Land Markets and Agricultural Land Use Efficiency and Sustainability: Evidence from East Africa

Land markets, including land sales and short-term land rentals, have an important role to play for efficient and sustainable land management and agricultural development, especially where markets for other factors of production are imperfect or missing. This study utilises data from the highlands of Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda to examine the impact of land markets on various types of land investment and management practices, crop yield, and land quality. The results highlight the relative long-term versus short-term return to different types of investment and practices, where those with longer-term benefits such as trees, manuring, and composting are preferred on more tenure-secure plots, while those with immediate or season-to-season benefits such as drainage structures or chemical fertilizers are preferred on rented plots. The impact on agricultural productivity is mixed and context specific. Regarding land quality outcomes, there is reason to believe that plots traded on short-term markets in Kenya and Uganda tend to be of inferior quality, supporting the hypothesis of movement of land from households to those with higher capital/land ratios.land markets, land investment and management, land use efficiency, Land Economics/Use,

Heterogeneous treatment effects of integrated soil fertility management on crop productivity: Evidence from Nigeria

This study compares the impacts of integrated soil fertility management (ISFM) on crop production with use of either mineral fertilizer or organic manure alone. We also investigate the conditions under which .ISFM technology has greater beneficial effects on yields and the factors constraining its uptake. To answer these questions, the study uses a cross-sectional, plot-level data set collected in Nigeria by the International Food Policy Research Institute and the World Bank in 2009. Using both quasi experimental matching estimators and multivariate regression approaches, it finds that overall ISFM has robustly significant positive effects on crop production. The study also finds that ISFM positively affects crop production on plots with customary tenure, sandy soils, and clay soils—conditions that are normally perceived to be less favorable for crop production. The results also show ISFM to be more effective on plots with mild erosion or no erosion. On the constraints, we find that households with limited livestock, equipment, labor, and land are less likely to use ISFM technology, and the extension services currently do not seem to be disseminating ISFM. This evidence provides strong support for efforts to promote ISFM in Nigeria and in other regions with comparable conditions, but adequate attention must be paid to the biophysical conditions of the plots and the household's access to labor endowments, livestock, equipment, and tenure conditions if this technology is to be scaled up and more widely used in Sub-Saharan Africa.Crop production, Integrated soil fertility management, matching estimators,

Productivity Differences between Male and Female Managed Farms in the Eastern and Central Highlands of Kenya

This study was carried out in an agroforestry farming system in the central highlands of Kenya. The purpose of the study was to compare the productivity and technical efficiency of male and female managed farms. The study also sought to investigate the sources of differences in the Total Value Product and the technical efficiency of farms. Using a female dummy, the study found no evidence of differences in total value product between male and female managed farms. Male managed farms were however more technically efficient than female managed farms. The highest proportion of farms in the lowest bracket of efficiency levels was female managed farms. The total value product was found to be positively affected by age of the farmer, female labour and inputs while it was negatively affected by land size.Farm Management, Labor and Human Capital,

The impact of phosphorus inputs from small discharges on designated freshwater sites

Natural England, with a contribution from the Broads Authority, commissioned the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) in 2009 to conduct a review of the potential risk posed by small domestic discharges, such as from septic tanks, to freshwater SSSIs. The particular focus of this work was the risk of phosphorus (P) pollution to sites that are vulnerable to hyper-eutrophication

Base sequence dependent sliding of proteins on DNA

The possibility that the sliding motion of proteins on DNA is influenced by the base sequence through a base pair reading interaction, is considered. Referring to the case of the T7 RNA-polymerase, we show that the protein should follow a noise-influenced sequence-dependent motion which deviate from the standard random walk usually assumed. The general validity and the implications of the results are discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Is attending a mental process?

The nature of attention has been the topic of a lively research programme in psychology for over a century. But there is widespread agreement that none of the theories on offer manage to fully capture the nature of attention. Recently, philosophers have become interested in the debate again after a prolonged period of neglect. This paper contributes to the project of explaining the nature of attention. It starts off by critically examining Christopher Mole’s prominent “adverbial” account of attention, which traces the failure of extant psychological theories to their assumption that attending is a kind of process. It then defends an alternative, process-based view of the metaphysics of attention, on which attention is understood as an activity and not, as psychologists seem to implicitly assume, an accomplishment. The entrenched distinction between accomplishments and activities is shown to shed new light on the metaphysics of attention. It also provides a novel diagnosis of the empirical state of play