Russia's unknown agriculture

Sample

Ezekiel Gebissa

"Khat is a psychoactive shrub, produced and marketed in the province of Harerge, Ethiopia, and widely consumed throughout North East Africa. It is now easily available in the large cities of the West." "In the late nineteenth century the main cash crop of Harerge was coffee. Today khat is the fastest-growing and the most profitable regional industry, involving millions of farmers, traders and other service providers. This study examines why farming families shifted from cultivating coffee and food crops to growing khat." "Demographic, market and political factors facilitated the emergence of khat as Harerge's leading agricultural commodity. This development increased the scale of unofficial cross-border trade in consumer goods." "The study also explores the consequences of the new cash crop for the regional economy as a whole, for farmer-state relations, for the nature and balance of local social relations, as well as for Harerge's physical, socioeconomic and political landscapes."--BOOK JACKET.

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Debarati Guha-Sapir, Indhira Santos

Since the turn of the millennium, more than one million people have been killed and 2.3 billion others have been directly affected by natural disasters around the world. In cases like the 2010 Haiti earthquake or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, these disasters have time and time again wrecked large populations and national infrastructures. While recognizing that improved rescue, evacuation, and disease control are crucial to reducing the effects of natural disasters, in the final analysis, poverty remains the main risk factor determining the long-term impact of natural hazards. Furthermore, natural disasters have themselves a tremendous impact on the poorest of the poor, who are often ill-prepared to deal with natural hazards and for whom a hurricane, an earthquake, or a drought can mean a permanent submersion in poverty. The Economic Impacts of Natural Disasters focuses on these concerns for poverty and vulnerability. Written by a collection of esteemed scholars in disaster management and sustainable development, the report provides an overview of the general trends in natural disasters and their effects by focusing on a critical analysis of different methodologies used to assess the economic impact of natural disasters. Economic Impacts presents six national case studies (Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Nicaragua, Japan and the Netherlands) and shows how household surveys and country-level macroeconomic data can analyze and quantify the economic impact of disasters. The researchers within Economic Impacts have created path-breaking work and have opened new avenues for thinking and debate to push forward the frontiers of knowledge on economics of natural disasters.

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Owen Worth, Phoebe Moore

The semi-periphery, in the form of a state or a production zone within the middle tiers of world production was traditionally regarded as a mediator between the advanced and the 'underdeveloped' parts of the world and was often marked by instability and as a potential revolutionary agent. Work and production continue to divide the rich and the poor, but the actual methods and possibility for the anti-systemic change of globalizing capitalism is revisited in this book. Contributors to this volume speak to one another across chapters to ask what exactly the relevance of the semi-periphery will be. Will it be a transformative entity or not, in the context of the emergence of 'globalization' and specific 'world orders' as forms of explanations within World Politics? This collection re-examines and re-assesses the role of the semi-periphery in world politics and argues that the processes of globalization have led us to widen our understanding of the semi-periphery, through a range of case studies as well as theoretical chapters.

Sample

Paul A. Strassmann

Strassmann reveals the hidden costs versus value of information technology, including how to realize the alignment of IT and business plans, how spending interacts with revenue, overhead costs, and personnel related to IT, and the idea of workload without payoff. One strategy is outsourcing and the perspective that the best companies do not outsource massive amounts of data manipulation, but rather study good reasons for outsourcing and manage it effectively without decaying their information assets.