The impact of Russian food security policy on the performance of the food system

Abstract

Food security has guided Russia’s food policy since 2010. The article examines the impact of food security policy on the food system. The Russian model of food security combines government intervention in the form of assistance for domestic production while simultaneously restricting market access. Food security does not appear to have a deleterious impact on the food system. We measure impact on four dimensions. Financial support for agriculture continues to increase in nominal rubles. In food production, the beef and dairy branches continue to lag, but increased grain production has made Russia a global leader in grain exports. Average per capita food consumption improved, although the poor consume much less, and the decline of the ruble affects the way Russians shop. The largest impact of food security has been on food trade. Food security policy has brought food to the forefront as an instrument of foreign policy. Food trade is politicized, witnessed by the food embargo against the West and food import bans against Turkey and Ukraine.     

山东省农业发展战略问题探讨

本文在分析山东农业发展的优劣势、现状、基本特点及存在问题的基础上,探讨了其农业发展的总体战略与应采取的基本措施。     

Informal markets and global value chains – the disembedding of Romanian dairy smallholders

The Romanian dairy-farming sector is marked by subsistence and semi-subsistence farms. Through consolidation in the retail and dairy sector, the price pressure has moved toward producers of raw milk. Through new European, national and private standards and global actors tapping into the Romanian market this development is reinforced. At the same time, the smallholders, formerly accepted to be acting on an informal level, cannot access their main distribution channels anymore. Additionally, through several legal constraints being developed since Romania’s accession to the European Union, the smallholders are neither able to issue invoices, nor to access certain subsidy programmes as they are not considered juridical persons. This article focuses on the consequences of this disembedding of farmers. The peasants are pushed toward informal activities or value chain positions, in which they do not have any bargaining power with the globally sourcing intermediaries they are supplying. The contemporary approaches of global value chains and global production networks build the theoretical framework for the study. Here it is argued that informal markets must be included into these approaches more concisely.     

中国发展观光农业的资源分析及对策

观光农业是一种新兴的农业与旅游业交叉的高效产业。随着城市经济的发展,观光农业将成为城郊休闲旅游的主要形式。本文分析和讨论了我国发展观光农业的意义、资源优势、存在问题及对策。     

《诗经》中农业地理知识探微

本文用地理学的方法,细致分析和探究了《诗经》中蕴藏的农业地理知识,其中包括农业自然资源条件、自然灾害、土地利用、重农思想、物候与农事活动。主要的粮食作物与经济作物、发达的畜牧业等。古为今用,作者通过对《诗经》中农业地理知识的深刻挖掘,得出了三个有益的启示。可为今日农业生产和农业地理研究提供一些借鉴。     

中古晚期农业对英国产业分化的作用

从近代产业结构形成与发展的角度来看,英国从中古向近代的转变过程中农业发挥了基础性作用。农业和农村的经济社会变革成功地促进了英国中古晚期的产业分化,并在一定意义上为其提供了产权保障和分化条件,从而为英国走向近代化奠定了基础。     

Land-Use Conflict and the Rate of the Transition to Agricultural Economy: A Comparative Study of Southern Scandinavia and Central-Western Korea

Although the forager–farmer interaction model successfully explains the gradual transmission of farming technology to foraging groups, it fails to explain rapid, abrupt transition to agricultural economies. This paper suggests that interaction between farmers and foragers often includes conflict and competition over land and that this conflict between different land-use strategies may lead to a rapid, discontinuous transition of subsistence economy. Comparing southern Scandinavian and central-western Korean cases, this paper suggests that the rapid transition to an agricultural economy in central-western Korea was a consequence of the appearance of territoriality of farmers in mobile, land-sharing context, resulting in a decrease in number of resource patches available to foragers.     

The shaping of the American Empire

This paper creates a traditional, counterfactual, historical geography that proposes the rise of an American Empire in the 1800s instead of the British. The industrialization of the British world-economy of the early 1800s, victory in the Napoleonic Wars, and the consequent success of the British Empire fundamentally depended on cotton textiles, thus on American cotton agriculture. Cotton was, to the economies of the nineteenth century, very much like oil is to those of the late twentieth and early twenty-first enturies. The development of the American cotton South after 1800 was based heavily on the reproduction of slaves within the South. Had Jefferson ended slavery, as he at one time considered, I suggest that an alternative America would have arisen in which Jeffersonian idealism would have encouraged family farms as the principal units of agricultural production. I further argue that, absent the availability of cheap British manufactures, the Philadelphia School of Protectionists would also have likely triumphed early and an American industrial development based on internal growth fueled by cotton grown on family farms would have allowed America to come to dominate the world-economy of the late 1800s. Protectionist policies would have similarly excluded French manufactures and the industrial development based on cotton the French were also attempting in the late 1700s would have failed just as did that of Britain. French military victory in the Napoleonic Wars would not have produced a French world-economy. An America without serious global opposition would not have resisted annexing all of Mexico and Canada in the 1840s and expanding aggressively into Asia via the Pacific basin and Hawaii to create an American Empire.     

对发展我国农业集约型规模经营的认识

发展集约型规模经营是我国农业发展、实现农业现代化的必由之路和必然趋势。目前,要把扩大规模与发展集约经营结合起来,转变发展方式。同时,要培育新的经营主体,增加投入,加快农业科技创新和科技应用,因地制宜,发展多种形式的集约型规模经营。     

Opportunities and constraints for intensive agriculture in the Hawaiian archipelago prior to European contact

Intensive agricultural systems interact strongly and reciprocally with features of the lands they occupy, and with features of the societies that they support. We modeled the distribution of two forms of pre-European contact intensive agriculture – irrigated pondfields and rain-fed dryland systems – across the Hawaiian archipelago using a GIS approach based on climate, hydrology, topography, substrate age, and soil fertility. Model results closely match the archaeological evidence in defined locations. On a broader scale, we calculate that the youngest island, Hawai'i, could have supported 572 km² of intensive agriculture, 97% as rain-fed dryland field systems, while Kaua'i, the oldest island, could have supported 58 km², all as irrigated wetland systems. Irrigated systems have higher, more reliable yields and lower labor requirements than rain-fed dryland systems, so the total potential yield from Kaua'i (49k metric tons) was almost half that of Hawai'i (97k metric tons), although Kaua'i systems required only 0.05 of the agricultural labor (8400 workers, versus 165,000 on Hawai'i) to produce the crops. We conclude that environmental constraints to intensive agriculture across the archipelago created asymmetric production efficiencies, and therefore varying potentials for agricultural surplus. The implications both for the emergence of complex sociopolitical formations and for anthropogenic transformation of Hawaiian ecosystems are substantial.