Food safety scares affect consumption behavior, and food safety and animal health issues are increasingly impacting international agricultural trade. Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a highly contagious viral-type disease, and has raised not only the concerns of animal health issue but also food safety issue. Over 58 countries in the world have experienced FMD outbreaks, and pork exports and imports among these countries are largely impacted. This dissertation focuses on how global pork trade is affected by FMD. This dissertation consists of three parts: first, this study specifically focuses on the market of U.S. pork exports. Results show that disease-affected pork importers are potential traders with the U.S., and only importing countries with a vaccination policy are more likely to increase pork imports from the U.S. rather than those importers with a slaughter policy. Second, a further investigation focuses basic hypothesis on import demand of FMD-affected importers by using a gravity model with fixed-effects to show how pork trade is affected by FMD among 186 countries. Results confirm that pork export falls when an exporting country develops FMD. Exporters with a vaccination policy have larger negative impacts than those with a slaughter policy. Further, pork importers that develop FMD and institute a slaughter policy will import more pork, but importers with a vaccination policy import the same level of pork. Third, the findings of part one and two reveal that FMD-free pork exporters face different market opportunities when pork importers have FMD outbreaks. Hence, four major FMD-free pork exporters, such as Canada, U.S., Germany, and Spain, are further investigated. Results confirm that the impacts of foreign FMD have altered pork exporters differently. Germany has gained the most exports during foreign FMD outbreaks in pork importers; the U.S. is second; Spain is third; and Canada is fourth. In sum, this dissertation contributes to the literature of gravity model when endogeneity and heteroskedasticity may coexist, when an extremely large number of zero observations are included, when single commodity for one specific exporter is analyzed, when a spatial econometric approach is compared, and when pork export market has been altered by foreign FMD outbreaks.

This dissertation explores the impact of international trade on the geographic location of manufacturing activities and on regional productivity growth patterns within countries. This study develops models of trade with monopolistic competition in the context of a two-region country. It also provides empirical estimates of the e ect of tari policy on the distribution of industrial activities and on productivity growth di erentials across Colombia's regions. The rst essay investigates the consequences of trade liberalization for the distribution of manufacturing activities between large and small cities. It presents an extension of the Melitz (2003) model of trade with monopolistic competition and heterogeneous rms where producers' location and export market participation decisions depend on their productivity. As a country's exposure to trade shifts, rms and output are reallocated between large and small urban areas. Data from Colombia's manufacturing sector lend support to theoretical predictions concerning tari reduction's impact on the repartition of industrial activities between metro- and nonmetropolitan areas in this country. The second essay extends the New Economic Geography, Footloose-Capital model to examine the e ect of commercial policy on the distribution of industrial activities between regions within a country. This study aims at distinguishing theoretical cases with regard to the nature of the trade policy change or to the source of asymmetry between regions. It shows that trade liberalization can have adverse consequences for the manufacturing sector of a small or isolated region under bilateral liberalization, but a positive impact under unilateral trade liberalization. The third essay adapts the Melitz and Ottaviano (2008) model of trade with monopolistic competition, heterogeneous rms, and variable mark-ups to analyze the relationship between trade openness, regional market size, and regional aggregate industry performance. It demonstrates that the impact of trade liberalization on aggregate industry productivity growth varies across regions as a function of regional market size and proximity to foreign markets. A larger region experiences a greater increase in aggregate productivity through intra-industry reallocation of market shares. Similarly, a region with better access to international markets enjoys a higher productivity growth from tari reduction. Empirical evidence is obtained from the Colombian manufacturing sector.

This dissertation examines organic food marketing from three aspects: household demand for organic food, household choice of retail formats accounting for preference organic food preference, and farmers’ joint adoption of organic farming and direct marketing methods. In Chapter Two, given the fast growth of private label milk and organic milk in the U.S., we estimate a censored demand system to study the demand relations among types of milk differentiated by brand types and organic status, using recent Nielsen Homescan data. We find that sociodemographic factors still play important roles in a household choice of milk types, and fluid milk is an inferior good. Moreover, as income increases, households are more likely to shift from buying conventional milk to organic milk and from private label conventional milk to branded conventional milk, as indicated by the asymmetric cross price elasticities. In Chapter Three, we examine whether households’ preference for organic food can affect their retail format choices for their grocery shopping trips. We model households’ choices of five major retail format with a conditional logit model, also using the Nielsen Homescan data. Our main findings are that regular organic user households are more likely to patronage organic specialty stores and discount stores, but less likely to shop in warehouse clubs. Price, consumer loyalty, and household shopping behavior also affects household retail format choice. In Chapter Four, we examine the relation between farmers’ adoption of organic farming and direct marketing, given their similar objectives in satisfying consumer demand and increasing farm income. We model farmers’ adoption of the two practices with a bivariate simultaneous linear probability model using data from USDA Agricultural Resource Management Survey. Our main finding is that the farmers’ adoption of organic farming decreases their probability of adopting direct marketing, whereas the reverse effect is insignificant. Also, organic farming is found to improve gross farm income.

Changes within and outside of agricultural education were analyzed between 2009-2014 which coincided with a reduction of male pre-service agricultural teachers. Under the lens of the Theory of Gender Re-alignment, special attention was given to changes in legislation, curriculum, recruitment, and economic factors which relate to structural and cultural changes within agricultural education. The Changes identified in this study explain why male students are being outperformed by female students at a two to one ratio in regards to agricultural education degrees obtained.

This thesis, submitted for the Doctor of Philosophy in Geography and Environment, presents a case study of the development of the UK's market-based management system for oceanic fisheries. Implemented gradually in the years since 1984, the informal nature of the UK's fisheries management system, which has developed through a number of incremental changes and government-industry "gentlemen’s agreements" rather than clear legislative moves, means that few official policy documents (and perhaps consequently, little academic literature) on the subject currently exist. This thesis traces the material and political processes of market formation, looking at the origin of market-based policies in the theories of bioeconomics and wider economic history. It asks what the implicit assumptions of the economic discipline can – and can't – tell us about the impacts and outcomes of market creation, and using a Foucauldian inspired approach to economic performativity, discusses the role of ostensibly descriptive theories in shaping the world around them. Finally, it calls for a greater geographical engagement with marine issues, and proposes an action-research role for geographers in the politics of the sea.

The tundra is currently warming twice as rapidly as the rest of planet Earth, which is thought to be leading to widespread vegetation change. Understanding the drivers, patterns, and impacts of vegetation change will be critical to predicting the future state of tundra ecosystems and estimating potential feedbacks to the global climate system. In this thesis, I used plant traits - the characteristics of individuals and species - to investigate the fundamental structure of tundra plant communities and to link vegetation change to decomposition across the tundra biome. Plant traits are increasingly used to predict how communities will respond to environmental change. However, existing global trait relationships have largely been formulated using data from tropical and temperature environments. It is thus unknown whether these trait relationships extend to the cold extremes of the tundra biome. Furthermore, it is unclear whether approaches that simplify trait variation, such as the categorization of species into functional groups, capture variation across multiple traits. Using the Tundra Trait Team database - the largest tundra trait database ever compiled - I found that tundra plants revealed remarkable consistency in the range of resource acquisition traits, but not size traits, compared to global trait distributions, and that global trait relationships were maintained in the tundra biome. However, trait variation was largely expressed at the level of individual species, and thus the use of functional groups to describe trait variation may obscure important patterns and mechanisms of vegetation change. Secondly, plant traits are related to several key ecosystem functions, and thus offer an approach to predicting the impacts of vegetation change. Notably, understanding the links between vegetation change and decomposition is a critical research priority as high latitude ecosystems contain more than 50% of global soil carbon, and have historically formed a long-term carbon sink due to low decomposition rates and frozen soils. However, it is unclear to what extent vegetation change, and thus changes to the quality and quantity of litter inputs, drives decomposition compared to environmental controls. I used two common substrates (tea), buried at 248 sites, to quantify the relative importance of temperature, moisture and litter quality on litter decomposition across the tundra biome. I found strong linear relationships between decomposition, soil temperature and soil moisture, but found that litter quality had the greatest effect on decomposition, outweighing the effects of environment across the tundra biome. Finally, I investigated whether tundra plant communities are undergoing directional shifts in litter quality as a result of climate warming. Given the importance of litter quality for decomposition, a shift towards more or less decomposable plant litter could act as a feedback to climate change by altering decomposition rates and litter carbon storage. I combined a litter decomposition experiment with tundra plant trait data and three decades of biome-wide vegetation monitoring to quantify change in community decomposability over space, over time and with warming. I found that community decomposability increased with temperature and soil moisture over biogeographic gradients. However, I found no significant change in decomposability over time, primarily due to low species turnover, which drives the majority of trait differences among sites. Together, my thesis findings indicate that the incorporation of plant trait data into ecological analyses can improve our understanding of tundra vegetation change. Firstly, trait-based approaches capture variation in plant responses to environmental change, and enable prediction of vegetation change and ecosystem function at large scales and under future growing conditions. Secondly, my findings offer insight into the potential direction, rate and magnitude of vegetation change, indicating that despite rapid shifts in some traits, the majority of community-level trait change will be dependent upon the slower processes of migration and species turnover. Finally, my findings demonstrate that the impact of warming on both tundra vegetation change and ecosystem processes will be strongly mediated by soil moisture and trait differences among vegetation communities. Overall, my thesis demonstrates that the use of plant traits can improve climate change predictions for the tundra biome, and informs the fundamental rules that determine plant community structure and change at the global scale.

By examining a sector of the economy that was exposed to increased imports more than four decades ago, Crumley illuminates the economic pressures, resistance, and reform that help to shape Russia's agrarian sector today. Contents: The impact of trade on Russian agrarian institutions: an introduction -- Conceptualizing alternative approaches to institutional change in Russia -- Soviet agrarian institutions and interests -- Administrative and organizational changes as agrarian reform, 1972-1990 -- The decentralization of decision-making institutions in the era of market reforms, 1990-2002 -- Government incentives, traditional values, and the shaping of agrarian interests -- Changes and constraints in agrarian institutions. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1037/thumbnail.jpg

The study of bananas in East Africa by geographers has been neglected. Some study has been made by agriculturists and anthropologists on a small scale. The anthropologist have concentrated their work more on ethnic groups than on the spatial pattern of the crop as such. In none of the studies has distribution been correlated with the Bantu people in East Africa. For a long time the banana has been a staple food la the region. The present study points out that in spite of the many changes which have occurred the banana continues to serve as the staple food crop of many people in East Africa, especially the Bantu peoples. Further, it tries to show how closely the distribution of the Bantus and bananas are related in all regions of East Africa.

This paper looks at the development of U.S. immigration policy since 1965. In attempts to lower the number of immigrants from the southern border, Congress and the Executive branch have passed immigration measures that bolster illegal immigration. Furthermore, these policies have created an agricultural sector that is reliant on illegal migrant workers. However, recent changes in immigrant characteristics and attitudes are negatively impacting farmers. Going forward, temporary migrant worker programs must be expanded and improved upon to ensure the health of the agricultural industry.

This dissertation includes three essays on U.S. beef market. Each essay has looked at this market from a different point of view. The first essay investigates the price adjustment along the different levels of this market. The second essay discusses the impact of food safety incidents on export levels in this market. The third essay considers the environmental loading of U.S. beef market. A summary of each article is as follows. The first essay (chapter 2) analyzes price adjustment of the U.S. beef sector with a focus on the Great Recession. To this purpose, the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) and historical decomposition graphs are applied to monthly data. The results indicate that retail prices have lower speeds of adjustment than wholesale prices. Also, the magnitude of price adjustment in the presence of the Great Recession, as an exogenous shock, is different for each level of the U.S. beef market. It is concluded that, with respect to both the speed and magnitude of the price adjustment, the U.S. beef sector has an asymmetric price adjustment, pointing to the inefficiency of the U.S. beef supply chain. These results have welfare implications for U.S. beef consumers and producers. The primary objective of the second essay (chapter 3) is to quantify the impact of consumer awareness about beef safety on U.S. beef exports. To do that, an index is used to reflect consumer’s awareness about beef safety based on the publicized reports in the media. Quarterly panel data is applied to the top importing countries, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Canada for the period 2000-2016. Applying the gravity model, results show that a 0.8% reduction in U.S. beef exports arose from the foodborne-disease news. In addition, using impulse response functions derived from panel vector autoregressive (Panel VAR) estimation, results show that the negative impact of a shock in food safety news intensified after three quarters, and then diminished slowly over time. In order to regain consumers’ confidence and to compensate for the economic loss arising from a foodborne outbreak, bilateral cooperation among trade partners seems necessary. Investing in any scheme that minimizes the impact of food safety events, such as disease eradication programs, traceability systems, quality labeling, and third-party certification that conveys the safety message to consumers is suggested. The third essay (chapter 4) has two purposes. First, it quantifies the environmental loading of U.S. beef sector by calculating emission levels over the period 1970-2014. Beef cattle is one of the most emission-intensive sectors, which is responsible for 35% to 54% of total GHGs from livestock. Following International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guideline, this study identifies three sources of emissions, including enteric fermentation, manure management, and manure left on pastures. Second, it provides an understanding of consumption-environmental connection related to the beef industry using time series techniques. Finally, it is suggested that providing information to the public regarding livestock and climate change relationship would be beneficial. This knowledge might help to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change in the future.