Sensemaking, Entrepreneurship and Agricultural Value-Added Businesses

Agricultural producers have been experiencing significant income pressures, leading to a search for alternative sources of income. One of such is value-added agricultural businesses that allow the farmers to stay on the farm and undertake entrepreneurial ventures to improve their finances. How do farmers make sense of their environment as they consider their options for value-added business ventures? This paper presents a sensemaking model and links it to entrepreneurship decisions, allowing us to explain how producers may make such decisions.Agribusiness,

Reviewing, Reviewers and the Scientific Enterprise

Despite their critical importance to the scientific enterprise, reviewers receive no formal training and reviewing has become a skill that they pick up through trial and error. Additionally, because most reviewers do not receive any feedback on their performance, any bad reviewing habits become entrenched over time. This has contributed to significant and unnecessary anxiety about reviewing and to antagonistic encounters between reviewers and authors. This paper seeks to correct this situation by defining reviewers as co-creators of scholarship and the reviewing as a quality control process in the production of scientific scholarship. The paper provides three groups of activities aimed at creating the right mindset among reviewers to facilitate this co-creation and quality control perspective: relationships, commitment and honest decisions and recommendations.reviewers, reviewing, scientific enterprise, scholarship, co-creations, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Opportunities for African Small Farmers in Ethical Foods Markets: An Entrepreneurial Perspective

Income growth in many countries is fuelling expansion of the ethical consumer segment and creating an unprecedented opportunity for small African farmers. The challenge is how to organize these farmers to seize the opportunities being offered by the emerging market. We argue in this paper that the development of entrepreneurial perspectives on small farmers’ realities could help alleviate the current economic challenges confronting them. We suggest increased engagement between researchers and academics with producers in entrepreneurial ventures to seize these opportunities. This is new model of economic development focuses on microeconomic solutions through entrepreneurial initiatives. We believe the agricultural economics profession’s ability to engage producers in this manner will not only increase its relevance but provide needed financial resources to grow education and research programs.Ethical Foods, Farmers, African, Markets, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Consumer/Household Economics, Environmental Economics and Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, International Relations/Trade, Marketing, Productivity Analysis, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

TRADE LIBERALIZATION AND THE WTO NEGOTIATIONS AFTER SEATTLE

Trade liberalization has been received around the world with mixed emotions. The completion of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in December 1993 brought conversations about international trade into the conversation of the general public in a significant way for the first time. What is most important, individuals against or concerned about increased global trade have successfully organized themselves into forces of recognition, taking the conversations about trade from the back rooms into the streets. This was manifest at the Third, or Seattle, Ministerial Conference which was aimed at ushering in the Next Round of Trade Negotiations under the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 1999. During the volatile week in Seattle in December 1999, the focus of the media was primarily on the demonstrations and riots on the streets, with little or no coverage of the activities going on in the meetings at the Ministerial Conference. The WTO was unable to make a Ministerial Declaration to launch the next round of trade negotiations, leading some to think that any international trade liberalization effort has been derailed because of the demonstrations and riots. A number of questions emerge as a result of the events emanating from the Seattle Ministerial Conference, but three of these are of specific interest to this author: 1. What really happened at the Seattle Ministerial and why? 2. What are the implications of what happened to global trade negotiations in the future? 3. Why should Canada care? This paper addresses the above questions, looking at the issues leading up to the Ministerial, the structure of the Ministerial agenda and the positions tabled by various countries in an attempt to understand the outcome of the Seattle Ministerial. It also looks at the changes in the membership of the WTO and the negotiation processes and how these affect future global trade negotiations. We also assess the increasing importance of trade to Canada, arguing that there is an important role for Canada in the current negotiation to ensure its successful conclusion. The layout of the paper is as follows. The next section presents a brief summary of the built-in agenda that was agreed to at the end of the Uruguay Round, explaining the evolving nature of international trade rules and the changes that have occurred in international trade relations since the WTO came into force on January 1, 1995. The section following presents the agenda of the Seattle Ministerial, the positions on the critical subjects of negotiations including agriculture, implementation and rules, market access tabled by the various countries and condition that created for the ability of the Seattle Ministerial to achieve its objectives. The final section presents developments at the WTO since Seattle and what that means for Canada's agri-food industries.International Relations/Trade,

On the Development of an Ethical Demand Theory

As an increasing number of consumers shift to demand products on the basis on production practices, animal welfare protocols, human rights initiatives, it is becoming important that we develop new tools for evaluating the decision-making frameworks in the ethical products market place. This paper draws on the behavioral economics and the principal-agent literature to provide a framework for conducting such analyses.Demand and Price Analysis,

Consumers and the Evolution of New Markets: The Case of the Ethical Foods

Changes in consumer preferences have frequently created new markets for new products. This paper explores the antecedents of the changes in consumer preferences and the factors influencing the evolution of niche markets into commodity markets and its speed. The results show that the more embedded characteristics products have and more consumption is driven by attitude, the longer products are able to maintain their uniqueness and the slower their evolution to commodities.Ethical consumers, New Markets, Consumer choice, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Re-description of Strandesia sanoamuangae Savatenalinton & Martens, 2010 and description of a new species of Strandesia (Crustacea, Ostracoda) from Grande Terre, New Caledonia

The New Caledonian Archipelago is a hot spot for biodiversity and endemism. Whereas popular groups such as birds and plants are well-studied, invertebrate groups such as ostracods remain ill-known. Here, we re-describe Strandesia sanoamuangae Savatenalinton & Martens, 2010, originally described from Thailand (8000 km away from New Caledonia), and describe Strandesia mehesi sp. nov. Both species are known only from females. Material for the present study was collected from diverse aquatic non-marine habitats from Grande Terre, the main island of New Caledonia. Whereas S. sanoamuangae is seemingly easily identifiable, S. mehesi sp. nov. is part of the Strandesia vinceguerrae/vavrai species cluster in the genus, of which the 'older' species (described long ago) often have incomplete and superficial descriptions. Differentiation between the new species and the other members of this species cluster are based on small anatomical details of the valves. The current paper updates the known number of recent freshwater Ostracoda of New Caledonia from 14 to 16 species, although at least five of these species have an uncertain status

THEY SAY THAT THEY ARE HEALTHY, BUT ARE THEY? HEALTH PERCEPTIONS IN THE U.S.

Public health initiatives are the result of strategies developed to address current health issues facing a population that are posing a significant concern to the public. This concern is primarily driven by the economics of health care. The objective of this study is to provide a contemporary analysis of how socio-economic and behavioral factors influence subjective health status. By understanding how these factors influence perceived health status, we can develop successful policies and strategies to target those groups who have a gap between their perceived and real health status and significantly lower health care costs. This analysis makes use of the socio-economic and behavioral data from the 2005-2006 NHANES and an extension of the traditional economic model for ordered data. Results indicate that higher education and an individual's perceived diet quality have a significant effect on influencing an individual's health perception. Strategies to improve health status may include incorporating valid health education into the formal education system.Self-perception, health status, education, ordered logit, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, Health Economics and Policy, I10, D03,