Distant agricultural landscapes

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0278-0This paper examines the relationship between the development of the dominant industrial food system and its associated global economic drivers and the environmental sustainability of agricultural landscapes. It makes the case that the growth of the global industrial food system has encouraged increasingly complex forms of “distance” that separate food both geographically and mentally from the landscapes on which it was produced. This separation between food and its originating landscape poses challenges for the ability of more localized agricultural sustainability initiatives to address some of the broader problems in the global food system. In particular, distance enables certain powerful actors to externalize ecological and social costs, which in turn makes it difficult to link specific global actors to particular biophysical and social impacts felt on local agricultural landscapes. Feedback mechanisms that normally would provide pressure for improved agricultural sustainability are weak because there is a lack of clarity regarding responsibility for outcomes. The paper provides a brief illustration of these dynamics with a closer look at increased financialization in the food system. It shows that new forms of distancing are encouraged by the growing significance of financial markets in global agrifood value chains. This dynamic has a substantial impact on food system outcomes and ultimately complicates efforts to scale up small-scale local agricultural models that are more sustainable.The Trudeau Foundation || Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Increased lipogenesis and resistance of lipoproteins to oxidative modification in two patients with glycogen storage disease type 1a

We describe 2 patients with glycogen storage disease type la and severe hyperlipidemia without premature atherosclerosis. Susceptibility of low-density lipoproteins to oxidation was decreased, possibly related to the similar to40-fold increase in palmitate synthesis altering lipoprotein saturated fatty acid contents. These endings are potentially relevant for antihyperlipidemic treatment in patients with glycogen storage disease type la

Public Policy (Studies)

Public policy is a specific branch of policy studies, having as its field of research a specific definition of the sociopolitical phenomenon intended as policy. To define public policy, it is necessary to start from the fact that labels like policy studies, policy sciences, policy analysis, policy inquiry, and public policy are often used synonymously. However, a definitional distinction would be very useful in understanding the relevance and role of interest groups. For now, it is enough to underline that public policy is a specific field of study pursued from a political science perspective but with multidisciplinary nuances. It focuses on facts/ events that are perceived to be social and political problems. It attempts to understand how the government and other relevant actors act and interact when addressing policy problems in terms of definition and decision. It analyzes how collectivized decisions and policy programs are implemented. It focuses on the different ways of assessing and evaluating outputs and outcomes. It focuses on what really happens in policymaking and tries to provide input for what should be done to improve performance and impact on society. Indeed, public policy is a multifaceted discipline, and to reduce it to its essence for the economy of this chapter, here it is held that public policy is committed to analyzing the processes dealing with collective problems, to understand who gets what, when, and how. This is a minimal definition that can be agreed upon by political scientists interested in understanding policies: they can be focused on how power is processed through policymaking as well as on how problems are framed as collective and consequentially solved