INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES AND STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE: VIEW FROM WITHIN THE LAND-GRANT UNIVERSITY

Sustainable agricultural research and education have gained acceptability within the land-grant system in less than a decade, an impressive change. Attitudes were changed by a set of forces which include lobbying by sustainable agriculture advocates, requests from farmers as a result of the cost-price squeeze of the early 1980's, changing demands for both environmental quality and less pesticide residues from food consumers, and the availability of new funding sources. Despite its hard-won acceptability, there are tensions with respect to sustainable agriculture within the land-grant system. Sustainable agricultural issues are not yet integrated into the fabric of the land-grant institution. In order to integrate it fully, challenges remain in three key areas: knowledge generation, research and education, and funding. The challenge to generate new knowledge embraces not only biological and ecological systems, but also the socioeconomic systems of the humans who manage agriculture. We must move beyond anecdotal evidence of biological integration efficiencies to scientific understanding of the underlying processes and opportunities for human intervention. The biological research agenda covers a plethora of plant-animal-environment interactions from the microbial level on upward. Socioeconomic research must grapple with human motivations to change farming methods, as well as the likely impacts of change on farmers, consumers, other species, and the quality of the environment in which we live. One important area for such knowledge-generation is the relative merits of government policy tools, which have been and will continue to be central to environmental quality assurance. Attempts to generate new sustainable agriculture knowledge have already begun to raise new challenges for the integration of research and education. Research trials conducted off the research station pose new quandaries for scientific analysis and validation. Having farmers set the research and outreach agenda can be threatening to land-grant personnel as the old distinction between research and extension begins to dissolve. This situation is complicated by the budgetary stress on land-grant institutions and uncertainty about the dividing line between public and private responsibilities in a rapidly changing agricultural business environment. Funding is the third area where more integration into the land-grant university is needed. Earmarked funding for sustainable agriculture has helped to legitimize it in the land-grant university. But earmarked funding is a two-edged sword. If sustainable agriculture fails to become integrated into the routine land-grant agenda for research and education, it will lose its newly gained momentum if those funds disappear. It needs to gain full acceptance as legitimate science that will allow its researchers to compete for "mainline" funding sources such as the USDA National Research Initiative grants. Sustainable agriculture has made strong gains within the land-grant university system. But it can easily slip from the land-grant agenda or become co-opted if sustainable agriculture research and education are not integrated further into the system while retaining a clear focus on its original goals.Environmental Economics and Policy,

A RISK PROGRAMMING APPROACH TO DESIGNING CONTRACTS TO REDUCE NITRATE LEACHING

As contractual agriculture expands, contract design offers a non-regulatory opportunity to reduce non-point source pollution. A risk programming analysis of seed corn contract designs illustrates a tractable empirical principal-agent model, and shows that grower risk preferences affect contract acceptability and efficiency at reducing nitrate leaching.Environmental Economics and Policy, Risk and Uncertainty,

FQPA IMPLEMENTATION TO REDUCE PESTICIDE RESIDUE RISKS: PART II: IMPLEMENTATION ALTERNATIVES AND STRATEGIES

Implementation of the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) is fraught with difficulty due to the divergent perspectives and demands of stakeholders in the process. In "Part I: Agricultural Producer Concerns," the authors reviewed the concerns of food producers about potential FQPA threats to farm profitability, international competitiveness, consumer perceptions, and the development of pest resistance to remaining pesticides. Fortunately, lessons from past environmental policy and economic theory offer useful principles for how to implement the FQPA. This paper, "Part II: Implementation Alternatives and Strategies" addresses ways to accommodate producer concerns while meeting the policy mandate of reducing risk from pesticide exposure, especially for infants and children. In so doing, the authors are neither advocating nor criticizing this FQPA policy mandate; rather, they are providing policy analysis of alternative implementation strategies.Crop Production/Industries, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

FQPA IMPLEMENTATION TO REDUCE PESTICIDE RESIDUE RISKS: PART I: AGRICULTURAL PRODUCER CONCERNS

The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 (FQPA) transforms the regulation of pesticide residues on food in the United States. Three changes are prominent. First, under the FQPA, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is authorized to develop uniform pesticide residue tolerances for both fresh and processed foods. These tolerances must be based on a conservative standard appropriate for infants and children, rather than the adult-based tolerances that prevailed previously for fresh-market produce. Second, under the FQPA, pesticide registration will be based upon aggregate risk to the most susceptible consumers from all pesticides sharing a common biochemical mode of action in humans. Third, the FQPA expands the scope of health effects included in risk assessment decisions to include potential endocrine and reproductive effects of pesticidal chemicals. As the EPA has moved to develop implementation guidelines for the FQPA, agricultural producers and input suppliers have become concerned about its impact on them. Even if the FQPA's implementation results only in a restriction of the pesticides used on some crops, producers still have four major concerns: (1) the potential loss of farm profitability, especially for farms specializing in fruit and vegetable production; (2) unfair competition if foreign competitors can use pesticides forbidden to domestic producers; (3) the impact of the FQPA on consumer purchases, (i.e., if reduced pesticide use results in more blemishes or lower quality product, will consumers refuse to purchase the product?); and (4) excessive reliance on a few remaining pest control weapons, possibly resulting in accelerated pest resistance. Because these uncertainties potentially impact producers' livelihoods, many argue for a go-slow, long transition for any major changes in the way they farm or the pest control products they use. Competing with these agricultural concerns, however, are a parallel set of concerns, expressed by consumer and environmental groups, that the FQPA's promise to protect infants and children from pesticide risks will be sabotaged by lax or ineffective implementation. There are many uncertainties with respect to the impacts related to alternative FQPA implementation strategies. Research to resolve these concerns is fragmentary and frequently inconclusive. The common element that emerges from this review of producer concerns is: Impacts on producers will depend on how the FQPA is implemented.Crop Production/Industries, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION CONTRACTS TO REDUCE NITRATE LEACHING: A WHOLE-FARM ANALYSIS

Ten alternative seed corn contract specifications are evaluated with respect to nitrate leaching and profitability for the processor firm (principal) and contracted grower (agent). A whole-farm optimization and feasibility analysis suggest that contract terms can be used to reduce non-point source pollution.Crop Production/Industries,

JmjC histone demethylases act as chromatin oxygen sensors

© 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Oxygen sensing is important in physiology but also in disease. We find that hypoxia (oxygen deficiency) triggers rapid and hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF)-independent histone methylation changes which are reversible upon reoxygenation. Hypoxia-induced histone methylation genomic distribution precedes transcriptional changes and is mimicked by specific Jumonji-C (JmjC) histone demethylase depletion. Oxygen sensing by JmjC histone demethylases is required for the cellular response to hypoxia

Harnessing Wicked Problems in Multi-stakeholder Partnerships

Despite the burgeoning literature on the governance and impact of cross-sector partnerships in the past two decades, the debate on how and when these collaborative arrangements address globally relevant problems and contribute to systemic change remains open. Building upon the notion of wicked problems and the literature on governing such wicked problems, this paper defines harnessing problems in multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) as the approach of taking into account the nature of the problem and of organizing governance processes accordingly. The paper develops an innovative analytical framework that conceptualizes MSPs in terms of three governance processes (deliberation, decision-making and enforce-ment) harnessing three key dimensions of wicked problems (knowledge uncertainty, value conflict and dynamic complexity). The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil provides an illustrative case study on how this analytical framework describes and explains organizational change in partnerships from a problem-based perspective. The framework can be used to better understand and predict the complex relationships between MSP governance processes, systemic change and societal problems, but also as a guiding tool in (re-)organizing governance processes to continuously re-assess the problems over time and address them accordingly

Asia’s Wicked Environmental Problems

The developing economies of Asia are confronted by serious environmental problems that threaten to undermine future growth, food security, and regional stability. This study considers four major environmental challenges that policymakers across developing Asia will need to address towards 2030: water management, air pollution, deforestation and land degradation, and climate change. We argue that these challenges, each unique in their own way, all exhibit the characteristics of "wicked problem". As developed in the planning literature, and now applied much more broadly, wicked problems are dynamic, complex, encompass many issues and stakeholders, and evade straightforward, lasting solutions. Detailed case studies are presented to illustrate the complexity and significance of Asia's environmental challenges, and also their nature as wicked problems. The most important implication of this finding is that there will be no easy or universal solutions to environmental problems across Asia. This is a caution against over-optimism and blueprint or formulaic solutions. It is not, however, a counsel for despair. We suggest seven general principles which may be useful across the board. These are: a focus on co-benefits; an emphasis on stakeholder participation; a commitment to scientific research; an emphasis on long-term planning; pricing reform; tackling corruption, in addition to generally bolstering institutional capacity with regard to environmental regulation; and a strengthening of regional approaches and international support