THE ROLE OF SCIENTIFIC AND BUSINESS INTEGRITY IN THE FUTURE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY: A SCENARIO ANALYSIS

The emergence of biotechnology in crop and livestock applications has been an issue of great controversy. Proponents argue that the potential benefits are dramatic while opponents have raised many concerns about the technology's risks. The Starlink debacle is a prime example of the undesirable outcomes which the debate has created. Given the controversy, what is the future of biotechnology for food uses? This paper is designed to address this question with a focus on the feasible range of alternative futures (scenarios) that could emerge. As a major variable in this analysis, the integrity of the scientific and business communities plays a critically important role. The paper begins with a description of three key uncertainties-food security, environmental/health impacts, and consumer reaction-that will define the future for biotechnology's use in food applications. Based on these uncertainties, four alternative future scenarios for biotechnology are presented. The role of messenger integrity is then introduced. The integrity of various possible messengers (scientists, businesses, government, and non-profits) is examined. The concept of integrity is then used to address a series of current biotechnology issues. Throughout the paper, comparisons and contrasts between the developed and developing world are made.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

ALTERNATIVE ITALIAN AGRICULTURAL COOPERATIVE SYSTEMS IN THE CHANGING EU FOOD SYSTEM

The European food system is undergoing significant change driven both by global competitive forces and local conditions. Market globalization and technological innovation are interacting with the reform of EU's agricultural policies (CAP) and a renewed interest by the European society in the social and environmental functions of agriculture. These factors have created a new and challenging economic environment both for farmers and the food industry across Europe (Tarditi, 1997).Agribusiness,

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF BIOTECHNOLOGY: A SCENARIO ANALYSIS

Over the years agricultural technology has created remarkable commodity production growth rates and enhanced general economic growth through food production, manufactured goods and trade for most nations. Biotechnology holds the promise of continuing this remarkable record. There is a long list of potential benefits of biotechnology but unfortunately the perceived costs/risks are also many. These concerns have lead to significant consumer reluctance to accept the technology and, in some cases, outright consumer rejection of the technology. To discuss the future of biotechnology, scenario analysis is used to examine the social and economic impact of biotechnology on industrialized and emerging nations. Four scenarios are discussed in detail: biotechnology may be formally or informally banned (Scenario 1), fully accepted (Scenario 2), marketed through strict labeling (Scenario 3), or limited to non-food applications (Scenario 4). Consumer acceptance of this technology will be key to determining which scenario becomes the future for each nation. The likelihood of each scenario is different for each nation, the U.S. will most likely evolve into scenario 2 or 3, while in the EU scenarios 1 or 4 are more likely. Determining the future for emerging nations is extremely complex and dependent on several factors like malnutrition rates, environmental safety and historical trading routes. Each scenario has a major impact on small producers worldwide which ultimately influences the health of rural communities. The analysis indicates that emerging nations are the most sensitive to the timing of decisions being made about the future of biotechnology. If biotechnology becomes a reality, new data will be required to assess the social and economic impact of this technology.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

MEMBERS' FINANCIAL EVALUATION AND COOPERATIVES' DECISION PROCESSES

The paper presents an analysis of cooperative investment decision based on the coalition theoretical framework (Staatz 1983, 1987, 1989). According to this framework, cooperatives can be considered as coalitions of groups with different interests. The behavior of any cooperative is determined by the interaction of its many groups (different types of farmers, managers, lenders, input suppliers, buyers, etc.) with different objectives. The group that can impose its will on the coalition will determine the cooperative's strategy. The other parties may accept this leadership, leave the cooperative or try to use their bargaining power to modify the final outcome. The paper discusses the impact of group bargaining on cooperatives' decision process. In particular, the paper addresses the issues related to the consequences of members' heterogeneity on cooperative efficiency. The proposed model utilizes tools from financial theory already successfully applied in the literature (Peterson 1992, Hendrikse 1998) providing a more detailed insight into the determinants of the cooperative decision process. The paper shows that cooperatives evaluate investments differently from IOFs due to the unique characteristics of their patrons compared to other types of investors.Agribusiness, Agricultural Finance,

EFFECTS OF MANAGERS' POWER ON CAPITAL STRUCTURE: A STUDY ON ITALIAN AGRICULTURAL COOPERATIVES

Agribusiness,

Understanding the Session Durability in Peer-to-Peer Storage System

This paper emphasizes that instead of long-term availability and reliability, the short-term session durability analysis will greatly impact the design of the real large-scale Peer-to-Peer storage system. In this paper, we use a Markov chain to model the session durability, and then derive the session durability probability distribution. Subsequently, we show the difference between our analysis and the traditional Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) analysis, from which we conclude that the misuse of MTTF analysis will greatly mislead our understanding of the session durability. We further show the impact of session durability analysis on the real system design. To our best knowledge, this is the first time ever to discuss the effects of session durability in large-scale Peer-to-Peer storage system.Computer Science, Theory & MethodsSCI(E)EICPCI-S(ISTP)

Flexible provisioning of Web service workflows

Web services promise to revolutionise the way computational resources and business processes are offered and invoked in open, distributed systems, such as the Internet. These services are described using machine-readable meta-data, which enables consumer applications to automatically discover and provision suitable services for their workflows at run-time. However, current approaches have typically assumed service descriptions are accurate and deterministic, and so have neglected to account for the fact that services in these open systems are inherently unreliable and uncertain. Specifically, network failures, software bugs and competition for services may regularly lead to execution delays or even service failures. To address this problem, the process of provisioning services needs to be performed in a more flexible manner than has so far been considered, in order to proactively deal with failures and to recover workflows that have partially failed. To this end, we devise and present a heuristic strategy that varies the provisioning of services according to their predicted performance. Using simulation, we then benchmark our algorithm and show that it leads to a 700% improvement in average utility, while successfully completing up to eight times as many workflows as approaches that do not consider service failures

Using redundancy to cope with failures in a delay tolerant network

We consider the problem of routing in a delay tolerant net-work (DTN) in the presence of path failures. Previous work on DTN routing has focused on using precisely known network dy-namics, which does not account for message losses due to link failures, buffer overruns, path selection errors, unscheduled de-lays, or other problems. We show how to split, replicate, and erasure code message fragments over multiple delivery paths to optimize the probability of successful message delivery. We provide a formulation of this problem and solve it for two cases: a 0/1 (Bernoulli) path delivery model where messages are ei-ther fully lost or delivered, and a Gaussian path delivery model where only a fraction of a message may be delivered. Ideas from the modern portfolio theory literature are borrowed to solve the underlying optimization problem. Our approach is directly relevant to solving similar problems that arise in replica place-ment in distributed file systems and virtual node placement in DHTs. In three different simulated DTN scenarios covering a wide range of applications, we show the effectiveness of our ap-proach in handling failures