O objetivo do trabalho é analisar o acesso das mulheres ao Programa Nacional de Fortalecimento da Agricultura Familiar (Pronaf), partindo de uma perspectiva de gênero e da percepção de agricultoras familiares. Para isso, foram utilizados como fontes de dados a pesquisa bibliográfica, documentos e outros dados secundários, além de dados primários levantados diretamente pela pesquisadora por meio de entrevistas realizadas com agricultoras familiares de Coração de Jesus, em Minas Gerais. O desenvolvimento do trabalha utiliza como principais marcos teóricos a discussão sobre a categoria agricultura familiar e sua relação com a categoria campesinato, e discussões sobre direito e gênero. Além disso, utiliza a teoria crítica feminista do direito como marco teórico-metodológico. Os objetivos específicos do trabalho voltaram-se para: a) a compreensão das demandas políticas da agricultura familiar brasileira e consequente criação do Programa Nacional de Fortalecimento da Agricultura Familiar (Pronaf) e suas modificações; b) o debate do papel das mulheres no meio rural e na agricultura familiar e sua condição de sujeito de direito e de políticas públicas; c) a análise da percepção das agricultoras familiares sobre o Pronaf e o acesso das mulheres a esse programa. Os resultados encontrados mostraram que, além das mulheres ainda terem acesso ao Pronaf em números muito inferiores que o dos homens \" em número de contratos e, principalmente, em valor concedido \", muitas vezes elas são beneficiárias passivas do Programa, pois contratam o crédito em seu nome, mas são homens da unidade familiar que têm o poder de decisão e de direção sobre as atividades. Isso decorre, sobretudo, da divisão sexual do trabalho, fruto das relações de gênero que permeiam a agricultura familiar e invisibilizam o trabalho das mulheres. / The purpose of the study is to analyze the access of women to the National Program for the Strengthening of Family Farming (Pronaf), from a gender perspective and from the family women farmers\' perception of the program. On that account, the data sources used were the bibliographic research, documents and other secondary data research, as well as primary data collected directly by the researcher in interviews with family farmers from Coração de Jesus, a city in the state of Minas Gerais. The main theoretical frameworks adopted include the discussion on family farming category and its relationship with the peasantry, and also discussions on law and gender. Thus, the feminist critical theory of law was employed as theoretical and methodological framework. The specific objectives of the study are: a) understanding the political demands of the Brazilian family farming and, therefore, the creation of the National Program for the Strengthening of Family Farming (Pronaf) and its modifications; b) the debate on the role of women in rural areas and in family farming, and also their condition of subject of rights and public policies; c) the analysis of the perception of family farmers about PRONAF and women\'s access to this program. The results showed that, besides women still have access to Pronaf in much lower numbers than men - in number of contracts and specially in the amount granted - women are often passive beneficiaries of the program, because they contract the credit on their own behalf, but the men of the family unit are who have the power of decision and direction on activities. This is mainly due to the sexual division of labor, that is a result of gender relations that permeate family farming and cause the invisibility of women\'s work.

Este trabalho tem o intuito de analisar quais foram os determinantes dos preços de venda e de arrendamento da terra de cultura de primeira e de pastagem no estado de São Paulo, de 1969 a 2001. Além disso, procura-se mostrar que os preços de venda da terra de diferentes categorias e em diferentes estados estão relacionados. Conforme a teoria econômica, o preço da terra deveria refletir o fluxo de receitas que essa terra pode gerar, descontado a uma determinada taxa de juro. Contudo, a literatura argumenta que em diversos momentos na economia brasileira, especialmente nas décadas de 70, 80 e início de 90, os determinantes do preço da terra foram além da taxa de juro e do fluxo de receitas gerado pelo ativo. A determinação do preço da terra contemplou também variáveis indiretamente relacionadas ao processo produtivo, como o nível de atividade econômica e a taxa de inflação. Tendo sido analisadas as diversas referências sobre os determinantes dos preços da terra, foram selecionadas variáveis de interesse micro e macroeconômico para compor os modelos econométricos de determinação dos preços de terra de cultura de primeira, terra de pastagem, arrendamento para culturas e aluguel de pasto para animais. A ferramenta econométrica utilizada foi a regressão linear múltipla. As variáveis selecionadas que estão diretamente ligadas ao setor agrícola foram: poder de compra do agricultor, índice de paridade, índices de preços recebidos e de preços pagos pelos produtores e volume de subsídio concedido através do crédito rural. A fim de representar o ambiente macroeconômico, foram estimadas: a taxa de inflação anual vigente no período, uma proxy para o hiato do produto, taxa de juro e infra-estrutura governamental (representada pela extensão total das rodovias pavimentadas e não pavimentadas do estado de São Paulo). Construiu-se ainda uma variável binária com o intuito de verificar se houve um deslocamento significativo no nível de preços de venda e de arrendamento de terra de cultura e de pastagem, no período de 1973 a 1994. Procurou-se ainda verificar se existe relação entre os preços de venda da terra de diferentes categorias, dentro do estado de São Paulo e de algumas categorias deste estado com outras do Centro-Sul do país. Para tanto foram utilizados os testes econométricos de raiz unitária (metodologia proposta por Dickey e Fuller) e de co-integração (segundo a metodologia proposta por Johansen). Dos resultados obtidos, constata-se a que tanto os preços da venda de terra como os preços de arrendamento (para cultura e para pastagem) foram mais elásticos às variáveis relacionadas à atividade agrícola (poder de compra, termos de troca, etc) em detrimento das variáveis macroeconômicas e do crédito rural. Ressalta-se ainda que a variável binária foi significativa nos modelos de determinação dos preços de venda de terra para culturas, para pastagem e também nos de arrendamento, para as duas categorias em questão. Os resultados dos testes de raiz unitária e de co-integração suportaram as evidências empíricas de que os preços de diferentes tipos de terra, em diferentes regiões, estão relacionados. A explanação destes resultados emerge de dois lados: da demanda por terras com a finalidade agrícola e da demanda por terras para fins especulativos. Esses resultados estão de acordo com algumas das diversas referências sobre os determinantes dos preços da terra analisadas. / This dissertation has the intention to determine the price of land (for both crop and pasture land), land rent (again for crop and pasture land), in Sao Paulo State, from 1969 to 2001. Besides that, it has the intention of showing that prices of different categories and of different States are related. According to the economic theory, land price should be the income present value calculated, considering a specific interest rate. However, literature has shown that in different moments in the Brazilian economy, especially in the 70ies, 80ies and early 90ies, there were other determinants of land price, apart from income and interest rate. Land price is also determined by others indirect variables, such as economic activity and inflation. The study has selected several variables (micro and macroeconomics) to determine its relevance in explaining crop and pasture land prices and rents. The econometrical tool used was multiple linear regression. Variables related to agriculture were: purchasing power, terms of trade, product and factor prices (index), and governmental loan subsidies. In order to represent macroeconomic variables, the work has chosen four different determinants: inflation rate, infrastructure (roads), interest rate and GDP gap. A dummy variable was taken to verify whether crop and pasture land prices have changed significantly over 1973 to 1994. Another objective considered was to verify crop and pasture land long run relation between Sao Paulo State and eight different States. The study also analyses long run relation among prices of four different land categories. To do so, it used unit root tests (proposed by Dickey and Fuller) and cointegration tests (according to Johansen´s methodology). Results have shown that land price and rent are more elastic to agricultural related variables (purchasing power, terms of trade, etc). Although it has been determined that variables affects land prices and rent, its effects are much lower than agricultural ones. The dummy variable has shown to be statistically significant in several models. Unit root and cointegration tests supported empirical evidences that different kind of land price have similar pattern of movement. Also, same kind if land have similar behavior among different states. These results are due to factors related to land demand for agriculture and land demand for speculative purposes. Results supported evidences raised by several researchers surveyed in this study.

Agricultural policy in the transition states of Central Eastern Europe is a very complex issue – ranging from privatisation of farm land, the establishment of agricultural markets to detailed questions of veterinary care, plant health and animal nutrition. Its main elements are the introduction of market liberalization, farm restructuring, privatisation, the reform of the sector and the creation of supporting market institutions and services.1 In this process central state agriculture administration plays a decisive role.<br><br> This paper is summing up the research of the author on Slovak agricultural administration between 2002 and 2004. This work was part of a DFG-funded research project on “Genesis, Organization and Efficiency of the central-state Ministerial Administration in Central and Eastern Europe”. The project was analysing the processes, results and efficiency of administrative structures at central-state level in Estonia, Poland and Slovakia with reference to public administration in the policy fields of agriculture and telecommunications. The paper is reflecting the situation in the sector and its administration at the beginning of 2004.<br><br> At first, an overview of the role of the agricultural sector in Slovak economy in the past and presence is provided (section I). Against this background, the development of the agricultural policy in the different periods since 1989 will be analysed, mainly what privatisation, accession to the EU and subsidy policy are concerned (section II). A detailed study of the developments in agricultural administration forms the next part of the paper (section III), i.e. the changes taking place in the ministry of agriculture and in the other institutions responsible for the implementation of agricultural policy. The role of interest groups in agriculture is briefly analysed (section IV). In the conclusions two different scenarios on the further development of Slovak agricultural administration will be deployed.

Alle Menschen haben elementare Gemeinsamkeiten: Um zu überleben, müssen sie atmen, trinken – und essen. Doch ist Ernährung garantiert? Der Diskurs über globale Ernährungssicherung führte Jahrzehnte lang ein Schattendasein. Nun erfährt die Agrarwirtschaft eine Renaissance, doch ob dies den Hungernden zugutekommen wird, ist fraglich: Immer mehr Produkte sollen nicht den Energiebedarf der Menschen, sondern den der Maschinen decken. In unserem aktuellen Thema diskutieren Experten die Möglichkeiten und Risiken dieser veränderten Wertschätzung der Landwirtschaft.

The aim of this study has been to analyse the effects of state subsidies within agriculture. The goal of these policies was to build up long-term sound and profitable farms by means of both general and selective support measures. The investments affecting structure gave rise to the following questions: (a) What were the effects on a farm of a given type of aid? (b) How were the farms and the surrounding community affected? (c) In what respect was a desirable effect achieved, and in what respect were the results problematical? The investigation was carried out in three municipalities in Norrland, and considered three different forms of subsidy (SR-, A- and B-support) which were utilized during the years 1961-1978. In addition to these so-called "subsidized farms", a similar number of "comparative farms" that had not received support were selected. In all, 650 farms were investigated. The evaluation was mainly divided into five areas of interest: (a) Farm reconstruction, (b) Farm development, (c) The farmers, (d) Economic effects, (e) Social effects in the locality. The principal findings were as follows: (1) SR- and A-supported farms were characterized by farmers who were relatively young, had good education and who used a portion of their working-hours for carrying out organizational measures. The comparative farms were distinguished rather by older farmers with less education and with a higher degree of employment outside the farm. (2) All of the SR-and B-supported farms had survived. Some A-supported farms were abandoned, while the number of comparative farms was greatly reduced. (3) All types of subsidized farms exhibited growth in their areas of arable land and forest and in their stock of milk cows, whereas the comparative farms were relatively unchanged. (4) Improved production results within crop husbandry could be derived simultaneously from the increased use of pipe drainage, shorter periods between ploughing, new methods of harvesting, etc. Within all these areas the subsidized farms had higher proportions of improvements than the comparative farms. (5) Since SR-farms in particular (but even A-farms) financed their rationalization measures by means of bank loans, they all became extremely sensitive to risks. In thi s way they all too easily ended up with economic difficulties when major increases in interest rates or changes in costs or revenues occurred. (6) In the short term the rationalization of the size of subsidized farms had little effect on outmigration from the areas concerned. (7) The households were larger on subsidized farms than in the comparative group. This meant that the subsidized farms, which were increasing their relative share of the population, also comprised a stabilizing factor in a locally-dependent service sector. / digitalisering@umu

Agriculture is undergoing extreme change. The introduction of new generation agricultural products has generated an increased need for efficient and accurate product segregation across a number of Canadian agricultural sectors. In particular, monitoring, controlling and preventing commingling of various wheat grades is critical to continued agri-food safety and quality assurance in the Canadian grain handling system. The Canadian grain handling industry is a vast regional supply chain with many participants. Grading of grain for blending had historically been accomplished by the method of Kernel Visual Distinguishability (KVD). KVD allowed a trained grain grader to distinguish the class of a registered variety of wheat solely by visual inspection. While KVD enabled rapid, dependable, and low-cost segregation of wheat into functionally different classes or quality types, it also put constraints on the development of novel traits in wheat. To facilitate the introduction of new classes of wheat to enable additional export sales in new markets, the federal government announced that KVD was to be eliminated from all primary classes of wheat as of August 1, 2008. As an alternative, the Canadian Grain Commission has implemented a system called Variety Eligibility Declaration (VED) to replace KVD. As a system based on self-declaration, the VED system may create moral hazard for misrepresentation. This system is problematic in that incentives exist for farmers to misrepresent their grain. Similarly, primary elevators have an incentive to commingle wheat classes in a profitable manner. Clearly, the VED system will only work as desired for the grain industry when supported by a credible monitoring system. That is, to ensure the security of the wheat supply chain, sampling and testing at some specific critical points along the supply chain is needed. While the current technology allows the identification of visually indistinguishable grain varieties with enough precision for most modern segregation requirements, this technology is relatively slow and expensive. With the potential costs of monitoring VED through the current wheat supply chain, there is a fundamental tradeoff confronting grain handlers, and effective handling strategies will be needed to maintain historical wheat uniformity and consistency while keeping monitoring costs down. There are important operational issues to efficiently testing grain within the supply chain, including the choice of the optimal location to test and how intensively to test. The testing protocols for grain deliveries as well as maintaining effective responsiveness to information feedback among farmers will certainly become a strategic emphasis for wheat handlers in the future. In light of this, my research attempts to identify the risks, incentives and costs associated with a functional declaration system. This research tests a series of incentives designed to generate truthful behavior within the new policy environment. In this manner, I examine potential and easy to implement testing strategies designed to maintain integrity and efficiency in this agricultural supply chain. This study is developed in the first instance by using an analytic model to explore the economic incentives for motivating farmer’s risk control efforts and handlers’ optimal handling strategies with respect to testing cost, penalty level, contamination risks and risk control efforts. We solve for optimal behavior in the supply chain assuming cost minimization among the participants, under several simplifying assumptions. In reality, the Canadian grain supply chain is composed of heterogeneous, boundedly rational and dynamically interacting individuals, and none of these characteristics fit the standard optimization framework used to solve these problems. Given this complex agent behavior, the grain supply chain is characterized by a set of non-linear relationships between individual participants, coupled with out of equilibrium dynamics, meaning that analytic solutions will not always identify or validate the set of optimized strategies that would evolve in the real world. To account for this inherent complexity, I develop an agent-based (farmers and elevators) model to simulate behaviour in a more realistic but virtual grain supply chain. After characterizing the basic analytics of the problem, the grain supply chain participants are represented as autonomous economic agents with a certain level of programmed behavioral heterogeneity. The agents interact via a set of heuristics governing their actions and decisions. The operation of a major portion of the Canadian grain handling system is simulated in this manner, moving from the individual farm up through to the country elevator level. My simulation results suggest testing strategies to alleviate misrepresentation (moral hazard) in this supply chain are more efficient for society when they are flexible and can be easily adjusted to react to situational change within the supply chain. While the idea of using software agents for modeling and understanding the dynamics of the supply chain under consideration is somewhat novel, I consider this exercise a first step to a broader modeling representation of modern agricultural supply chains. The agent-based simulation methodology developed in my dissertation can be extended to other economic systems or chains in order to examine risk management and control costs. These include food safety and quality assurance network systems as well as natural-resource management systems. Furthermore, to my knowledge there are no existing studies that develop and compare both analytic and agent-based simulation approaches for this type of complex economic situation. In the dissertation, I conduct explicit comparisons between the analytic and agent-based simulation solutions where applicable. While the two approaches generated somewhat different solutions, in many respects they led to similar overall conclusions regarding this particular agricultural policy issue.

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Feb 16, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Dissertation advisor: Dr. Joe Donaldson. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Rural areas of New Mexico still exhibit post-colonial political patterns. In terms of its agricultural profile, subsistence farming has only recently (in the past generation) begun to give way to highly specialized, big-business farming interests. Older Hispanic and Pueblo communities struggle to maintain their farming traditions in the face of external economic factors. Now, with the increasing use of genetically-modified seeds on major farm operations and the ongoing development of a transgenic chile seed, a heritage crop, these populations are grappling with intellectual property issues and ecological implications that technological manipulation of native seeds bring. Other growers across the state also have serious concerns about their ability to grow crops from non-genetically modified seeds, as consumers have shown a preference for organic, non-genetically modified foods. Using the guiding analytical tools of Latour and Callon's Actor Network Theory (ANT), I assess the dynamics of power and influence among all agricultural stakeholders to find how a network of disparate elements can achieve “compromise among materially diverse elements” (Rutland and Aylett 2008). This work outlines a framework based on deliberative democratic principles to begin a participatory process that builds upon the disconnected agricultural network of New Mexico. A deliberative process enfranchises previously neglected stakeholders to develop an agricultural policy that deals with genetically engineered crops in a way that reflects the values and goals of the public. / text

Der Bericht dokumentiert die vom LfULG angewandte Methodik zur Ermittlung repräsentativer landwirtschaftlicher Modellbetriebe in Sachsen. Mittels einer Clusteranalyse wurden Daten aus der Agrarförderung und die Buchführungsergebnisse von Betrieben in Sachsen untersucht. Im Ergebnis konnten neun Betriebsgruppen ermittelt werden, die repräsentative Aussagen für Sachsen zulassen. Diese werden als Modellbetriebe beschrieben und anhand von Strukturmerkmalen und Kennzahlen in Form eines Steckbriefes definiert. Die Modellbetriebe erlauben Hochrechnungen zu verschiedensten agrarpolitischen Themenfeldern.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the causal relationship between the intensive farmers-government interaction in agricultural policy and the perverse and suboptimal outcomes in the view of taxpayers and consumers. This analysis focused on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the EU. Created with the signature of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 by the six founding countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands and the Federal Republic of Germany), the CAP represented for many years the only common policy fully administered at the European level and the largest item in the EU budget. It is strongly rooted in the European integration project and it represents the cornerstone of EU agriculture. Although a model of policy integration at the supranational level, it has also been the source of much criticism about its cost and its perverse effects. Nevertheless, the latest reform of the CAP, approved in 2013, demonstrates that agricultural policy remains of utmost importance at the EU level. This research is based on two major assumptions: First, it was possible to maintain political support for the Common Agricultural Policy because it fulfilled social and economic purposes that justified its existence. Second, interest group activity is often perceived negatively and there is not much information on its positive role in the policy process. This thesis draws from the literature on European governance in order to analyze the role of interest groups in the policy process and their impact on policy outcomes. / Graduate / 0615 / 0503 / 0335 / elodie_texier@hotmail.com