Challenges and Issues in the Next Decade: A Proactive Role for Agricultural and Resource Economists

Economic and environmental challenges in the global economy raise significant issues that require public policy and private sector attention over the next decade. Price volatility, invasive species, sustainable biofuels production, and climate change all affect our agricultural and resource base and its future. Agricultural and resource economists must provide analyses of public policy and private sector strategies based on innovative research that integrates insights across disciplinary boundaries. Proactive communication of the results to decision makers can make a difference in how these important societal issues are addressed and help to shape the future.economics, environment, policy research, communication, Agricultural and Food Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

PUBLIC ISSUES EDUCATION AND THE NPPEC

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

POLICY ISSUES AFFECTING AGRICULTURAL ALTERNATIVES

Agricultural and Food Policy,

EMERGING ROLES FOR FOOD LABELS: INFORM, PROTECT, PERSUADE

Every day, food producers and processors provide products consumed by 250 million people in this country. Each of those consumers is affected by the content of their foods. With advances in food production, processing, and distribution technology, the role of food labels has become increasingly important. Current research and views related to food labeling issues were discussed at a conference held in Washington, D.C. on March 20-21, 2003. This article gives an overview of food-labeling issues and summarizes the research findings presented at the conference. Issues discussed in this paper include the impact of food labels on consumer purchase decisions, the role of the private versus the public sector in providing credibility to marketing claims, the costs and benefits of voluntary and mandatory labels, and the implications of country-of-origin labeling.Agribusiness,

Supply Chains and Rural Development in the Asia Pacific Region

Rapid income growth and urbanization are having profound impacts on the food system, food producers and rural areas in the developing Asia Pacific economies. Meeting the challenge of rural development will depend on better integrating rural areas with fast-growing urban areas where the composition of food demand is changing and the logistics of supply are growing more complex. Possible government options include investment in transportation infrastructure—roads, railroads and waterway—and providing rural communities and small-scale producers the tools they need to better adapt to the rapid spread of modern supermarkets and their supply chains.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

The Future of Animal Agriculture in North America

Livestock Production/Industries, Q18,

Microscopic Enhancement of Heavy-Element Production

Realistic fusion barriers are calculated in a macroscopic-microscopic model for several soft-fusion heavy-ion reactions leading to heavy and superheavy elements. The results obtained in such a realistic picture are very different from those obtained in a purely macroscopic model. For reactions on 208:Pb targets, shell effects in the entrance channel result in fusion-barrier energies at the touching point that are only a few MeV higher than the ground state for compound systems near Z = 110. The entrance-channel fragment-shell effects remain far inside the touching point, almost to configurations only slightly more elongated than the ground-state configuration, where the fusion barrier has risen to about 10 MeV above the ground-state energy. Calculated single-particle level diagrams show that few level crossings occur until the peak in the fusion barrier very close to the ground-state shape is reached, which indicates that dissipation is negligible until very late in the fusion process. Whereas the fission valley in a macroscopic picture is several tens of MeV lower in energy than is the fusion valley, we find in the macroscopic-microscopic picture that the fission valley is only about 5 MeV lower than the fusion valley for soft-fusion reactions leading to compound systems near Z = 110. These results show that no significant ``extra-extra-push'' energy is needed to bring the system inside the fission saddle point and that the typical reaction energies for maximum cross section in heavy-element synthesis correspond to only a few MeV above the maximum in the fusion barrier.Comment: 7 pages. LaTeX. Submitted to Zeitschrift fur Physik A. 5 figures not included here. Complete preprint, including device-independent (dvi), PostScript, and LaTeX versions of the text, plus PostScript files of the figures, available at http://t2.lanl.gov/publications/publications.html or at ftp://t2.lanl.gov/pub/publications/mehe

Contextual planning for NASA - A second workbook of alternative future environments for mission analysis, volume 1 Interim report

Contextural planning for selecting alternate NASA program