The European Community and Food Security

Summary Food security has been one of the major concerns of the European Community's development cooperation policy. Over the past decade, the approach has evolved from a focus on projects to expand agricultural production towards a more general emphasis on food policies and rural development programmes. In relation to food security, the EC has underlined the essential comlementarity in the roles of the public and the private sectors. In a parallel evolution, the food aid instrument has been adapted to make it a better resource for development, more integrated with financial and technical assistance

Natural resource wars in the shadow of the future: Explaining spatial dynamics of violence during civil war

Previous studies on natural resources and civil wars find that the presence of natural resources increases both civil conflict risk and duration. At the same time, belligerents often cooperate over resource extraction, suggesting a temporal variation in the contest over this subnational space. This study argues that parties fight over natural resources primarily when they expect that the conflict is about to end, as the importance of controlling them increases in the post-conflict setting. In contrast, belligerents that anticipate a long war have incentives to avoid fighting near natural resources since excessive violence will hurt the extraction, trade, and subsequent taxation that provide conflict actors with income from the resource. We test our argument using yearly and monthly grid-cell-level data on African civil conflicts for the period 1989–2008 and find support for our expected spatial variation. Using whether negotiations are underway as an indicator about warring parties’ expectations on conflict duration, we find that areas with natural resources in general experience less intense fighting than other areas, but during negotiations these very areas witness most of the violence. We further find that the spatial shift in violence occurs immediately when negotiations are opened. A series of difference-in-difference estimations show a visible shift of violence towards areas rich in natural resources in the first three months after parties have initiated talks. Our findings are relevant for scholarship on understanding and predicting the trajectories of micro-level civil conflict violence, and for policymakers seeking to prevent peace processes being derailed

Activity analysis models as a tool for agricultural planning

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THE GROWING APPLICATION FIELD OF LASER DEBONDING: FROM ADVANCED PACKAGING TO FUTURE NANOELECTRONICS

Thin substrate handling has become one of the cornerstone technologies that enabled the development of 3D stacked ICs over the past years. Temporary wafer bonding has continuously improved and reached the maturity level required by volume manufacturing of first-generation devices. Yet the need remains for further development and performance increases. Indeed, the continuous push for denser interconnects has brought new requirements for a through-silicon-via technology on one side but also pushed temporary adhesive and carrier technology into the space of wafer reconstruction and fan-out WLP. On the opposite side of the semiconductor spectrum, at the early steps of the front-end-of-line processing, transistor scaling becomes more and more challenging, including demanding the integration of higher numbers of novel materials. To further increase the options of materials, a growing number of exploratory devices are considering using a layer transfer approach. The advances in temporary bonding and debonding technology is bringing the packaging and nanoscale world together.status: publishe

The european Union and Africa: Trade Liberlisation, Constructive Disengagement, and the Securitisation of Europe's External Frontiers

International audienc