Participatory commodity networking: An integrated framework for Fairtrade research and support

This article discusses the potential for humanizing production and trade relations by extending action research to multilateral commodity networks. Participatory action research and Fairtrade certification both promote social justice, but the first faces difficulties in terms of scalability, while the second experiences challenges in terms of producer support. As conventional research has failed to deliver methods for improving services, we worked with small-scale farmers in South Africa’s rooibos tea industry to meet this gap. Responding to producer concerns regarding market and certification access, we conducted a participatory research, training, and networking program to establish a farmer leadership network within the rooibos industry. Despite the challenges involved in advancing participation in an arena marked by complex power relations, our work helped stakeholders establish trust, improve knowledge, and begin addressing issues. By incorporating commodity network analysis into action research methodology, our model facilitates both community and organizational development, offering a multilateral framework for collaborative inquiry

Emerging rooibos farmer market access project

Global markets increasingly require rapid and coordinated response to standards and certification. Yet despite broad political transformations in post‐Apartheid South Africa, structural power relations limit emerging farmer capacity to effectively access certified markets such as fairtrade and organic. Within the Rooibos commodity network, inequitable functioning has prevented emerging farmers from fully developing critical market‐access skills and resources. While diverse groups have collaborated to achieve mutual interests, the cooperative building process has been marked by conflict. There is a need to involve producers in networks as this will help the industry to more effectively capture lucrative market opportunities. Successful community and emerging farmer network efforts are potential building blocks in which to inform further engagement. The South African Rooibos Council is working towards developing formal emerging farmer networking space as part of its Broad‐based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) portfolio. Diverse industry and organizational experts are increasingly invested in emerging communities and a core group has expressed interest in further collaboration. Commodity network efforts have been incrementally achieving goals, but more work needs to be done to ensure development sustainability and scalability

A Latin American Perspective to Agricultural Ethics

The mixture of political, social, cultural and economic environments in Latin America, together with the enormous diversity in climates, natural habitats and biological resources the continent offers, make the ethical assessment of agricultural policies extremely difficult. Yet the experience gained while addressing the contemporary challenges the region faces, such as rapid urbanization, loss of culinary and crop diversity, extreme inequality, disappearing farming styles, water and land grabs, malnutrition and the restoration of the rule of law and social peace, can be of great value to other regions in similar latitudes, development processes and social problems. This chapter will provide a brief overview of these challenges from the perspective of a continent that is exposed to the consequences of extreme inequality in multiple dimensions and conclude by arguing for the need to have a continuous South-South dialogue on the challenges of establishing socially and environmentally sustainable food systems

Marketing as a means to transformative social conflict resolution: lessons from transitioning war economies and the Colombian coffee marketing system

Social conflicts are ubiquitous to the human condition and occur throughout markets, marketing processes, and marketing systems.When unchecked or unmitigated, social conflict can have devastating consequences for consumers, marketers, and societies, especially when conflict escalates to war. In this article, the authors offer a systemic analysis of the Colombian war economy, with its conflicted shadow and coping markets, to show how a growing network of fair-trade coffee actors has played a key role in transitioning the country’s war economy into a peace economy. They particularly draw attention to the sources of conflict in this market and highlight four transition mechanisms — i.e., empowerment, communication, community building and regulation — through which marketers can contribute to peacemaking and thus produce mutually beneficial outcomes for consumers and society. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for marketing theory, practice, and public policy

Biomass offsets little or none of permafrost carbon release from soils, streams, and wildfire : an expert assessment

As the permafrost region warms, its large organic carbon pool will be increasingly vulnerable to decomposition, combustion, and hydrologic export. Models predict that some portion of this release will be offset by increased production of Arctic and boreal biomass; however, the lack of robust estimates of net carbon balance increases the risk of further overshooting international emissions targets. Precise empirical or model-based assessments of the critical factors driving carbon balance are unlikely in the near future, so to address this gap, we present estimates from 98 permafrost-region experts of the response of biomass, wildfire, and hydrologic carbon flux to climate change. Results suggest that contrary to model projections, total permafrost-region biomass could decrease due to water stress and disturbance, factors that are not adequately incorporated in current models. Assessments indicate that end-of-the-century organic carbon release from Arctic rivers and collapsing coastlines could increase by 75% while carbon loss via burning could increase four-fold. Experts identified water balance, shifts in vegetation community, and permafrost degradation as the key sources of uncertainty in predicting future system response. In combination with previous findings, results suggest the permafrost region will become a carbon source to the atmosphere by 2100 regardless of warming scenario but that 65%-85% of permafrost carbon release can still be avoided if human emissions are actively reduced.Peer reviewe

Review of Nora McKeon’s Food Security Governance: Empowering Communities, Regulating Corporations.

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Differential acquisition of English letter -sound correspondences in bilingual and monolingual primary students

Bilingual children learning to read and write in their second-language face the unique challenge of mapping letters onto sounds that do not exist in their native language. In early invented spelling young bilingual children can show us how they perceive the unique L2 sounds by their choice of letters as they represent sounds in words. There is a paucity of research on the spelling of bilingual children, especially with those children who do not receive native language instruction. This study compared the spelling of young Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual children. Non-Spanish phonemes and English phonemes differing from their Spanish counterparts in voice onset time were examined. The relationships between lower level auditory discrimination skills and invented spelling, and the relationship between English vocabulary acquisition and spelling were also studied. Twenty bilingual children completing kindergarten, all of whom began to acquire English at 4 years of age and received literacy instruction only in English, were matched for phonemic awareness and English letter-sound knowledge with twenty monolingual children also ending kindergarten and attending the same school. A nonword and an English real word auditory discrimination assessment as well as a spelling assessment were created to study how non-Spanish sounds were perceived and spelled. The PPVT-3 was also administered. Results showed no significant difference between the monolingual group and the bilingual group on the nonword test. However, the monolingual group made significantly fewer mistakes on the English real word auditory discrimination and spelling assessment than did the bilingual group. Bilingual children also chose different letters to represent non-Spanish sounds in their mistakes than did the monolingual children, extending the work of Fashola, Drum, Mayer, and Kang (1996). The amount of English vocabulary known by the students was also found to be correlated with correct spelling, supporting Metsala and Walley\u27s lexical restructuring model (1998). Taken together, these results support and extend Werker and Tees\u27 cascading model of phonological acquisition (2005) and suggest that the bilingual children who began to acquire their L2 as early as the age of four experienced L1 phonological interference as the tasks became more complex