This paper describes Nepal’s national livestock policies and considers how they can be improved to help meet the pressing national challenges of economic development, equity, poverty alleviation, gender mainstreaming, inclusion of marginalized and underprivileged communities, and climate...

Health professionals play an important role in educating the public about food safety risks. However, the ways this important group of educators remains up-to-date on these topics are not well defined. In this study, a national sample of dietitians employed in direct teaching of patients (<i>n</i> =...

Paper presents diverse modes of governance of chemical and biological risks in agri-food sector, assesses their efficiency, complementarities, and challenges, and suggests recommendations for public policies improvement. It defines governance as system of social order responsible for particular...

Ensuring food security is an ongoing global challenge. Many forecasts point to a need to increase food production by at least 70% if we are to feed the world’s projected population of nine billion in 2050. Recent volatility in commodity prices and the general upward trend in the cost of food...

Since humans worldwide obtain more than 99.7% of their food (calories) from the land and less than 0.3% from the oceans and aquatic ecosystems, preserving cropland and maintaining soil fertility should be of the highest importance to human welfare. Soil erosion is one of the most serious threats...

Soil conservation is threatened by a number of factors, namely the effects of intensive agricultural practices, the increasing pressure for food production linked to the increasing human population, the consumption patterns in developed and emerging economies, and the conversion of agriculture...

This article is one of the first to carry out a non-parametric efficiency analysis of crop production in Uzbekistan. The study applies the bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute bias corrected technical efficiency (TE) scores using a sample of farms located in two regions of...

In terms of species richness, arthropods may represent as much as 85% of the soil fauna. They comprise a large proportion of the meso- and macrofauna of the soil. Within the litter/soil system, five groups are chiefly represented: Isopoda, Myriapoda, Insecta, Acari, and Collembola, the latter...

The benefits of biochar to soils for agricultural purposes are numerous. Biochar may be added to soils with the intention to improve the soil, displace an amount of conventional fossil fuel based fertilizers, and sequester carbon. However, the variable application rates, uncertain feedstock...

Chicken litter or chicken litter-based organic fertilizers are usually recycled into the soil to improve the structure and fertility of agricultural land. As an important source of nutrients for crop production, chicken litter may also contain a variety of human pathogens that can threaten...