1 Biotechnology Research Institute, Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Shanghai, China, 2 Shanghai Key Laboratory of Agricultural Genetics and Breeding, Shanghai, China, 3 College of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Co-innovation Center for Modern Production Technology of Grain Crops, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, China, 4 State Key Laboratory of Crop Genetics and Germplasm Enhancement, M...

Today, co-operative engineering in the fields of plant production is a time consuming and expensive issue. The integration process of product data and models into the planning and engineering of the production facilities and vice versa is a complex task. Furthermore, these integration processes are repeated in an iterative manner at every level or phase of the plant production project in a supp...

Soil microbial populations are immersed in a framework of interactions known to affect plant fitness and soil quality. They are involved in fundamental activities that ensure the stability and productivity of both agricultural systems and natural ecosystems. Strategic and applied research has demonstrated that certain co-operative microbial activities can be exploited, as a low-input biotechnol...

There has been a recent economic literature arguing that international environmental agreements (IEAs) can have no real effect, on account of their voluntary and self-enforcing nature. This literature concludes that the terms of IEAs are the codification of the non-co-operative equilibrium, and recent empirical work has supported this conclusion in the context of the Montreal Protocol. This pap...

This article assesses the achievement of land reform in South Africa with respect to the number of beneficiaries relative to rural employment and the demand for land and increases in livelihoods and agricultural output. Even though there are islands of success, for the past twenty years the Land Reform Programme has not satisfied these criteria. Implementation has been poor and farm workers’ an...

Development of the horticultural sector in the Mediterranean agricultural areas of Spain is closely linked to the activity of co-operative organisations for the production and marketing of produce. These entities are especially important in finding answers to current demand requirements in the food market, bearing in mind the small family-scale nature of many of the farm enterprises in this sec...