ASSESSING THE ECONOMICS OF FOOD SAFETY ACTIVITIES: STUDIES OF BEEF SLAUGHTER AND MEAT PROCESSING

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

ISO 9000 -- A MARKETING TOOL FOR U.S. AGRIBUSINESS

The relevance of the ISO 9000 series of quality management systems (QMS) for U.S. agribusiness is analyzed. Certified firms from several industries were surveyed to determine their before (ex ante) and after (ex post) perspectives of the QMS. Results for the agribusiness subsample are compared to those for firms from other industries to determine if they behave differently. Anticipated marketing advantages (increasing market share and providing access to new markets) of the QMS were critical factors that encouraged the pursuit of the certificate. The average cost to attain certification was $101.400 and to maintain certification was an additional$26,500 per year.Agribusiness, Marketing,

The Double Bind: The Politics of Racial & Class Inequalities in the Americas

The main goal of the task force, under the leadership of APSA President Rodney Hero, was to investigate the relationship between race and class in producing material, political, and social inequalities in the nations of the Americas. The task force also examined how the political systems in these countries work to foment and/or ameliorate inequalities that track with ethnic and racial identities and socioeconomic status.The work of the task force unfolded in a period in which political science has begun to pay greater attention to the causes and consequences of various forms of inequality. To some extent, political science has lagged behind cognate fields of history, economics, and sociology in terms of scholarly attentiveness to inequality. The recent literature on inequality in political science, however, has focused almost exclusively on rising income inequality and how it affects political representation. The long-standing gaps in the life chances of whites and communities of color in the nations of the Americas have been largely unexplored. At the same time, in Latin America, which had long denied the existence of a relationship between race and ethnicity and class disparities, there has been an explosion in data-gathering on race and ethnicity and in particular on the relationship between race and inequality. The task force members have explicitly sought to grapple with both the problem of rising socioeconomic inequality and the multifaceted racial gaps that exist throughout the Americas. Moreover, they examined the ways in which race and class inequalities are epiphenomena of politics. Thus, their work was organized around several core concepts and theoretical insights that animate research programs in political science—e.g., the role of institutions, the mobilizing power of group memberships, party politics, and social movements. They find that ethnoracial minorities, even in countries in which they represent a large percentage of the population and participate actively in elections, are hampered in translating their demographic potential and civic participation into meaningful socioeconomic gains by their low socioeconomic status and the incentives of the party system

The Future of Conventional Deterrence

The 1990\u27s will see the emergence of a new and qualitatively different world order that will require United States to recast its traditional approaches to foreign policy and national security. For four decades national security policy in the United States, largely defined by the superpower rivalry, was heavily dependent upon strategic nuclear deterrence. Today, as the era of bipolarity recedes, we may confidently expect new and different challenges to our important interest abroad