The paper assesses the ability of French wineries to prevail over the crisis of French wine in the years 2000. Corporations are distinguished from co-operatives: Over the 2000-2006 period in spite of sales fluctuations, French wineries did not increase their financial debt level substantially....

Construction of the Itaparica dam and reservoir induced changes in the agricultural production systems of the Itaparica micro-region, at the lower-middle São Francisco river basin. Extensive traditional systems were replaced by e.g. irrigated fruit production. However, over twenty years after...

Evaluating the rural communities capacity to manage changes is of paramount importance for effective Social Sustainability strategies identification. The aim of the present study is to analyze if social resilience can be integrated into the social assessment of rural communities, with the aim of...

This paper makes a case for harnessing indigenous knowledge (IK) for sustainable national development in Ghana. IK according to the World Bank is the basic component of any country’s knowledge system and it is upon this knowledge that scientific research builds. In Ghana the Government has...

Iran's simple and environmentally extended commodity by commodity input-output (IO) model was used to determine the impacts of dietary changes on the Iranian economy and on the environmental load. The original model is based on the status-quo diet and was modified to include the World Health...

This paper offers an empirical case study of the potential for urban gardening to contribute to individual food security. Food security generally encompasses both availability and accessibility. In Western Europe, availability per se has declined in importance with the development of national...

Food companies are increasingly challenged to balance business performance and economic gains with environmental and social performance. Therefore, in 2012, we started a collaborative project on this topic named SCALE (Step Change in Agri-food Logistics Ecosystems). SCALE aims to improve the...

Recent crises in the agricultural sector, such as the 2011 German dioxin scandal and deaths from EHEC or the last swine fever outbreak in Germany in 2006, have caused immense economic damage. As a result, German veterinary authorities at the district, state, and federal levels have been put in...

Due to global climate change and its impact on local weather conditions, decision support systems are becoming more important in agriculture. Such systems allow farmers to adapt more effectively to the complex changes affecting their farms. Marginal production sites must apply new tillage...

The market of local and organic food is still a niche market in the USA, despite its strong growth rates. Both offer consumers an alternative to a globalized anonymous food supply chain. Yet local food and organic food seem to be overlapping and to some degree competing food concepts. While the...