Assisting Vietnamese Mango Farmers to Capture Greater Benefi ts through Improved Supply Chain Management

In the developing countries, traditional supply chains for fresh produce are giving way to new supermarket-led supply chains. The rapid transformation in the fruit and vegetable sector is due to the meteoric rise of supermarkets, hypermarkets, superstores, neighbourhood stores, convenience stores, and discount stores, which are impacting on smallholder farmers. This change is also impacting on both upstream and downstream market intermediaries through the demand for safe, high-quality produce that has been produced in a sustainable manner. Problems with procurement in traditional supply chains include few product standards, inconsistent supply, highly variable transaction costs, and limited market information. Supermarkets are now setting new procurement practices and supply systems which focus on reducing costs and improving quality to enable them to sell at lower prices. This will allow them to win over consumers and to obtain a larger market share. However, the ability of smallholder farmers, collector agents, and wholesalers in the Mekong Delta to meet safe food levels and the quality demands of domestic and overseas supermarkets can only be obtained through improving their production and supply chain practices. The implementation of new production and postharvest practices and the modernization of these supply chains may preclude many smallholder farmers from participating. Smallholder farmers must develop risk minimization strategies, such as forming collaborative marketing groups, implementing new crop management and production systems, improving the packaging, and creating more efficient transport methods and handling practices to provide a safe, competitively priced, high-quality product. Understanding the supply chain and where to intervene are essential if farmers and all supply chain participants are to benefit. In this paper, we describe mango supply chains in the Mekong Delta, provide empirical data collected from surveys, and highlight improvements smallholder farmers have been making to achieve greater benefits

Gendered self-views across 62 countries: a test of competing models

Social role theory posits that binary gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in less egalitarian countries, reflecting these countries’ more pronounced sex-based power divisions. Conversely, evolutionary and self-construal theorists suggest that gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflecting the greater autonomy support and flexible self-construction processes present in these countries. Using data from 62 countries (N = 28,640), we examine binary gender gaps in agentic and communal self-views as a function of country-level objective gender equality (the Global Gender Gap Index) and subjective distributions of social power (the Power Distance Index). Findings show that in more egalitarian countries, gender gaps in agency are smaller and gender gaps in communality are larger. These patterns are driven primarily by cross-country differences in men’s self-views and by the Power Distance Index (PDI) more robustly than the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI). We consider possible causes and implications of these findings

Magnetic and Mossbauer Studies of Perpendicular Magnetic Anisotropy in Nanocrystalline Gd-Fe Films

International audienc

Quality assessment of marketed eggs in Hanoi (Vietnam)

Poultry farming is the first sector of livestock that has been industrialized. The poultry sector plays an important role in the GDP of Vietnam. It is the second largest livestock after the pig livestock. The production and consumption of eggs in Vietnam is estimated as 5.64 billion and 102.6 eggs per person per year respectively. The aim of this study was to assess the quality of eggs in relation to the chicken breed and different marketing channels in Hanoi, Vietnam. In total, 431 chicken eggs were purchased from four different marketing channels in Hanoi, including households (89 eggs), supermarkets (152 eggs), public markets (130 eggs) and small grocery stores (50 eggs). Out of the 431 above-mentioned eggs, 119 eggs came from the commercial chicken breeds and 312 eggs from traditional local breeds. The quality of eggs for a consumer is represented by its cleanliness, nutritional quality, freshness, and price. A series of measurements is carried out just after their purchase. According to the breed and the marketing channel, highly significant differences (P 0.05) the freshness of the eggs, however, they have a significant effect (P <0.05) on the size of the eggs marketed in Hanoi. The results of this study show an important diversity in marketing channels and marketed eggs in Hanoi

Modeling in Relationship bbetween Crude Oil and Agricultural Commodity prices

textabstractThe food-energy nexus has attracted great attention from policymakers, practitioners and academia since the food price crisis during the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), and new policies that aim to increase ethanol production. This paper incorporates aggregate demand and alternative oil shocks to investigate the causal relationship between agricultural products and oil markets, which is a novel contribution. For the period January 2000 - July 2018, monthly spot prices of 15 commodities are examined, including Brent crude oil, biofuel-related agricultural commodities, and other agricultural commodities. The sample is divided into three sub-periods, namely: (i) January 2000 - July 2006; (ii) August 2006 - April 2013; and (iii) May 2013 - July 2018. The Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) model, impulse response functions, and variance decomposition technique are used to examine how the shocks to agricultural markets contribute to the variance of crude oil prices. The empirical findings from the paper indicate that not every oil shock contributes the same to agricultural price fluctuations, and similarly for the effects of aggregate demand shocks on the agricultural market. These results show that the crude oil market plays a major role in explaining fluctuations in the prices and associated volatility of agricultural commodities

Relationship between ?13C of chironomid remains and methane flux in Swedish lakes

1.?Methanogenic carbon can be incorporated by methane-oxidising bacteria, leading to a 13C-depleted stable carbon isotopic composition (?13C) of chironomids that feed on these microorganisms. This has been shown for the chironomid tribe Chironomini, but very little information is available about the ?13C of other abundant chironomid groups and the relationship between chironomid ?13C and methane production in lakes.2.?Methane flux was measured at the water surface of seven lakes in Sweden. Furthermore, fluxes from the sediments to the water column were measured in transects in two of the lakes. Methane fluxes were then compared with ?13C of chitinous chironomid remains isolated from the lake surface sediments. Several different chironomid groups were examined (Chironomini, Orthocladiinae, Tanypodinae and Tanytarsini).3.?Remains of Orthocladiinae in the seven study lakes had the highest ?13C values (?31.3 to ?27.0‰), most likely reflecting ?13C of algae and other plant-derived organic matter. Remains of Chironomini and Tanypodinae had lower ?13C values (?33.2 to ?27.6‰ and ?33.6 to ?28.0‰, respectively). A significant negative correlation was observed between methane fluxes at the lake surface and ?13C of Chironomini (r = ?0.90, P = 0.006). Methane release from the sediments was also negatively correlated with ?13C of Chironomini (r = ?0.67, P = 0.025) in the transect samples obtained from two of the lakes. The remains of other chironomid taxa were only weakly or not correlated with methane fluxes measured in our study lakes (P &gt; 0.05).4.?Selective incorporation of methane-derived carbon can explain the observed correlations between methane fluxes and ?13C values of Chironomini. Remains of this group might therefore have the potential to provide information about past changes in methane availability in lakes using sediment records. However, differences in productivity, algal ?13C composition and the importance of allochthonous organic matter input between the studied lakes may also have influenced Chironomini ?13C. More detailed studies with a higher number of analysed samples and detailed measurement of ?13C of different ecosystem components (e.g. methane, dissolved inorganic carbon) will be necessary to further resolve the relative contribution of different carbon sources to ?13C of chironomid remains

Low-field magnetoresistance of Fe/Cr multilayers

International audienc