In the course of economic development there is a general downward trend of agricultural employment, although structural change in agriculture is often delayed. In the EU-15, agricultural employment decreased by -2.3% p.a. (measured in regular persons) and -3.0% p.a. (measured in annual working...

The encroachment of protected areas for agricultural and livestock production is an important challenge for nature conservation in developing countries. The driving forces of encroachment are debated - major arguments focus on (1) the need of local people to cultivate land inside protected areas...

Crop production in the tropics is subject to considerable climate variability caused by the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. In Southeast Asia, El Niño causes comparatively dry conditions leading to substantial declines of crop yields. In concert with global warming, the...

The debate about the "quasi" moratorium on the release of GMOs in the European Union is on going. One of the major arguments that were put forward to delay the release of new traits was the one for more information. In this contribution we compare the situation for Bt-maize from the 1995 and...

In this paper we empirically assess and compare the environmental impact of pesticide programs for Bt, Ht (glufosinate) and conventional corn in Europe, employing the Environmental Impact Quotient. We use field trial data from Narbons, France 2004 as well as secondary data. Our results show that...

This paper examines the empirical evidence of a theoretical economic model of the effect of labor organization on IPM adoption developed by Beckmann and Wes seler (2003). We use cross section data collected from the participatory farming system survey of 150 durian growers in Chanthaburi,...

The gum tree (Acacia senegal) in the Sahel-Sudan zone has many environmental benign functions. An important function is to control desertification. In this paper we analyze farmers' economic incentives to preserve the existing gum trees and their incentives to create new plantations using a real...

Land markets play a crucial role in agricultural structural change. Because the dynamics of structural change and land markets, respectively, mainly depend on the interactions between individual farms, agent-based modeling (ABM) has been established as a tool for understanding and explaining...