Joseph J. Molnar

Sound Policies for Food Security: The Role of Culture and Social Organization

Culture conditions the ability to organize to provide food security, but social organization is the immediate source of policies that prevent food insecurity or determine what happens when it does occur. Weather, war, terrorism, conflict, overpopulation, environmental degradation, corruption, and faulty policies have been identified as causes of food insecurity. Perhaps most of the blame for food insecurity should go to faulty policies or poor implementation of sound policy. This article identifies reasons for both kinds of failure that are linked to culture and social organization. The central task of government is to allow the food system to manage its own affairs, but policies must be ready to guide action when market, crop, or policy failures create food insecurity among those with no other means of coping with adversity.

Limited Access to Conservation: Limited- Resource Farmer Participation in the Conservation Security Program in the Southeast

The paper examines the joint adoption of conservation tillage, crop rotations, and soil testing by small and limited-resource farmers in the Southeast. The objectives are to determine the potential eligibility of small farmers for the Conservation Security Program, examine socioeconomic factors affecting adoption, and assess the interdependence between adopting different conservation practices. Results indicate that conservation management, ethnicity, and farm characteristics affect practice adoption. Of the producers surveyed in the study, 7% meet Conservation Security Program eligibility requirements, while the other 93% have less than a 20% likelihood of adopting the needed practices to qualify.

Cluster membership as a competitive advantage in aquacultural development: Case study of tilapia producers in Olancho, Honduras

Abstract The performance of individual firms often is enhanced by membership in a group or cluster of other firms engaged in similar activities. This paper examines a cluster of Honduran fish farmers in terms of the patterns of relationships that allowed them to initiate and sustain successful tilapia businesses for an extended period of time. Although there are larger, individual production facilities elsewhere in Honduras, the circumstances of the cluster are unique. The cluster of tilapia farms has been in operation in Olancho, Honduras for over 15 years. Financial analysis describes production costs, prices, and profitability in the context of the cluster. The results elucidate the way relationships among coexisting firms provide a source of competitive advantage for the adoption and development of an aquacultural enterprise. Furthermore, the results provide insights into the organizational and contextual factors that facilitate commercial fish culture. As the Olancho model of aquacultural development becomes more widely known, it may be an important means of fostering tilapia culture in other locales. These Honduran producers have been able to sustain the enterprise due to advantages offered by the grower cluster beyond the efficient operation of the individual farms.

Citizen Participation in Rural Community Development: Community Group Perspectives:

to unite all significant community parties to decision-making. It seeks to organize people to express their own needs, to consider action alternatives, and then to take action with respect to them (Warren, 1975:145T. Thus citizen participation is an integral part of the community development process, but only relatively recently has it been explicitly recognized as a major subgoal in its own right. In the past fifteen years, concern for citizen participation has mushroomed. Until the mid1960’s, federal standards for public involvement in the administrative process required only that agencies provide public notice and opportunity for public comment. Responsibility for initiating involvement largely rested with the public and was limited to later stages of the decision-making process (Rosenbaum, 1976). The first major shift in the orientation of administrative agencies toward participation

PEOPLE LEFT BEHIND: TRANSITIONS OF THE RURAL POOR

Compared to their urban counterparts, the rural poor are more likely to be employed, more apt to be members of married-couple families, less likely to be children, less likely to be minority, and more likely to have assets but a negative income. This paper examines poverty rates and factors that affect mobility in and out of poverty among major categories of the rural poor. Particular attention is paid to farm workers and the rural farm population in the South. It endeavors to identify both structural conditions that perpetuate rural poverty and government interventions that ameliorate human suffering and break the cycle of poverty reproduction.

Technology transfer: Institutions, models, and impacts on agriculture and rural life in the developing world

Technology transfer is a multi-level process of communication involving a variety of senders and receivers of ideas and materials. As a response to market failure, or as an effort to accelerate market-driven social change, technology transfer may combine public and private aparatus or rely solely on public institutional mechanisms to identify, develop, and deliver innovations and information. Technology transfer institutions include universities, government ministries, research institutes, and what may be termed the ‘project sector’. Four farm- and village-level change models are considered: traditional community development, adoption-diffusion, training and Visit Extension, and Farming Systems Research. The challenges to technology transfer efforts center on developing indigenous capacity to generate and adapt agricultural technology to local conditions. This is the primary objective of technology transfer in agriculture and the basis for advancing rural development.