform of agricultural policy so far. / Abstract: This dissertation has the purpose to analyze the capacity of international events to cause changes in U.S. public policies. To do so, two challenges to a traditional U.S. policy, the Farm Bill, were analyzed. The cases are the cotton dispute between Brazil and the U.S. in the WTO, and the ratification of the CAFTA-DR by Congress. The analysis were conducted in the light of the literature about domestic politics and international relations. It is concluded that the international challenges had partial success and that that success was related to the engagement of U.S. domestic actors, mainly the Executive, in changing the agricultural policy to challengers' intended direction. The challanges, however, didn't produce enough incentive to a comprehensive structural reform of agricultural policy so far. / Mestre

O objetivo deste trabalho foi analisar o armazenamento do arroz no Brasil, propondo modelos para tomada de decisão quanto à formação de estoques. Uma vez conhecidos estes modelos é possível analisar previamente as intervenções pretendidas pelo governo. Para tanto se partiu da hipótese de que é possível representar o mercado de arroz no Brasil através de um modelo dinâmico de expectativas racionais capaz de captar o efeito da importação do produto e de algumas políticas de sustentação de preço ao produtor adotadas pelo governo brasileiro. A proposta metodológica para a estimação do modelo segue a abordagem de programação dinâmica. Foram desenvolvidos algoritmos que representam o mercado de arroz no Brasil em uma situação de mercado fechado sem intervenção do governo, mercado aberto sem intervenção do governo, mercado fechado com intervenção do governo via Prêmio de Escoamento do Produto - PEP, mercado fechado com intervenção do governo via Aquisição do Governo Federal - AGF mercado aberto com intervenção do governo via PEP, mercado aberto com intervenção do governo via AGF. Os métodos utilizados para solução exigem que sejam conhecidos as funções de demanda e oferta de área, o custo unitário de armazenamento, a taxa anual de juros, a distribuição de probabilidades das variáveis aleatórias (produtividade e choques de demanda) e os preços de importação e mínimos (quando for o caso). Os preços esperados de mercado na situação de mercado aberto com intervenção via PEP foram ligeiramente inferiores ao preço de mercado sem intervenção, porém o preço recebido pelo agricultor foi ligeiramente maior. Isto significa que parte dos recursos da PEP é apropriada pelo produtor e parte pela indústria. Os resultados do modelo aberto com AGF demonstram que os preços para o comprador ficam acima do encontrado para o modelo sem intervenção do governo. Outro resultado encontrado foi que o nível de preços mínimos praticado nos últimos anos não tem sido suficientemente elevado a ponto de promover mudanças significativas no equilíbrio de mercado interno. / The aim of this study was to analyze rice storage in Brazil, proposing a model for decision taking regarding stock formation. Once these models are known it is possible to previously analyze the government interventions. Thus, the study was based on the hypothesis that it is possible to represent the rice market in Brazil through a dynamic model of rational expectations able to analyze the product importation effect and some policies of price support to the producer adopted by the Brazilian government. The methodological proposal for estimating the model follows the dynamic programming approach. It was developed algorithms which represent the rice market in Brazil in a situation of closed market without the government intervention, open market without government intervention, closed market with the government intervention through PEP (Prêmio de Escoamento do Produto - Prize for Product Outletting), closed market with the government intervention through AGF (Aquisição do Governo Federal - Federal Government Acquisition), open market with the government intervention through PEP, open market with government intervention through AGF. The methods used for the solution require that it be known the demand and supply functions for the area, the unit storage cost, the annual interest rate, the distribution of probabilities of random variables (productivity and demand shocks), importation and minimum (whenever is the case) prices. The expected market prices in the situation of open market with intervention through PEP were slightly lower than to the market price without intervention, however the price received by the grower was a little higher. It means that part of the PEP resources is allotted by the grower and part by the industry. The results of the open model with AGF show that the prices for the buyer are higher than those found in the model without government intervention. Another result was that the level of minimum prices practiced over the last years has not been adjusted to the point to promote significant changes in the balance of the domestic market.

L’Afrique Subsaharienne avec une croissance démographique urbaine spectaculaire et une agriculture vivrière déficitaire n’a plus la capacité de nourrir la totalité de ses habitants : résultat des politiques de développement mis en place depuis les indépendances. Pour faire face à une demande alimentaire sans cesse croissante, surtout au niveau des zones urbaines, les pays subsahariens en général et le Gabon en particulier, grâce à son économie de rente, a recours aux importations massives de produits alimentaires souvent éloignés, voire incompatibles avec les habitudes alimentaires et/ou des us et coutumes des populations endogènes. Cependant, le Gabon contrairement à bon nombre de pays subsahariens, dispose d’importantes potentialités agricoles susceptibles de lui assurer aujourd’hui sa souveraineté alimentaire (climat, végétation, sols, réseau hydrographique, faible densité de population, etc.). Or, la récente crise économique mondiale à l’origine d’une crise alimentaire internationale sans précédent qui a d’ailleurs provoqué des émeutes de la faim dans plusieurs pays subsahariens, vient une nouvelle fois interpeller non seulement les autorités de l’Afrique Noire, mais aussi la communauté internationale toute entière quant à l’urgente nécessité d’un développement agricole vivrier local africain. En somme, la fragilité de la sécurité alimentaire mondiale, les stratégies géopolitiques des pays du Nord, la spéculation agricole internationale et la situation des économies africaines ont orienté notre réflexion sur la dépendance alimentaire excessive des pays subsahariens, à l’instar du Gabon, et nous ont conduits à revisiter dans cette thèse ce que pourrait être une politique de la souveraineté alimentaire. Cette démarche stratégique apparaît, au vu de ce qui précède, comme une nécessité politique, économique, culturelle et environnementale si l’on entend freiner, voire limiter au maximum, la dépendance alimentaire excessive et si l’on entend assurer un développement durable de cette région en général et du Gabon en particulier. / Having a spectacular urban population growth and an overdrawn food-producing agriculture (farming), Sub-Saharan Africa cannot feed the totality of its inhabitants any more. This is the result of development policies set up since independence. To face a continuous increasing food demand, especially in urban zones, sub-saharan countries in general, and Gabon in particular -thanks to its economy of pension- rely on massive import of food products, often from far abroad and incompatible with the food habits and\or habits and customs of the endogenous populations. However, Gabon, unlike most of sub-saharan countries, disposes of important agricultural potentialities susceptible to insure today its food sovereignty (climate, vegetation, grounds, water system, low density of population, etc.). But the recent world economic crisis, which is at the origin of an unprecedented international food crisis, causing riots of hunger in several sub-saharan countries, is once again calling the vigorous attention of not only African authorities, but also of the whole international community regarding a fierce urgency to promote the development local food-producing agriculture in Africa. In fact, the fragility of the global food safety, the geopolitical strategies of Western countries, the international agricultural speculation and the situation of the African savings guided our reflection on the excessive food dependence of sub-saharan countries, as for Gabon, and led us revisit in this thesis what could be a policy of food sovereignty. Considering what precedes, this strategic approach appears as a political, economic, cultural and environmental necessity if we intend to break or limit the most as possible the excessive food dependence and insure a sustainable development in this region in general and Gabon in particular.

Die Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit den Auswirkungen verschiedener Politikoptionen auf den Weltzuckermarkt. Dazu wird ein räumliches Preisgleichgewichtsmodell wie von Takayama und Judge vorgeschlagen mit hoher Abdeckung von Regionen und Politiken erstellt. Der Vorteil dieses Modelltyps gegenüber den in bisherigen Analysen verwendeten besteht in seiner Fähigkeit, die Annahme der Ursprungshomogenität (im Gegensatz zu Modellen, die auf dem Armington Ansatz basieren) mit der Möglichkeit zu kombinieren, bilaterale Handelsströme explizit abzubilden. Ein wesentlicher Nachteil ist die quasi-normative Natur des Ansatzes. Nach der Einführung wird zunächst in Kapitel zwei der Weltzuckermarkt detailliert beschrieben und von anderen Agrarmärkten abgegrenzt sowie die Anforderungen an ein Gleichgewichtsmodell des Weltzuckermarktes diskutiert. Dann wird im dritten Kapitel eine Übersicht über verschiedene in der Vergangenheit verwendete Modellansätze gegeben und deren Ergebnisse ausgewertet. Im vierten Kapitel wird ein Überblick die theoretische Entwicklung des Modellansatzes gegeben und schließlich das in der Dissertation verwendete Modell beschrieben. Das Modell umfasst 104 Zucker produzierende und 90 Zucker konsumierende Regionen. Nationale Handels- und Agrarpolitiken sowie eine Vielzahl regionaler und präferentieller Handelsabkommen sind im Modell berücksichtigt. Im zweiten Teil von Kapitel vier wird eine Analyse von vier Szenarien mit dem Modell durchgeführt. Diese umfassen eine Fortführung gegenwärtiger Politiken, ein WTO Abkommen, eine einseitige Liberalisierung des Zuckermarktes der EU sowie eine Liberalisierung der Zuckermärkte aller im Modell vertretenen Länder. Im Abschlusskapitel werden einige Kernergebnisse zusammengefasst und eine Weiterentwicklung des Ansatzes diskutiert. Hier wird insbesondere auf das Problem der Quasi-Normativität eingegangen. / The Dissertation at hand investigates the effects of different policy options on the world sugar market. A Spatial Price Equilibrium Model as suggested by Takayama and Judge is established. This model type has one considerable advantage over previously ap-plied types which is its ability to combine the assumption of homogeneous goods regardless of origin (as opposed to Armington-based models) with the possibility to model bilateral trade flows explicitly. One major drawback of the approach is that is behaves in part like a normative model. After the introductory chapter, a detailed description of the world sugar market and how it distinguishes from markets for other agricultural commodities is given. In this frame-work requirements of a valid equilibrium model of the world sugar market are discussed. In the third chapter various studies of the world sugar market based on equilibrium models are surveyed. In the chapter four the development of the approach of spatial equilibrium modeling finally the model applied in this dissertation are described The model covers 104 sugar pro-ducing and 90 sugar consuming regions. National agricultural and trade policies as well as numerous regional and preferential trade agreements are accounted for. In the second part of chapter four, four scenarios are simulated with the model. These are a reference scenario in which current policies are maintained, a WTO agreement, a unilateral liberalization of sugar policies on the part of the EU as well as a multilateral liberalization of the sugar markets of all countries. In the final chapter, some core results are summarized and further development of the applied approach especially possible solutions for the problem of quasi-normativity are dis-cussed.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-10T10:46:33Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 MARIA APARECIDA DE BASTOS.pdf: 14807019 bytes, checksum: ee33779ff07f225ba9678b180b5df1ed (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-04-07 / The environmental crisis we are experiencing brought the need for paradigm shifts in modes of production. Farming constitutes one of the greatest forms of environmental impact, because its origin is based on the exploitation of natural resources. In the course of this matter, there are studies, since the adoption of the Land Statute, the social function of property has become a determinant in the guideline that it is for rural workers to explore the land seeking to improve their quality of life, contributing also for the welfare and conservation of natural resources. It is expected, along the thesis that the agricultural policy instruments, such as rural credit and forms of associations / cooperatives and the Draft Regional Sustainable Development (DRS's) are effective means to reach the sustainable in family farming, permanently. It is argued that, partnerships between Government, Banking Officers, Emater, FETAEG, Sebrae, unions, associations of producers and other actors of civil society organizations are the key for sustainable family farming to be a great exponent for the economic development of the country. / A crise ambiental que estamos vivenciando trouxe a necessidade de mudanças de paradigmas nos modos de produção. A atividade agrícola se constitui numa das formas de maior impacto ambiental, pois tem sua origem na exploração dos recursos naturais. Na disciplina dessa matéria, verificam-se estudos, desde a aprovação do Estatuto da Terra, que a função social da propriedade tornou-se diretriz determinante no sentido de que cabe ao trabalhador rural explorar a terra buscando a melhoria da sua qualidade de vida, contribuindo também para o bem estar social e a conservação dos recursos naturais. Defende-se, ao longo da dissertação, que os instrumentos da política agrícola, tais como o crédito rural e as formas de associativismo/cooperativismo e os Projetos de Desenvolvimento Regional Sustentável (DRS s), são meios eficazes para se atingir a Sustentabilidade na agricultura familiar, de forma permanente. Defende-se ainda que, parcerias entre Governo, Bancos Oficiais, Emater, FETAEG, Sebrae, Sindicatos, Associações de produtores e demais agentes da sociedade civil organizada são fundamentais para que a agricultura familiar sustentável seja um grande expoente para o desenvolvimento econômico do País.

This thesis is an exploration of liberalism in Romania and in anthropology. Liberalism is frequently represented in contemporary anthropology as a hegemonic technocratic practice, rationalist ideology and hypocritically exclusionary politics. I challenge this representation through an ethnography of a British-Romanian rural revitalisation and conservation programme in the Saxon villages region of southern Transylvania, Romania, and the vernacular liberalism of the cosmopolitan youth who have taken this project up. Douglas Holmes has asserted that in the European Union (EU) in the twenty-first century, communities and people are experimenting with new identity projects that fuse the liberal and illiberal in innovative ways. I trace how the rural revitalisation programme brought together romantic, "integralist" visions of the Saxon villages with the EU's liberal technologies of governance to create a set of projects the value of which could be translated between diverse sets of actors, from British tourists through European bureaucrats and Transylvanian farmers. This provided local youth with the possibility of making a life in their home region in a context of significant economic decline and massive emigration. The seemingly disparate liberal and romantic elements, initially brought together in a transnational context, were "domesticated" by Transylvanian liberals as complementary resources that could be mobilised to combat entrenched problems of Romanian society and modernity, as liberals saw it, notably the failure of the state to provide key services and the stagnation of the public sphere. The state's failures had led liberals to abandon it is a source of hope, turning instead to voluntary action, which made the dilemmas of how to mobilise engaged publics all the more crucial. Village liberals' attempts to foster such publics frequently ended up reproducing their own marginality, however. Against conventional representations of liberalism, I argue that its technocratic pretensions can be an object of hope in a milieu where expertise is perceived to be absent as much as an institutional hegemony. I further conclude that the multiple ways in which the liberal and the romantic are combined challenges dominant images of liberal ideology and practice as purely abstract and formal.

<p>This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two papers address political economy and indus-trial organization aspects of agricultural policy, and the last two international aspects of environmental policy.</p><p>Paper [I] explains Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies to farmers by the influence of farmer interest-groups with an EU-wide membership. The analysis is based on panel-data for fifteen commodities over the period 1986-2003. Because the CAP is set as an overall EU policy, effective lobbying presents a collective ac-tion problem to the farmers in the EU as a whole. Indicators of lobbying, which are based on this perception, are found to explain part of the variation in agricultural support.</p><p>In Paper [II], the Bresnahan-Lau framework is used to analyze whether policy reforms, i.e. the two-price sys-tem (an input quota, 1986-1991) and a general deregulation of dairy policy (1991-1994) had any market power effects on the Swedish butter market. The results show that the null hypothesis of no market power cannot be rejected, for any of the specific policy reforms, at any reasonable significance level.</p><p>Paper [III] concerns the welfare consequences of environmental policy cooperation. It is assumed that coun-tries finance their public expenditures by using distortionary taxes, and that they differ with respect to compe-tition in the labor market. It is shown how the welfare effect of an increase in the expenditures on abatement depends on changes in the environmental damage, employment and work hours. The welfare effect is also related to the strategic interaction among the countries in the prereform equilibrium.</p><p>In Paper [IV] environmental policy in an economic federation, where each national government faces a mixed tax problem, is addressed. It is assumed that the federal government sets emission targets, which are imple-mented at the national level. It is also assumed that the economic federation is decentralized. The results high-light a strategic role of income and commodity taxation, i.e. each country uses its policy instruments, at least in part, to influence the emission target.</p>