The Effects of Altitude on the Profitability, Productivity, and Technical Efficiency of Cacao Farms in Calinan and Marilog Districts, Davao City, Philippines

Altitude is one of many components that accounts for climatic variability, which affects the level of inputs and outputs of farmers. This study compared the profitability and technical efficiency of cacao farms situated in areas classified as low, medium, and high altitude in Calinan and Marilog Districts, Davao City, Philippines. Costs and returns were calculated across wet, dried, and mixed cacao bean classification following the Philippine Statistics Authority template. The results suggest that dried cacao bean production in low, medium, and high altitudes have positive but smaller net returns relative to wet cacao bean production in low and medium altitudes and mixed cacao bean production in medium altitude. Dried cacao beans from these areas were marginally less profitable compared to wet beans primarily due to low quality of dried beans as a result of limited drying facilities. The stochastic production function was also used to determine technical efficiency performance. Cost of chemical inputs is a positive and significant factor of production. Farms with high altitude were less technically efficient compared to farms with low and medium altitudes. Higher altitude entails lower temperature and humidity, and cacao farming can be more challenging under this condition. Also, input purchasing behavior of farmers is also affected as the cost of transport becomes expensive. Access to extension, modern technology, and postharvest facilities is also limited in high altitude regions. However, there is an opportunity for farmers in high altitudes to improve their profitability by focusing on producing quality products and accessing specialty market

Underreporting of Tuna Catch: Implications to Technical Efficiency of Handline Fishing Vessels in General Santos City, Philippines

With the increasing demand for tuna product and the dwindling resources, promoting sustainable measures is a must. Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing is a damaging problem because it affects fisheries stocks. We identified the level of IUU fishing, particularly the underreporting of tuna catch, in the Philippines, and also the drivers and implications to the technical efficiency (TE) performance of fishing vessels. Samples were from General Santos City. Two data sets were gathered: an annual panel data of reported inputs and catch level of 216 registered fishing vessels at the Fish Port Authority and primary data involving 40 handline fishers. The latter data were compared to the former data set. It revealed underreporting by 51%−100% and is more prevalent in smaller vessels. Using stochastic frontier analysis, the TE scores of the tuna vessels were overestimated to 0.80, 0.70, and 0.72 using the panel data while the primary data set suggested a lower TE score of 0.66. This implies that the efficiency performance of the handline fishers could be lower by 6% if reporting were correct. We recommend increasing penalties for IUU fishing, increasing frequency of monitoring activities, and promoting an enabling environment for small-scale fishers

Credit Access and Technical Efficiency of Cavendish Banana Growers in Santo Tomas, Davao del Norte, Southern Philippines

Cavendish banana substantially boosts the economy of the Philippines, which is one of the leading suppliers worldwide. However, production problems and constraints, such as the spread of diseases and challenging cost of production due to expensive inputs, hinder farmers to generate higher incomes. As such, access to credit becomes an important tool to afford better inputs, invest in equipment, and eventually improve production. Therefore, credit access could potentially increase farm efficiency. Employing data envelopment analysis, along with Tobit regression, this study aims to investigate the effect of credit access on technical efficiency level. Using 187 production data from Cavendish banana farmers in Santo Tomas in Davao del Norte, findings showed that growers with access to credit attained higher technical efficiency. Furthermore, farmers who borrowed from formal financial institutions reaped higher technical efficiency compared to farmers who sourced from informal financiers. The study concludes that farmers in a developing country like the Philippines lack capital and need available and accessible credit sources to purchase adequate volume of inputs necessary to maximize technical efficiency. Additionally, borrowing from banks and/or cooperative could give better efficiency. These results could guide government and other industry actors in designing future agricultural credit programs to aid farmers

Factors Affecting the Logistical Costs of Cavendish Banana Farmers in the Philippines and Its Implications to Profitability

Currently back in the second spot of the world’s top exporters of Cavendish banana, the Philippines has been giving this industry much regard since its rapid growth has been a significant source of national income and employment for the agricultural sector. Vis-à-vis its potential to improve the welfare of farmers, the industry also received a lot of contention due to issues on equity of returns gained by actors along its value chain, which is presumably dominated by multinational companies. For the farmers to enhance competitiveness, there is a need to increase farmers’ welfare by increasing their take-home pay. This can be done by improving access to markets with better prices, lowering costs, and enabling farmers to achieve efficiency, among others. This research would posit to look at the logistics aspect of the value chain in order to explore how this affects the profitability. More importantly, understanding the factors that significantly affect the logistical costs would also help farmers to strategize by minimizing costs incurred and consequentially increasing the level of profitability. Employing linear regression, factors such as banana farming experience, membership to cooperatives, choosing an ex-patio marketing arrangement, and access to gravel-type roads were seen to significantly decrease the logistical costs. Therefore, it is critical for the farmers to do their marketing through a cooperative and/ or allow buyers to assume transportation cost to transfer risk of losses. The need to improve road and infrastructure conditions is also recognized as one way to potentially increase farmers’ welfare

Lower Bounds for QBFs of Bounded Treewidth

The problem of deciding the validity (QSAT) of quantified Boolean formulas (QBF) is a vivid research area in both theory and practice. In the field of parameterized algorithmics, the well-studied graph measure treewidth turned out to be a successful parameter. A well-known result by Chen in parameterized complexity is that QSAT when parameterized by the treewidth of the primal graph of the input formula together with the quantifier depth of the formula is fixed-parameter tractable. More precisely, the runtime of such an algorithm is polynomial in the formula size and exponential in the treewidth, where the exponential function in the treewidth is a tower, whose height is the quantifier depth. A natural question is whether one can significantly improve these results and decrease the tower while assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH). In the last years, there has been a growing interest in the quest of establishing lower bounds under ETH, showing mostly problem-specific lower bounds up to the third level of the polynomial hierarchy. Still, an important question is to settle this as general as possible and to cover the whole polynomial hierarchy. In this work, we show lower bounds based on the ETH for arbitrary QBFs parameterized by treewidth (and quantifier depth). More formally, we establish lower bounds for QSAT and treewidth, namely, that under ETH there cannot be an algorithm that solves QSAT of quantifier depth i in runtime significantly better than i-fold exponential in the treewidth and polynomial in the input size. In doing so, we provide a versatile reduction technique to compress treewidth that encodes the essence of dynamic programming on arbitrary tree decompositions. Further, we describe a general methodology for a more fine-grained analysis of problems parameterized by treewidth that are at higher levels of the polynomial hierarchy

Advancing the human right to housing in post-Katrina New Orleans: discursive opportunity structures in housing and community development

In post-Katrina New Orleans, housing and community development (HCD) advocates clashed over the future of public housing. This case study examines the evolution of and limits to a human right to housing frame introduced by one nongovernmental organization (NGO). Ferree’s concept of the discursive opportunity structure and Bourdieu’s social field ground this NGO’s failure to advance a radical economic human rights frame, given its choice of a political inside strategy that opened up for HCD NGOs after Hurricane Katrina. Strategic and ideological differences within the field limited the efficacy of this rights-based frame, which was seen as politically radical and risky compared with more resonant frames for seeking affordable housing resources and development opportunities. These divides flowed from the position of the movement-born HCD field within a neoliberal political economy, especially its current institutionalization in the finance and real estate sector, and its dependence on the state for funding and political legitimacy

‘Down with communism – Power to the people’: The legacies of 1989 and beyond

This special issue brings together reflections on the thirtieth anniversary of the revolutions of 1989 and considers their consequences for our understandings of European and global society. What seemed for some at least the surprising and rapid collapse of Eastern European state socialism prompted rethinking in social theory about the potential for emancipatory politics and new modes of social and political organization. At the same time, there was increased reflection on the nature of varieties of capitalism and the meaning of socialism beyond the failure of at least its etatist and autarkic mode. The five articles here and the editors’ introduction address themes such as utopian hopes, civil society, the transformation of Europe, the world beyond 1989, and new configurations of power and conflict

Liberalization, globalization and the dynamics of democracy in India

In the closing decades of the twentieth century there has been an almost complete intellectual triumph of the twin principles of marketization (understood here as referring to the liberalization of domestic markets and freer international mobility of goods, services, financial capital and perhaps, more arguably, labour) and democratization . A paradigm shift of this extent and magnitude would not have occurred in the absence of some broad consensus among policymakers and (sections of) intellectuals around the globe on the desirability of such a change. There seems to be a two-fold causal nexus between marketization and democracy. The first is more direct, stemming from the fact of both systems sharing certain values and attitudes in common. But there is also a second more indirect chain from marketization to democracy, which is predicated via three sub-chains (i) from marketization to growth, (ii) from growth to overall material development welfare and (iii) from material development to social welfare and democracy. We examine each of these sub-links in detail with a view to obtaining a greater understanding of the hypothesized role of free markets in promoting democracies. In the later part of the paper we examine the socio-economic outcomes governing the quality of democracy in a specifically Indian context

Neurosteroids and Self-Reported Pain in Veterans Who Served in the U.S. Military after September 11, 2001

Nearly half of Operation Enduring Freedom / Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF) veterans experience continued pain post-deployment. Several investigations report analgesic effects of allopregnanolone and other neurosteroids in animal models, but few data are currently available focusing on neurosteroids in clinical populations. Allopregnanolone positively modulates GABAA receptors and demonstrates pronounced analgesic and anxiolytic effects in rodents, yet studies examining the relationship between pain and allopregnanolone in humans are limited. We thus hypothesized that endogenous allopregnanolone and other neurosteroid levels may be negatively correlated with self-reported pain symptoms in humans