Vertical coordination in high-value commodities

"Rising per capita income, urbanization and globalization are changing the consumption basket in the developing countries towards high-value commodities (like fruits & vegetables, milk, meat, poultry, fish, etc.). This paper explores how smallholders can benefit from the emerging opportunities from a silent demand-driven changes in high-value agriculture in India. The study examines the institutional mechanisms adopted by different firms to integrate small producers of milk, broilers and vegetables in supply chain and their effects on producers' transaction costs and farm profitability. The study finds that the innovative institutional arrangements in the form of contract farming have considerably reduced transaction costs and improved market efficiency to benefit the smallholders. The study does not find any bias against smallholders in contract farming. Also, the study does not find that the relevant firms have exploited their monopsonistic position by paying lower prices to farmers. On the contrary, contract producers were found enjoying benefits of assured procurement of their produce and higher prices. The study lists policy hurdles in scaling up the innovative models of vertical coordination in high-value food commodities" Authors' AbstractHigh value commodities ,Urbanization ,High value agriculture ,Scaling up ,

Strengthening Pluralistic Agricultural Information Delivery Systems in India

The study on agricultural information flow has revealed that only 40 per cent farm households access information from one or the other source. The popular information sources among farmers have been reported to be fellow progressive farmers and input dealers, followed by mass media. The public extension system has been found to be accessed by only 5.7 per cent households. Only 4.8 per cent of the small farmers have access to public extension workers as compared to 12.4 per cent of large farmers. The sector-wise study on the type of information, sought has revealed that a majority of the farmers have sought information on seed (32-55%) in the cultivation sector; on health care (26-54 %) in animal husbandry; and on management and marketing (8-46 %) in fisheries. Regarding adoption of information by farmers, input dealers and other progressive farmers have depicted greater influence mainly due to easy and convenient access to these sources. The study has suggested promotion of farmers-led extension and strengthening of public extension services to improve coverage and efficiency of agricultural information delivery systems.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Does Comparative Theology have an Advantage over Religious Studies?

In this essay, I assess the prospects for Comparative Theology as some scholars proffered towards building a general theory of religion. I first acknowledge the relationship between the two disciplines; second, I examine the relationship between faith and religion which I believe is crucial to enter the discussion on Comparative Theology and Religious Studies; third I come to the crux of the matter by assessing the influence of theology on the study of religion; fourth, having problematized the method of Comparative Theology, I underscore the limits of theological method for comparative analysis in the study of religion. This above outline is consciously intended to take the general reader as well as specialists toward my conclusion, which is to suggest that Comparative Theology can only serve an internal theological purpose of one religious tradition but not for the purpose of a general theory of religion

Some dterminants in the Planning of Library and Documentation Services in an Industrial Enterprise

Some of the determinants involved in the planning of library and documentation services in an industrial enterprise are discussed. The services planned and provided by the Hindustan Machine Tools Ltd, Hyderabad, on the basis of the determinantsis given as a case study

LETTER TO EDITOR: Role of Oxygen-Ozone (O2-O3) Injection in Discogenic Pain

Medical ozone is a mixture of oxygen-ozone (O2-O3) which can be used for several medical applications. Ozone chemonucleolysis by injecting mixture of oxygen-ozone is a minimally invasive technique to treat discogenic pain. Considering invasiveness and possible morbidity with surgery for discogenic pain, minimal invasive techniques are preferred. Ozone chemonucleolysis is currently available such technique which has shown promising result in recent years. It involves injection of ozone gas into the intervertebral disc under fluoroscopic guidance. This article deals with mechanism of action, indications, procedure and side effects of this technique in detail

Dielectric Behaviour of Binary Mixtures of Toluene with Chlorobenzene, n-Hexanol & Benzyl Alcohol

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Modelling temporal and spatial features of collaboration network

The collaboration network is an example of a social network which has both non-trivial temporal and spatial dependence. Based on the observations of collaborations in Physical Review Letters, a model of collaboration network is proposed which correctly reproduces the time evolution of the link length distributions, clustering coefficients, degree distributions and assortative property of real data to a large extent.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures; follow up work on arXiv.org/physics/0511181; accepted for publication in IJMP