FAO: Challenges and Opportunities in a Global World

FAO: Challenges and Opportunities in a Global World
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2019-05-01
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 925131411X

This illustrated volume identifies the challenges and opportunities facing food and agriculture in the context of the 2030 Agenda, presents solutions for a more sustainable world and shows how FAO has been working in recent years to support its Member Nations in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

China, India and the International Economic Order

China, India and the International Economic Order
Author: Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-08-26
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1139487701

With contributions by a variety of internationally distinguished scholars on international law, world trade, business law and development, this unique examination of the roles of China and India in the new world economy adopts the perspectives of international economic law and comparative law. The two countries are compared with respect to issues concerning trade and development, the World Trade Organization, international dispute settlement, regional/free trade agreements, outsourcing, international investment, foreign investment, corporate governance, competition law and policy, and law and development in general. The findings demonstrate that, though their domestic approaches to economic issues diverge, China and India adopt similar stances at the international level on many major issues, recapturing images which existed during the immediate post-colonial era. Cooperation between China and India could provide leadership in the struggle for economic development in developing countries.

Water

Water
Author: Brahma Chellaney
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2013-07-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 162616021X

Winner of the Asia Society's Bernard Schwartz 2012 Book Award The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. But the battles of tomorrow may be over water. Nowhere is that danger greater than in water-distressed Asia. Water stress is set to become Asia’s defining crisis of the twenty-first century, creating obstacles to continued rapid economic growth, stoking interstate tensions over shared resources, exacerbating long-time territorial disputes, and imposing further hardships on the poor. Asia is home to many of the world's great rivers and lakes, but its huge population and exploding economic and agricultural demand for water make it the most water-scarce continent on a per capita basis. Many of Asia’s water sources cross national boundaries, and as less and less water is available, international tensions will rise. The potential for conflict is further underscored by China’s unrivaled global status as the source of transboundary river flows to the largest number of countries, ranging from India and Vietnam to Russia and Kazakhstan; yet a fast-rising China has declined to enter into water-sharing or cooperative treaties with these states, even as it taps the resources of international rivers. Water: Asia’s New Battleground is a pioneering study of Asia’s murky water politics and the relationships between fresh water, peace, and security. In this unique and highly readable book, Brahma Chellaney expertly paints a larger picture of water across Asia, highlights the security implications of resource-linked territorial disputes, and proposes real strategies to avoid conflict and more equitably share Asia’s water resources.

Food and the Mid-level Farm

Food and the Mid-level Farm
Author: Thomas A. Lyson
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2008
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262622157

Agriculture in the United States today increasingly operates in two separate spheres: large, corporate-connected commodity production and distribution systems and small-scale farms that market directly to consumers. As a result, midsize family-operated farms find it increasingly difficult to find and reach markets for their products. They are too big to use the direct marketing techniques of small farms but too small to take advantage of corporate marketing and distribution systems. This crisis of the midsize farm results in a rural America with weakened municipal tax bases, job loss, and population flight. Food and the Mid-Level Farm discusses strategies for reviving an "agriculture of the middle" and creating a food system that works for midsize farms and ranches. Activists, practitioners, and scholars from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, political science, and economics, consider ways midsize farms can regain vitality by scaling up aspects of small farms' operations to connect with consumers, organizing together to develop markets for their products, developing food supply chains that preserve farmer identity and are based on fair business agreements, and promoting public policies (at international, federal, state, and community levels) that address agriculture-of-the-middle issues. Food and the Mid-Level Farm makes it clear that the demise of midsize farms and ranches is not a foregone conclusion and that the renewal of an agriculture of the middle will benefit all participants in the food system--from growers to consumers. Thomas A. Lyson was Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University until his death in 2006. He was the author of Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community. G.W. Stevenson is Senior Scientist with the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems at the University of Wisconsin-- Madison. Rick Welsh is Associate Professor of Sociology at Clarkson University.

Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors

Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors
Author: William B. Bonvillian
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2015-08-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199374538

The American economy faces two deep problems: expanding innovation and raising the rate of quality job creation. Both have roots in a neglected problem: the resistance of Legacy economic sectors to innovation. While the U.S. has focused its policies on breakthrough innovations to create new economic frontiers like information technology and biotechnology, most of its economy is locked into Legacy sectors defended by technological/ economic/ political/ social paradigms that block competition from disruptive innovations that could challenge their models. Americans like to build technology "covered wagons" and take them "out west" to open new innovation frontiers; we don't head our wagons "back east" to bring innovation to our Legacy sectors. By failing to do so, the economy misses a major opportunity for innovation, which is the bedrock of U.S. competitiveness and its standard of living. Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors uses a new, unifying conceptual framework to identify the shared features underlying structural obstacles to innovation in major Legacy sectors: energy, air and auto transport, the electric power grid, buildings, manufacturing, agriculture, health care delivery and higher education, and develops approaches to understand and transform them. It finds both strengths and obstacles to innovation in the national innovation environments - a new concept that combines the innovation system and the broader innovation context - for a group of Asian and European economies. Manufacturing is a major Legacy sector that presents a particular challenge because it is a critical stage in the innovation process. By increasingly offshoring production, the U.S. is losing important parts of its innovation capacity. "Innovate here, produce here," where the U.S. took all the gains of its strong innovation system at every stage, is being replaced by "innovate here, produce there," which threatens to lead to "produce there, innovate there." To bring innovation to Legacy sectors, authors William Bonvillian and Charles Weiss recommend that policymakers focus on all stages of innovation from research through implementation. They should fill institutional gaps in the innovation system and take measures to address structural obstacles to needed disruptive innovations. In the specific case of advanced manufacturing, the production ecosystem can be recreated to reverse "jobless innovation" and add manufacturing-led innovation to the U.S.'s still-strong, research-oriented innovation system.