Organic agriculture and rural livelihoods in Karnataka, India

The research explored the effects a change from conventional to organic farming had on the livelihoods of a group of farmers in Karnataka, South India. It involved semi-structured interviews with organic farmers, NGOs, consumers, marketing organisations, and the State Agricultural Department. The farmers in the case study perceived that they had improved their livelihoods over the long term by the conversion from conventional to organic farming. Reduced costs for external inputs and reduced labour requirements together with similar or higher yields and premium prices resulted in higher net-farm incomes. The conversion to organic farming reduced the reliance on credits and the risk of crop failure due to pests, diseases and droughts, thereby reducing vulnerability. In addition, the farmers mentioned enhanced natural assets, reduced risk of pesticide poisonings, improved food safety, higher levels of self-sufficiency, and the access to networks supporting knowledge exchange and political participation as important benefits of the conversion. However, almost all the case study farmers noted that the conversion period was difficult due to temporarily declining yields and a lack of information and experiences. This is likely to be a major constraint preventing asset-poor farmers from adopting organic agriculture

Special Interest Groups and the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement

In the political economy model of Grossman and Helpman (1995), two incumbent governments attempt to negotiate a free trade agreement (FTA), while special interest groups in each country influence negotiations by offering financial contributions to their governments. As a consequence, a set of politically sensitive industries is excluded from the proposed FTA. Using the empirical methodology of Gawande, Sanguinetti, and Bohara (2001), this paper shows that the Grossman-Helpman (1995) model successfully predicts the set of excluded industries for the recently implemented Australia-United States FTA. It is also shown that the set of exclusions favours Australian interest groups, which could indicate that the gains from the FTA are lower for the government of Australia than for the government of the United States.

Polarization-resolved extinction and scattering cross-section of individual gold nanoparticles measured by wide-field microscopy on a large ensemble

We report a simple, rapid, and quantitative wide-field technique to measure the optical extinction $\sigma_{\rm ext}$ and scattering $\sigma_{\rm sca}$ cross-section of single nanoparticles using wide-field microscopy enabling simultaneous acquisition of hundreds of nanoparticles for statistical analysis. As a proof of principle, we measured nominally spherical gold nanoparticles of 40\,nm and 100\,nm diameter and found mean values and standard deviations of $\sigma_{\rm ext}$ and $\sigma_{\rm sca}$ consistent with previous literature. Switching from unpolarized to linearly polarized excitation, we measured $\sigma_{\rm ext}$ as a function of the polarization direction, and used it to characterize the asphericity of the nanoparticles. The method can be implemented cost-effectively on any conventional wide-field microscope and is applicable to any nanoparticles

Moving Five-Branes in Low-Energy Heterotic M-Theory

We construct cosmological solutions of four-dimensional effective heterotic M-theory with a moving five-brane and evolving dilaton and T modulus. It is shown that the five-brane generates a transition between two asymptotic rolling-radii solutions. Moreover, the five-brane motion always drives the solutions towards strong coupling asymptotically. We present an explicit example of a negative-time branch solution which ends in a brane collision accompanied by a small-instanton transition. The five-dimensional origin of some of our solutions is also discussed.Comment: 16 pages, Latex, 3 eps figure