The impact of increased consumption of biofuels on agricultural markets has already been substantial, and will increase further as countries around the world seek to expand the proportion of their energy that they get from renewable sources. Models of the agricultural sector must therefore...

While water supply sources are dwindling in South Africa, the demand for the scarce water resource is increasing. This situation requires a switch from supply to demand management of water in the country. The study updates the 1999 social accounting matrix for South Africa, using the Trade and...

There is growing evidence that freshwater availability is declining, while competition among sectors for the withdrawal of this scarce resource is rapidly increasing,(Rosegrant et a, 2002). Therefore, the need to promote inter-sectoral water use efficiency from the demand-side management has...

To date within Europe, a regulatory approach has been favoured when trying to curtail emissions from agriculture, the Nitrates Directive being a recent example. Economic theory indicates that market based solutions such as tradable emissions permits are the least cost means of achieving desired...

The production of biofuels from agricultural commodities has received much attention in recent years. Apart from a few private initiatives, biofuels have not seen a large scale, commercial production in South Africa to date. This article sketches a basic picture of the economic feasibility of...

The potential impact of the current South African industrial biofuels strategy on the economic feasibility of biofuel production in South Africa is analysed and discussed. The analysis is then taken a step further by means of a scenario to analyse the potential impacts of higher global prices on...

Conservation auctions such as the Conservation Reserve Program in the United States and the BushTender Program in Australia have been used to identify landholders who can provide on-farm conservation and biodiversity protection actions at lowest cost. These conservation auctions are typically...

This paper analyses the economics of biodiversity conservation in the context of a tropical ecosystem in India, where coffee is the main competitor for land use.Using primary data covering a cross section of coffee growers,the study notes that the opportunity costs of biodiversity conservation...

In the face of growing management problems and conflicts over increasing demands and dwindling or increasingly variable supplies of surface and groundwater, the need for revising the conventional water resource allocation methods has been increasingly felt among natural resource managers and...

While water markets have been shown to be beneficial to users, the transfers made through sales can have serious third-party impacts, as has been addressed in the water resources literature. Potential asymmetries arising from the hydrological characteristics of the groundwater basin could...