Land use and crop production in the Khorezm region in western Uzbekistan, exemplarily for the irrigated low-lands of Central Asia, is adversely affected by the excessive, non-sustainable use of irrigation water on one hand, repeated droughts on the other hand, and by soil degradation by...

Decades of Soviet rule have left a heritage of environmental and social problems in Central Asia. The demise of an entire ecosystem at unprecedented pace, the "Aral Sea Syndrome", is the most prominent of the undesired outcomes of the focus on agricultural production that has dominated land and...

This volume of proceedings, available as both a hard copy and a pdf file, is an edited compilation of selected contributions to the Conference on Modern Agriculture in Central and Eastern Europe (MACE) 2010, held in Berlin, Germany, at the ICC on the 13th and 14th of January 2010. We would like...

This paper shows how the involvement of local governments and individuals allowed the successful creation of a public-private partnership for agricultural marketing in South-Eastern Poland, despite a generally negative perception of cooperation among the rural population. While the regional...

Based on farm panel data we empirically investigate the determinants of Polish farm households 'flexibility from 1994 to 2001. We focus on scale flexibility (adjustment in production volume) and scope flexibility (adjustment in product mix). The findings of our fixed-effects regression provide...

Using a unique dataset of a commercial microfinance institution in Madagascar, this paper investigates how the provision of microfinance loans with (in)flexible repayment schedules affects loan delinquencies of agricultural borrowers. Flexible repayment schedules allow a redistribution of...

Politicians and farm lobbyists frequently use the argument that agricultural policy is necessary to safeguard jobs in agriculture. We explore whether this is true by conducting an econometric ex-post evaluation of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the three East German...

Since the end of the quasi-moratorium on genetically modified organisms (GMO) in the European Union in 2004, the establishment of GMO-free zones has become an EU wide phenomenon. In contrast to other European countries, Germany follows the concept of cooperative GMO-free zones where neighbouring...

Research on agricultural development in China has increasingly paid attention to the potentially negative effects of highly fragmented farm structures. This study provides a deeper theoretical understanding of the linkages between land fragmentation and off-farm labor supply and investigates...