The value-added statement: An appeal for standardisation

Owing to the absence of accounting standards for the preparation of a value-added statement (VAS), a large variety of methods are used in financial statements. In this study the published value-added statements (PVAS) of companies listed on the JSE Securities Exchange during the period 1976-2005 have been standardised by the Graduate School of Business of the University of Stellenbosch (USB) in order to quantify the differences between the standardised VAS (SVAS) and the PVAS. These differences consist of the inclusion of items that do not belong in the VAS, items that are erroneously allocated among the distribution to stakeholders, and interpretation differences in whether a certain item forms part of the calculation of value added or the distribution thereof. The greatest difference quantified was the overstatement of the distribution to government that amounted to 54.4% of total differences. For users, including government, to properly calculate and compare the value added of different business entities, a standard for the preparation and presentation of VAS ought to be published. In the South African context the need of a precise measurement of each business entity's contribution to the growth of the national economy is relevant, and this need should also be addressed.Value added, Gross Domestic Product, South Africa, financial statements

Agricultural, marketing and trade policies to promote food security in the SADCC region: a research proposal

A research paper on regional co-operation in agricultural marketing in Southern Africa to enhance and promote regional food security.In recent years, the nine member states of SADCC have voiced great interest in expanding intraregional trade as one strategy to increasing food security within the region. The fact that six of the nine countries are landlocked, transport costs are high, and dependence on trade with external countries (including South Africa) is viewed as precarious, has contributed to a sense of urgency which resulted in the funding of prefeasibility and feasibility studies to investigate establishing a regional food security scheme based on local grain reserves,The research supporting the preparation the proceedings papers was financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Bureau of Science and Technology; Bureau for Africa; and the Southern Africa Regional Programme

Urban Agriculture, Food Security and the Environment: Socio-economics, Land Use Conflicts and Cultivators’ Views

A DAEE working paper on urban agricultural activities in Zimbabwe.Crop production on open municipal and undeveloped lands has become a significant source of the food security and indirectly sources of household cash income generation or savings. Advent of economic reforms has exacerbated urban agriculture. This is because of the removal of subsidies on food commodities and retrenchments in the formal employment sectors. These have in turn contributed to falling real incomes and reduced food security status of urban households. Urban cultivation had become an important strategy through which families cope with the impact of the economic structure adjustment programme. Though a widespread practice, urban agriculture is not planned for or supported by other planners and managers as a legitimate form of urban land use. Urban agriculture comes into direct conflict with planning provisions for urban space. This study examines the socio-economics of urban crop on municipal lands, cultivators’ views and perceptions on the use of urban space for agricultural activities and related issues in Harare, Zimbabwe. Urban agriculture is used for subsistence maize production. It improves food grain availability, thus increasing household food security and real incomes available for other household requirements as contributes to savings on food expenditure. This is the incentive for cultivation on undeveloped urban land spaces. The study gives empirical insight on the uses of urban space for agricultural activities from the cultivators' perspectives. The findings of the study also show that there is a serious problem of lack of concern for the environment on the part of the cultivators. The majority of the cultivators were aware of but ignored the steam bank regulations. There was general lack of knowledge about the environmental effects of cultivation on the urban environment. Given the importance of urban agriculture to the cultivators and the concern on the environmental impacts, there is need to design extension programmes through which the cultivators would be provided with advice on proper land use husbandry

Residential caregivers’ perceptions of adolescents’ preparedness, as they transition from residential care

Magister Artium (Social Work) - MA(SW)The National Policy on Orphans and Vulnerable defines an orphan as a child, who has lost one, or both parents, and is under the age of 18, while a vulnerable child is one, who is in need of care and protection. The Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVCs) are placed in residential childcare facilities (RCCFs), such as children’s homes, shelters, safe havens, or any other alternative form of care. They are provided with psychosocial support, depending on the facility, in which they are placed.Failure to provide proper and specialised care by the caregivers could prove harmful to the overall wellbeing of the child, resulting in children with developmental difficulties, poor interpersonal relationships, mental health difficulties, behavioural difficulties, and poor academic achievement

The non-clonality of drug resistance in Beijing-genotype isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from the Western Cape of South Africa

Background. The Beijing genotype of M. tuberculosis is a virulent strain that is disseminating worldwide and has a strong association with drug resistance. In the Western Cape of South Africa, epidemiological studies have identified the R220 cluster of the Beijing genotype as a major contributor to a recent outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis. Although the outbreak is considered to be due to clonal transmission, the relationship among drug resistant isolates has not yet been established. Results. To better understand the evolution of drug resistance among these strains, 14 drug-resistant clinical isolates of the Beijing genotype were sequenced by whole-genome sequencing, including eight from R220 and six from a more ancestral Beijing cluster, R86, for comparison. While each cluster shares a distinct resistance mutation for isoniazid, mapping of other drug-resistance mutations onto a phylogenetic tree constructed from single nucleotide polymorphisms shows that resistance mutations to many drugs have arisen multiple times independently within each cluster of isolates. Thus, drug resistance among these isolates appears to be acquired, not clonally derived. This observation suggests that, although the Beijing genotype as a whole might have selective advantages enabling its rapid dissemination, the XDR isolates are relatively less fit and do not propagate well. Although it has been hypothesized that the increased frequency of drug resistance in some Beijing lineages might be caused by a mutator phenotype, no significant shift in synonymous substitution patterns is observed in the genomes. Conclusion. While MDR-TB is spreading by transmission in the Western Cape, our data suggests that further drug resistance (i.e. XDR-TB) at this stage is acquired.Peer Reviewe

Facilitation or Competition? Tree Effects on Grass Biomass across a Precipitation Gradient

Savanna ecosystems are dominated by two distinct plant life forms, grasses and trees, but the interactions between them are poorly understood. Here, we quantified the effects of isolated savanna trees on grass biomass as a function of distance from the base of the tree and tree height, across a precipitation gradient in the Kruger National Park, South Africa. Our results suggest that mean annual precipitation (MAP) mediates the nature of tree-grass interactions in these ecosystems, with the impact of trees on grass biomass shifting qualitatively between 550 and 737 mm MAP. Tree effects on grass biomass were facilitative in drier sites (MAP≤550 mm), with higher grass biomass observed beneath tree canopies than outside. In contrast, at the wettest site (MAP = 737 mm), grass biomass did not differ significantly beneath and outside tree canopies. Within this overall precipitation-driven pattern, tree height had positive effect on sub-canopy grass biomass at some sites, but these effects were weak and not consistent across the rainfall gradient. For a more synthetic understanding of tree-grass interactions in savannas, future studies should focus on isolating the different mechanisms by which trees influence grass biomass, both positively and negatively, and elucidate how their relative strengths change over broad environmental gradients. © 2013 Moustakas et al

Adding soil sampling to household surveys: Information for sample design from pilot data

Large sample surveys with households, or individuals within households, as the basic sampled units, are important sources of information on variables related to household income, economic activity, food security and nutritional status. In many circumstances the advantages of supplementing these surveys with sampling of the soil from fields or other land units which the households cultivate may seem obvious, as a source of information on the quality of the soil on which households depend, and potential limitations on their food security such as soil pH or nutrient status. However, it is not certain that household surveys, designed to examine social and economic variables, will be efficient for collecting soil information, or will provide adequate estimates of soil property means at scales of interest. Additional sampling might be necessary, so an attendant question is whether this is feasible. In this paper we use data on soil pH and soil carbon inferred by spectral measurements on soil specimens collected from land cultivated by households in Uganda and Ethiopia to estimate variance components for these properties, and from these the standard errors for mean values at District (Uganda) or Zone (Ethiopia) level by household surveys with different designs. Similar calculations were done for direct measurement of soil carbon and soil pH from a spatial sample in Malawi from which variograms were used to infer the variance components corresponding to the levels of a household survey. The results allow the calculation of sample sizes at different levels of the design, required to allow estimates of particular quantities to be obtained with specified precision. The numbers of sampled enumeration areas required to obtain estimates of district or zone-level means with the arbitrary specified precision were large, but the feasibility of such sampling must be judged for a particular application, and the precision appropriate for that. The presented method makes that possible

An open science framework and tools to create reproducible food composition data for use in nutrition

Food composition tables and databases (FCTs) and Nutrient Conversion Tables (NCTs) are essential for nutrition research. Compiling a new NCT requires multiple FCTs, usually with incompatible formats. FCT cleaning and standardisation is rarely reproducible and requires significant resources. Our aim was to develop a framework and tools for compilation and reporting of reproducible FCTs/NCTs, through expanding the fish and other aquatic products in the global NCT for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Supply and Utilization Accounts. FAO/ International Network of Food Data Systems (INFOODS) guidelines, and open science tools were used for processing. New R functions and scripts were developed to: import and standardise 12 FCTs; re-calculate food components; perform quality checks; and format outputs (e.g., spreadsheets). This resulted in the expansion of the global NCT, providing information on 32 food components for 95 fish and other aquatic products. The workflow takes 160 seconds to run. The scripts are publicly available in GitHub, with a manual, and can be used or adapted. These open science tools provide a novel resource to create, update and expand FCTs/NCTs in a reproducible, reusable, efficient, and transparent manner, for use in nutrition research

CONTEXTUALISING ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS A PANACEA TO YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA

Youth unemployment has bewildered governments across the globe, both in developed and emerging economies countries, with South Africa being no exception. This is captured through the accelerating youth unemployment rate in the country. Considering the positive contributions of excessive youth entrepreneurship policies in other countries, this paper, through the lenses of Schumpeter’s 1934 economic development theory, demonstrates that through entrepreneurship, the South African government should strive to accelerate the already implemented and discard the less effective youth policies. Consequently, creating an innovative environment centered around the youth eradicates the exacerbating percentage of inactive or discouraged youth due to unemployment. Longer spells of inactivity threaten their human development and their contribution to the South African economy. Therefore, a youth-driven entrepreneurship economy can assist the government in counter-solving upcoming and persistent negative effects of unemployed youth. Keeping the youth productive, and innovative, creating jobs and incomes

The value-added statement: An appeal for standardisation

Owing to the absence of accounting standards for the preparation of a value-added statement (VAS), a large variety of methods are used in financial statements. In this study the published value-added statements (PVAS) of companies listed on the JSE Securities Exchange during the period 1976-2005 have been standardised by the Graduate School of Business of the University of Stellenbosch (USB) in order to quantify the differences between the standardised VAS (SVAS) and the PVAS. These differences consist of the inclusion of items that do not belong in the VAS, items that are erroneously allocated among the distribution to stakeholders, and interpretation differences in whether a certain item forms part of the calculation of value added or the distribution thereof. The greatest difference quantified was the overstatement of the distribution to government that amounted to 54.4% of total differences. For users, including government, to properly calculate and compare the value added of different business entities, a standard for the preparation and presentation of VAS ought to be published. In the South African context the need of a precise measurement of each business entity's contribution to the growth of the national economy is relevant, and this need should also be addressed