Food policy and economic development in Mediterranean Arab countries

Food practices not only reflect the parameters of agricultural production and food consumption in Mediterranean countries: they are also very useful for analyzing the development of these countries and their economic policies. The food and agricultural sector in most Mediterranean countries shows a very large deficit; the situation in the northern part of the region is more favourable while the southern Mediterranean is heavily in the red especially as regard strategic foodstuffs such as cereals, sugar, meat, dairy and oleaginous products

Global Changes, Coastal Areas And Conflicts: Experiences From Italy

Three cases of environmental conflicts occurring in Italian coastal areas are analysed in the present chapter: Civitavecchia, Costa Teatina National Park and Ostia. Civitavecchia and Ostia are included in the Rome Metropolitan Area, while the Costa Teatina National Park is in the Chieti-Pescara urban area. In Civitavecchia the major conflict is environmental: about air quality and pollution due to the presence of two power stations close to the city centre and the mooring of cruise ships. The second conflict is about the use and management of water and the processing of waste water and drainage systems in Ostia, besides coastal erosion. The third conflict is linked to the spatial definition of the boundaries of the Costa Teatina National Park. The current conflict concerns the definition of the spatial boundaries of the park even if bias against the existence of the Park itself does exist. All the three conflicts concern the contrast between economic development and environmental protection. The first and the second also include competition for the use of resources at a time characterized by extensive human mobility. The third case study specifically concerns conflicts occurring over the protection of the natural environment and biodiversity. It will be shown that those conflicts are chronic, critical for the development of the concerned areas, and their solutions are urgently needed

A modern perspective: the recent development of port cities in southern Europe

The comparative analysis on port cities aims to point out similarities and contrasts between cities in diverse situations, with the intent of improving comprehension of these complex elements and understanding of the existing interrelationships among the ports, the cities, and their inland territories in some regions of southern and Mediterranean Europe. The countries of southern Europe, from Portugal to Turkey were examined, and in each case a large , historically significant coastal city with a port of international importance was considered. In this manner the cities of Lisbon, Barcelona, Marseille, Genoa, Naples, Athens and Istanbul were selected. The effects of demographic growth , urbanization, industrialization, and even pollution are demonstrated, and lead to the conclusions that at present the vital part of the port is usually far removed from the life and economic interests of the urban communities

On the characteristic direction of real hypersurfaces in C^{n+1} and a symmetry result

In this paper we show the following property of a non Levi flat real hypersurface in C^{n+1} : if the unit characteristic direction T is a geodesic, then it is an eigenvector of the second fundamental form and the relative eigenvalue is constant. As an application we prove a symmetry result of Alexandrov type for compact hypersurfaces in C^{n+1} with positive constant Levi mean curvature

Cooperazione internazionale e ricerca compara­ta

Il volume in cui si inserisce questo contributo è il risultato di una ricerca europea comparata sull'inquinamento atmosferico e le conseguenze sul monumenti e sui centri storici. Il contributo inserisce la ricerca realizzata nel campo più ampio dei progetti di ricerca multidisciplinari e multinazional

Barcelona and Glasgow, similarities and differencies in the history of two port cities

The role of port cities and the nature of its economic relations with its neighboring areas are determined by the interplay of a variety of different geographical, economic, political and technological factors. The comparative studies of similarities evident in the historical development of port cities in different locations, as Barcelona and Glasgow, can illustrate how these factors shaped the development of the relations between a port, its city and neighboring region