Rapid industrial development and urbanization transfer more and more land away from agricultural production, threatening China’s capability to feed itself. This paper analyzes the determinants of land use by modeling arable land and sown area separately. An inverse U-shaped relationship between land use intensity and industrialization is explored both theoretically and empirically. The findings...

Although tropical forests cover only 6% of Earth's arable surface, they account for nearly 50% of all known species (National Research Council, 1992). Despite this diversity, these systems are increasingly threatened, as exemplified by a recent Food and Agriculture Organization report (FAa, 1999) which indicates that tropical countries are losing 127,300 km2 of forest annually; this does not co...

Microalgae photobioreactor systems at the University of Dayton Research Institute’s (UDRI) Carbon Sequestration and Bio Fuel Laboratory are being used to investigate algae’s ability to capture CO2, clean wastewater, and produce algae biomass that can be used for carbon neutral biofuel generation. Algae cultivation is of interest because it does not require arable land or fresh water, and algae ...

In Indian economy sugarcane has great contribution to GDP. A large population of India depends on the agriculture sector for livelihood. At, the same time, due to expanding population , diminishing arable land and rising service industry, there is need to increase the production by utilizing the available agriculture resources. This paper represents a linear goal programming model for sugarcane...

Concerns about population growth historically revolved around the notion that there may be insufficient arable land, minerals or energy to meet the needs of an exponentially increasing population. Today they are compounded by fears that as wealth increases, so would consumption of natural resources, and that new technologies would enable further exploitation of these resources. Absent empirical...

Soil erosion is a major environmental threat to the sustainability and productive capacity of agriculture. During the last 40 years, nearly one-third of the world's arable land has been lost by erosion and continues to be lost at a rate of more than 10 million hectares per year. With the addition of a quarter of a million people each day, the world population's food demand is increasing at a ti...

The prudent peasant mitigated the risk of crop failures by scattering his arable land throughout his village, Deirdre McCloskey argued, because alternative risksharing institutions did not exist. But, alternatives did exist, this essay concludes. Medieval English peasants formed two types of farmers’ cooperatives. Fraternities protected members from the perils of everyday life. Customary poor l...