Producers in industrialized countries have been inundated by ideas and information about precision agriculture (PA) and how new site-specific management (SSM) technologies will revolutionize their farm operations. Conjuring up 'Star Wars' imagery, farmers and their computerized machinery...

This paper contrasts the successful transformation of the oil palm sector in Malaysia with the stagnation of the oil palm sector in Nigeria, and examines the factors determining the different paths that the oil palm sectors took in these two countries with the aim of drawing lessons for future...

Falling commodity returns. Proliferating environmental regulations. More complicated technologies. Pickier consumers. The general outlook is for an economic environment that puts greatly increased demands on agribusiness management. It's a sow's ear. What can be done with it?

A long term whole farm analysis comparing conventional and low-input farming systems is reviewed. A computational error led to the mistaken conclusion that conventional farming with government programs is less preferred by risk-averse farmers than the low input alternative. The greater income...

A time series model is estimated to identify the interrelation among prices on the international and the EU domestic market for butter. Although the findings were not derived from a causal model, the inspection of the data provides economically reasonable and important insights in structural...

The successful restructuring of Chinese industries is of immense importance not only for the continued development of China but also to the stability of the world economy. The transformation of the Chinese wool textile industry illustrates well the many problems and pressures currently facing...

In this paper, we use the experience of Kenya's failing Coffee Cooperatives to show that, under certain circumstances, membership based organizations can give rise to perverse incentives that undermine the benefits of organizing and lead to a reduction in member productivity and welfare. We...

The only commercial genetically modified (GM) subsistence food crop is white maize in South Africa, which was released in 2001/2. This paper reports on the performance of insect resistant (Bt) white maize grown by smallholders in Hlabisa, KwaZulu Natal, where the other development is minimum...

In this paper, we examine the existence of agglomeration effect on production in the Japanese food industry from 1985 to 2000 using plant-level 4-digit subclassification, panel dataset and new agglomeration index in Akune and Tokunaga (2005), and Tokunaga, Kageyama, and Akune (2005), based on...