Promoting Food Sovereignty through a Cooperativa Model in the Maya Region

The purpose of this investigation is to demonstrate if working in cooperatives favors an increase in food sovereignty among indigenous Mayan women living in rural communities of the Yucatan Peninsula, located in southeast Mexico. The support networks created within the working relationship are expected to transcend beyond the economic activities and provide a basis for deeper ties which promote food sharing in times of scarcity and foment bartering of fruit and vegetables among the participants. A quantitative methodology was used by means of a questionnaire with a Likert scale to measure the attitudes of the participants. The qualitative methodology of social investigation was also applied through open interviews, semi-structured interviews, participant observations and ethnography. It was found that cooperative work strengthens support networks among the participants in this study, thereby favoring their food sovereignty; however, this is also related to cultural and family aspects of the Maya people. As a result, this paper explains community strategies implemented by indigenous women to confront poverty and to improve, with their limited resources, their access to food and income through association

Social and Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (SELCA) Method for Sustainability Analysis:The Jeans Global Value Chain as a Showcase

In this chapter the concepts of social life cycle assessment and combined social and environmental LCA were explored through the application of existing LCA methods to the global value chain of jeans. The social and environmental life cycle assessment (SELCA) method resulted from this explorative research that aims to contribute to the battery of impact assessment tools of products whose value chain scope is multinational (global). From a broader perspective, SELCA has a double-folded purpose to (i) identify opportunities for environmental and social improvement at any of the value chain phases of products, for remediation goals, and (ii) predict the environmental and social performance of different ways (scenarios) to produce the same product, using it as a product design tool. To simplify SELCA development, it was decided to use a single product (jeans) as a showcase from the global textile sector. In this showcase, four scenarios for jeans assembly were compared; three of them were defined under the circular economy principles by including recycled materials (cotton, PET and nylon 6) during the yarn production. During the application of the SELCA method, some new challenges were encountered related to inventory analysis, in particular during data acquisition for social inventories. This is later mainly due to the extensive list of key stakeholders for the showcase and the qualitative nature of social metrics. This list starts with cotton cultivators from different countries where regulations and codes of conduct seem to have contextualised interpretations and consequently different levels of implementation. In this regard, governmental intervention to instrument the transition towards suitable social/environmental performance along the global jeans value chain was also discussed in this chapter

Inventory of social entrepreneurial methods/tools for succesful PC3 implementation

In this paper, authors carried out an extensive literature revision to identify what contributes to the success of social enterprises operating in Base of the Pyramid (BoP) markets, thus leading to enhanced understanding of how social enterprises can operate in these markets. This includes identifying methods, instruments, tools and/or practices used by successful social enterprises, which distinct them from enterprises that fail to successfully serve the BoP markets. As part of a larger research in the field of development through co-creation, the Product Co-created Centres (PC3), the focus is on business innovation through engaging with, and building enterprises with the people at the BoP. This builds on the cutting edge work in the field of BoP strategy by Erik Simanis and Stuart Hart from the Cornell University, thus their work focusses on MNCs operating in BoP markets, whereas this study focusses on engaging the people at the BoP with entrepreneurial activities

REPORTS OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE USES OF CACTACEAE SPECIES IN THE HISTORIA NATURALIS BRASILIAE (1648): COMPARATIVE PAST-PRESENT ANALYSES

Cactaceae species have diverse uses in Brazil, principally in the northeastern region of that country, and show morphological and physiological characteristics adapted to different environments and being useful to the man as well to the animals. In general, cacti are perennial and present in all stations, and demonstrate specialized survival characteristics, and may present leaves modified to form spines, and these species are generally suculent. These plants have significant biological and ecological value in the northeastern of Brazil being present in the Caatinga environment which is characterized as an ecosystem presenting adverse environmental conditions in terms of both its climate and soils. Cactaceae are cited in the historical tome of the 17th century, Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648), by Piso and Marcgrave which contains one of the first considered scientific records of the Brazilian flora. In light of the singular value of this work, seven species of Cactaceae cited by those naturalists were examined in detail. It was also aimed to establish past-present timelines of Cactaceae species comparing their historic and present qualitative and quantitative uses. It was utilized as methodological path: documental, qualitative and quantitative researches. It was observed that six of the seven species described in that work are still utilized for different uses or/and conservative uses by human populations. The use-categories of Cactaceae cited in the original work and in more recently documents are: medicinal, ornamental, food resources, accessories, shade, bio-indicators, construction, magic-religious, fuel, forage, living fences, technology, and veterinary. It is remarkable that the categories medicinal, forage and living fences are cited in both past and present records. The records of Piso and Marcgrave are of significant importance in terms of understanding the temporal dynamics of the use of Cactaceae species, and the wellspring of this work ensures its continued contribution to future research in different areas

On Chern-Simons Quivers and Toric Geometry

We discuss a class of 3-dimensional N=4 Chern-Simons (CS) quiver gauge models obtained from M-theory compactifications on singular complex 4-dimensional hyper-Kahler (HK) manifolds, which are realized explicitly as a cotangent bundle over two-Fano toric varieties V^2. The corresponding CS gauge models are encoded in quivers similar to toric diagrams of V^2. Using toric geometry, it is shown that the constraints on CS levels can be related to toric equations determining V^2.Comment: 14pg, 1 Figure, late