Conservation of tropical biodiversity in agricultural landscapes has become more important as the area covered by natural ecosystems decreases. We analyzed the effects of local livelihoods, cooperative types, and selected biophysical variables (elevation, slope, percent shade, distance to the forest, coffee density, and coffee age) on tree biodiversity in shade coffee cooperatives of El Salvado...

Although organic farming is considered the poster child of rural development in Europe, there is little empirical evidence assessing its success in achieving the ambitious environmental and socio-economic objectives that it is purported to assist. This paper presents empirical evidence from the growth of organic farming in Europe over the past two decades that questions the highly optimistic cl...

there are more than one million agricultural cooperatives members in iran. in the meantime, the rapid development of the animal husbandry in iran has forced cooperatives to meet the members’ scientific and practical needs for completing production cycle of the dairy industry. livestock production covers a wide spectrum of livestock activities including bee keeping, silkworm raising, and aquacul...

This paper describes a decision support system that has been designed and developed to evaluate and rank the financial profile of the main Apicultural Cooperatives and/or Union Cooperatives (A.U.C.) and Apicultural Enterprises (A.P.E.) of the Greek beekeeping industry. This system, called APIDESSYS , applies a multicriteria analysis and utilises the basic financial ratios that express the Liqui...

This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. The two key assumptions are constraints on lump-sum transfers from poorer members and dispro-This paper could not have been completed without the support and encouragement that we received from Shivajirao Patil and Jamshee...

reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. Practitioner's Abstract While not ignoring risk, agricultural cooperatives tend to accommodate risk through the holding of internal capital reserves rather than engage in active risk management. A lack of information regarding the ...

the main purpose of this study is to survey challenges and problems of home business cooperatives (hbcs). the study population of this research consists of all the hbc members in hamedan province in 2011-2012 (n=80), which have been thoroughly surveyed. the instrument for collecting data was a questionnaire which its validity was confirmed by a panel of experts and its reliability was establish...

water user cooperatives were formed due to consideration to people's empowerment and participation in water investment and management. the purpose of this study was to investigate the mechanisms of development and strengthening of water user cooperatives in the aras river basin. the study population consisted of the management board members of the water user cooperatives in the aras basin in th...

The development of Renewable Energy (RE) has become a major societal challenge. Even though RE technology is improving fast, the general public has been slow to adopt it. Meanwhile many RE cooperatives have been created; they act as social entrepreneurs in utilizing the social capital of a community to engage the public. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to consider how they can contribute t...