Assessing Investment in Precision Farming for Reducing Pesticide Use in French Viticulture

The paper develops a mathematical programming model for assessing the impact of Environmental Policy instruments on French winegrowing farm’s adoption of pesticides-saving technologies. We model choices with regards to investment in precision farming and plant protection practices, in a multi-periodic framework with sequential decision, integrating uncertainty on fungal disease pressure and imperfect information on equipment performance. We focus on recursive models maximizing a Utility function. These models are applied on a representative sample of 534 winegrowers from the French Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN). As expected, both ecotaxes and green subsidies make precision farming equipment more profitable, but the investment rate remains however low and concentrated on basic systems. One explanation is grower’s financial constraint in a context of market crisis and farm indebtedness. Shortcomings and further development of the models are discussed.Discrete Stochastic Programming, Precision Farming, Viticulture, Pesticides, Environmental Policy, Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management,

'Might is Right': A study of the Cape Town/Crozets elephant seal oil trade (1832-1869)

This thesis is the study of Cape involvement in the elephant seal oil trade on the Prince Edward Islands and Crozet Islands between the years 1832-1869

Island bodies: registers of race and 'Englishness' on Tristan da Cunha c.1811 - c.1940

Tristan da Cunha, a small island in the South Atlantic, is perhaps best known today as the remotest inhabited island in the world. Historical scholarship relating to the island has either focused on its supposed insularity, or has completely elided it in the broader thematic and theoretical studies that often dominate scholarship of the Atlantic world. By placing Tristan da Cunha and metropolitan Britain together within the same analytic field and using an interdisciplinary approach, this work traces metropolitan representations of the island from c.1811-c.1940. Part One traces the ways in which Tristan da Cunha was drawn into the European geographic imagination as well as the economic networks and channels of global circulation during the era of mercantile capitalism. This process saw the island framed as a Romantic English rural idyll displaced into the South Atlantic, and resulted in a metonymic linkage being created between the island body and the bodies that inhabited it. The shift from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism and the rise of modernity in the metropole led to (re)negotiations regarding who formed part of the social body of the metropole and Part Two traces the impact of this shift on the island body(ies) of Tristan da Cunha. The (re)negotiation and (re)constitution of the island body(ies) as a result of new metropolitan optics and debates regarding race, degeneration, social belonging, and bourgeois norms resulted in the increasing nativisation and concurrent racialisation of the islanders in metropolitan representations. The island bodies became both coloniser and colonised, Briton and nativised other, Anglo-Saxon and racialised other. These discourses - the island as Romantic English rural idyll, or as isolated, degenerating and inhabited by nativised others - would coexist from the turn of the nineteenth century. They sometimes cut across one another, at other times they reinforced one another, only to diverge and then cut across one another once again. This work unpacks the polyphonic and often contradictory registers of race and Englishness in these metropolitan representations. At the same time it unsettles and attempts to reconstitute the dominant lenses through which the island has previously been analysed

Peut-on définir le baroque ?

Cette question est-elle tout à fait folle ? Il faut bien la poser cependant, si l’on veut éviter d’être victime d’un mot magique, c’est-à-dire perfide autant que stimulant. Question raisonnable aussi : le terme, on le constate dans ce colloque, est employé en des sens divers ; chacun semble avoir son « baroque ». Qu’il appelle un travail de réduction et de mise en place, c’est l’évidence. Mais n’y a-t-il pas avantage, jusqu’à un certain point, à œuvrer dans l’indéfini ? L’indéterminé peut ser..

Les eaux miroitantes

Mon sujet sera limité : un commentaire de poèmes. Il y a cinq ans, lors du premier Colloque de Montauban, j’avais posé au contraire la question la plus ambitieuse : « Peut-on définir le baroque ? » J’éprouve maintenant le besoin de laisser derrière moi, au moins temporairement, non pas le baroque, mais la discussion sur le baroque. Mon propos actuel est de réduire l’extension du champ pour serrer de près des phénomènes particuliers, analyser des œuvres, suivre des thèmes. Il est vrai que ces ..