Climate-smart aquaculture: Evidences and potentials for northern coastal area of Vietnam

Coastal aquaculture, particularly brackish water shrimp farming, plays an important role in the socio-economic development of most coastal communities on the North Central Coast (NCC) of Vietnam. However, coastal aquaculture in the region is among the activities most affected by increasing global climate change, which threatens sustainable development of the fisheries sector, as well as food security of the country. Within the action plan framework for adaptation and mitigation for climate change in the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), climate-smart aquaculture (CSA) trials have been conducted in Hoang Phong commune, Thanh Hoa province in 2015 by WorldFish, the Vietnam Institute of Economics and Planning (VIFEP) and Thanh Hoa Agriculture Extension Center (TEC). In the farm-level climate-smart aquaculture trials, tilapia was raised in rotation with tiger shrimp, mud-crab and seaweed in a traditional extensive aquaculture system. Initial results show that the aqua-smart practice under the CSA approach is a “triple win” for local aquaculture farmers through: (1) sustainably improving aquaculture productivity and farming efficiency of the current production system; (2) increasing adaptive capacity and resilience of coastal aquaculture to climate change; and (3) contributing to climate change mitigation. However, a number of constraints, such as lack of high-quality fish seed and feeds, low market uptake for tilapia and uncertainty from extreme climate events, should be considered in scaling out the aqua-smart practice throughout the region

Responsible shrimp farming in vietnam: call for promoting and strenthening community based management approaches

Shrimp farming has been developing fast in Vietnam recently and is facing a number of challenges. These include environmental and socio-economic impacts, volatile international markets and current anti-dumping issues. This paper provides and analytical overview of major problems faced by the industry in Vietnam based on a literature review and experience gained under the UNDP-funded project VIE/97/030 "Environmental management in coastal aquaculture". The dominant characteristic of shrimp farming is its small-scale nature, based mainly on individual households. Development of shrimp farming has occurred through unplanned expansion in terms of number of farms, households, farming area, and - more recently - farming intensification. Traditional practices met constraints in meeting product quality standards in domestic and foreign markets. Demonstration under the project revealed that community-based management is an important way to bring farmers together to adopt responsible farming practices, and improve standards for quality shrimp production. Factors contributing to success of the management approach include: (1) farming communities' willingness to cooperate and provide labour; (2) development of management plans reflecting the practical needs of and benefits for the community; (3) building the capacity of key members; (4) integrating community activities into the state management network. Shrimp farming is very important to Vietnam. For responsible development we recommend that the government should promote and strengthen community-based management approaches. A legal policy document for community-based shrimp farmer management should be developed in order to provide specific guidelines for and delegate rights to local authorities and farmers.Keywords: VIE/97/030 project, Aquaculture Economics and Management, Shrimp farming, Vietnam, Fisheries Economics, Community based management, Responsible developmentKeywords: VIE/97/030 project, Aquaculture Economics and Management, Shrimp farming, Vietnam, Fisheries Economics, Community based management, Responsible developmen

Ownership Characteristics of Heir Property in a Black Belt County: A Quantitative Approach

The existing literature identifies heir property, land held communally by heirs of someone who has died without a will, as a primary cause of land loss among African Americans and a major factor contributing to persistent poverty in the South’s demographically-defined Black Belt. Despite the importance of this form of property, little systematic research has been done to quantify the extent of heir property or the potential wealth tied up in clouded titles. This study documents the presence of more than 1,500 heir property parcels in one Alabama Black Belt county (Macon) and describes the methodological challenges involved in such research. Our analysis identified distinctive characteristics of and significant relationships between a set of key ownership variables (taxpayer location, size and value of land, structural improvements, and municipal incorporation). We argue the need to document the extent and consequences of heir property to spur action by legislators, Extension Systems across the region, and pro-bono attorneys, among others, to address the personal and economic costs associated with this form of insecure ownership

Integrating agroecological principles into rapid value chain analysis: An operational guideline

AE-I’s third work package (WP3 – “Inclusive business models and financing strategies”), constitutes one of AE-I’s two adaptive scaling strategies, i.e., along with WP4 – “Strengthening the policy- and institutional-enabling environment”. One of AE-I’s WP3 tasks is to identify the potential for co-developing/upgrading business models (and the value chains (VCs) they are part of) through the integration of HLPE’s agroecological principles. In order to do so, one has to first analyze the selected VCs and diagnose their current agroecological status, which constitute the main objectives of this Rapid Agroecological Value Chain Analysis (RAVCA) guideline

Endowments, expectations, and the value of food safety certification: experimental evidence from fish markets in Nigeria

We study the impact of endowments and expectations on reference point formation and measure the value of food safety certification in the context of fish trading on real markets in Nigeria. In our field experiment, consumers can trade a known food item for a novel food item that is superior in terms of food safety--or vice versa. Endowments matter for reference point formation, but we also document a reverse endowment effect for a subsample of respondents. The effect of expectations about future ownership is weak and mixed. While expectations seem to affect bidding behavior for subjects "trading up" to obtain the certified food product (a marginally significant effect), it does not affect bids for subjects "trading down" to give up this novel food item. Finally, willingness to pay for safety certified food is large for our respondents-our estimate of the premium is bounded between 37 and 53% of the price of conventional, uncertified food

A Disaggregated Analysis of Fish Demand in Myanmar

We estimate demand elasticities for fish in Myanmar by fish supply sources and household groups, using a multistage budgeting approach combined with quadratic almost ideal demand system (QUAIDS). Our findings show that fish demand from all supply sources and household groups has increased with income. A substantial share of increasing demand for all fish groups is likely to come from poor and rural households because the income elasticity of demand for all fish groups is higher for poor (0.40) and rural households (0.32) than for nonpoor (0.26) and urban households (0.29). Farmed-fish consumption is the most income-responsive in all household groups. Demand for fish tends to be less price elastic for poor households because fish is their cheapest animal protein source, and substitutes are limited. Effective management policies and new technologies are essential to sustain fish supply from capture fisheries and aquaculture to meet the increasing fish demand in Myanmar

Hogwild! over Distributed Local Data Sets with Linearly Increasing Mini-Batch Sizes

Hogwild! implements asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) where multiple threads in parallel access a common repository containing training data, perform SGD iterations and update shared state that represents a jointly learned (global) model. We consider big data analysis where training data is distributed among local data sets in a heterogeneous way -- and we wish to move SGD computations to local compute nodes where local data resides. The results of these local SGD computations are aggregated by a central "aggregator" which mimics Hogwild!. We show how local compute nodes can start choosing small mini-batch sizes which increase to larger ones in order to reduce communication cost (round interaction with the aggregator). We improve state-of-the-art literature and show $O(\sqrt{K}$) communication rounds for heterogeneous data for strongly convex problems, where $K$ is the total number of gradient computations across all local compute nodes. For our scheme, we prove a \textit{tight} and novel non-trivial convergence analysis for strongly convex problems for {\em heterogeneous} data which does not use the bounded gradient assumption as seen in many existing publications. The tightness is a consequence of our proofs for lower and upper bounds of the convergence rate, which show a constant factor difference. We show experimental results for plain convex and non-convex problems for biased (i.e., heterogeneous) and unbiased local data sets.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2007.09208 AISTATS 202

DẪN LIỆU BƯỚC ĐẦU VỀ TÍNH CHẤT ĐỊA LÝ ĐỘNG VẬT ỐC NƯỚC NGỌT NỘI ĐỊA TẠI THỪA THIÊN HUẾ

The survey and sampling were conducted in Thua Thien Hue Province from May 2018 to July 2020. Initial remarks are made on the zoogeography of inland freshwater snails in Thua Thien Hue. In which, species with Indian-Malaysian characteristics are dominant (8 species; 40%), followed by widespread species (6 species; 30%), species with Chinese characteristics are less diverse (4 species; 20%) and Vietnamese endemic species are the least diverse (2 species; 10%).Khảo sát và thu mẫu ốc nước ngọt nội địa tại Thừa Thiên Huế được tiến hành từ tháng 5/2018 - 7/2020. Kết quả đã đưa ra nhận xét bước đầu về địa lý động vật ốc ở nước ngọt nội địa tại Thừa Thiên Huế. Trong đó, yếu tố Ấn Độ - Mã Lai chiếm ưu thế (8 loài; chiếm 40%), kế tiếp là các loài phân bố rộng (6 loài; chiếm 30%), yếu tố Trung Hoa kém đa dạng (4 loài; chiếm 20%) và thấp nhất là thành phần đặc hữu cho Việt Nam (2 loài; chiếm 10%)