Jeffery W. Bentley

Wouldn't you like to have all of your land in one place? land fragmentation in Northwest Portugal

This article addresses the land fragmentation debate, centering on the question of whether it is an ecological adaptation or an example of anachronistic, if not irrational and uneconomic, peasant behavior. Building on the ecological argument with case studies of inheritance and a quantitative analysis of farm production and land fragmentation in Portugal, two major assumptions about land fragmentation are refuted: (a) that it is extremely detrimental to farm production and (b) that its main cause is inheritance divisions.

13 World integrated pathogen and pest management and sustainable agriculture in the developing world

Publisher Summary Arthropod pests are controlled by chemicals, cultural practices, host-plant resistance and biological control. Eleven arthropods a year will probably be added to fauna of the United States about seven becoming pests. Developing countries consume only 25% of the worlds pesticides. Total volume of pesticide use is highest on maize, cotton, soybean, and wheat. These five crops use 56% of all insecticides, fungicides and herbicides, equivalent to approximately

Open-Economy Politics: The Political Economy of the World Coffee Trade

6100 million. This chapter discusses cultural control and agricultural sustainability. Cultural control is more than mechanical operations, such as tillage and burning. It involves many aspects of crop and soil management, including crop rotation, time of planting and harvesting, seed storage, fertilizer rates and cropping system diversification. Increasing demands for food can lead to new, unsustainable cultural practices. To combat pests successfully in a sustainable agriculture, it seems less risky to apply the old practices of ancient farmers. Cultural practices have one of the highest potentials for reducing yield loss because of plant diseases. They can be manipulated to minimize inoculum production, survival and dissemination, as well as infection of many pathogens and disease development, yet this area of disease control receives the least attention among the major control measures.

Pests, Peasants, and Publications: Anthropological and Entomological Views of an Integrated Pest Management Program for Small-scale Honduran Farmers

Open-Economy Politics: The Political Economy of the World Coffee Trade. Robert H. Bates. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.221 pp.