Latin American Agricultural Trade: The Role of the WTO in Sustainable Virtual Water Flows

International agricultural trade has been growing significantly during the last decade. Many countries rely on imports to ensure adequate food supplies to the people. A few are becoming food baskets of the world. This process raises issues about the food security in depending countries and potentially unsustainable land and water use in exporting countries. In this paper, we analyse the impacts of amplified farm trade on natural resources, especially water. Farm exports and imports of five Latin America countries (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru and Chile) are examined carefully. A preliminary analysis indicates that virtual water imports can save valuable water resources in water-short countries, such as Mexico and Chile. Major exporting countries, including Brazil and Argentina, have become big exporters due to abundant natural resource endowments. The opportunity costs of agricultural production in those countries are identified as being low, because of the predominant green water use. It is concluded that virtual water trade can be a powerful tool to alleviate water stress in semi-arid countries. However, for exporting nations a sustainable water use can only be guaranteed if environmental production costs are fully reflected in the commodity prices. There is no basis for erecting environmental trade tariffs on exporters though. Setting up legal foundations for them in full compliance with WTOs processes would be a daunting task.farm trade, water, blue water, green water, global sustainability, food production, global food demand, water pricing, WTO, International Relations/Trade, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Perspectives on institutional change - water management in Europe

CONTENTS: Mapping institutional change... 3, Insa Theesfeld, Frauke Pirscher; Affordability as an institutional obstacle to water-related price reforms... 9, Erik Gawel, Wolfgang Bretschneider; Analysing the shortcomings of the Ukrainian urban waste water sector - Institutional options for modernisation ... 35, Herwig Unnerstall, Nina Hagemann; Gemeinschaftsgüter und Gemeinwohl - Theoretischer Erkenntnisgehalt und praktische Relevanz für die Regionalentwicklung am Beispiel von Wasserinfrastrukturen und Kulturlandschaften ... 55, Andreas Röhring, Timothy Moss, Ludger Gailing, Rita Gudermann; Explaining top-down institutional design: The introduction of River Basin Management in Portugal... 85, Andreas Thiel, Catrin Egerton; Decentralization failures in post-socialist fishery management ... 107, Insa Theesfeld, Oscar Schmidt --

Implementation of an optimal strategy for algorithmic debugging

[EN] One of the most automatic debugging techniques is Algorithmic Debugging because it allows us to debug a program without the need to inspect the source code. In order to find a bug, an algorithmic debugger asks questions to the programmer about the correctness of subcomputations in an execution. Reducing the number and complexity of these questions is an old objective in this field. Recently, an strategy for algorithmic debuggers that minimizes the number of questions has been released. This new strategy is called Optimal Divide and Query and, provided that all questions can be answered, it finds any bug in the source code with a minimum set of questions. In this work we discuss the implementation of such a strategy in different algorithmic debugging architectures. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Secretar´ıa de Estado de Investigaci´on) under grant TIN2008-06622-C03-02 and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEO/2011/052Insa Cabrera, D.; Silva Galiana, JF. (2012). Implementation of an optimal strategy for algorithmic debugging. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science. 282:47-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.entcs.2011.12.005S476028

Understanding why, knowing why, and cognitive achievements

Duncan Pritchard argues that a feature that sets understanding-why apart from knowledge-why is that whereas (I) understanding-why is a kind of cognitive achievement in a strong sense, (II) knowledge-why is not such a kind. I argue that (I) is false and that (II) is true. (I) is false because understanding-why featuring rudimentary explanations and understanding-why concerning very simple causal connections is not a cognitive achievement in a strong sense. Knowledge-why is not a kind of cognitive achievement in a strong sense for the same reason knowledge-that is not. The latter thesis requires showing that having (p because q) information is not equivalent to having information about facts or principles that establish the explanatory connections between the phenomena in question. I make a positive case for this claim and defend it against objections. Based on this argument, I identify an alternative feature that sets understanding-why apart from knowledge-why: The minimal condition for understanding-why and knowledge-why with respect to their content, respectively, is not identical. Knowing why p merely requires information that some explanatorily relevant dependency obtains. Understanding why p additionally requires information about facts or principles that establish the explanatory connections between the phenomena in question

Moving beyond punitivism: punishment, state failure and democracy at the margins

Recent commentary on the punitive turn has focused on the repressive nature of criminal justice policy. Yet, on a marginalised council estate (social housing project) in England, residents appropriate the state in ways that do not always align with the law. What is more, where the state fails to provide residents with the protection they need, residents mobilise informal violence that is condemned by the state. An ethnographic analysis of personalised uses of criminal justice questions the state-centric assumptions of order that have informed recent narratives of the punitive turn. It also calls for a reassessment of the relationship between democratic politics and criminal justice by drawing attention to popular demands that are not captured by a focus on punishment alone

The labour of care: why we need an alternative political economy of social care

Caring is often taken for granted as an activity. But what happens when a social emotion is monetised? Insa Koch explains what the consequences are for those dispensing and those in receipt of care at a time of austerity politics, and in a legal system where female carers have never had the same rights and protections as their male counterparts

Irrigation and Water Regulation Systems in Transition: The Case of Bulgaria in Comparison with Latvia, East Germany and Romania

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,