Agricultural production is under increasing pressure by global anthropogenic changes, including rising population, diversion of cereals to biofuels, increased protein demands and climatic extremes. Because of the immediate and dynamic nature of these changes, adaptation measures are urgently needed to ensure both the stability and continued increase of the global food supply. Although potential...

THE RICE LANDS of Malaysia, tolaling 0.6 M ha are broadly classified as either granary or nongranary areas. The granaries comprise 8 large and contiguous irrigation schemes, covering 210,000 ha and producing more than 65 percent of the country's total output; and it is in these granaries that further developine.nt of rice production will bt. concentrated. The nongranaries are either rain-fed or...

SL2/PU!culture is of central importance to the fisheries sector in Bangladesh. It grew from next to nothing in the early 1970s to contribute about 11% of total exports in the mid-1990s (DOF 1995). No other primary commodity enjoyed such spectacular growth in post-independence Bangladesh. Although shrimp farming has had a significant impact on the economy of Bangladesh, it has had high environme...

A major challenge in rice (Oryza sativa L.) production is to enhance water use efficiency (WUE) and maintain or even increase grain yield. WUE, if defined as the biomass accumulation over water consumed, may be fairly constant for a given species in given climate. WUE can be enhanced by less irrigation. However, such enhancement is largely a trade-off against lower biomass production. If WUE is...

This paper creates democracy indicators for over 4000 municipalities in Brazil, and studies their impact on economic performance. Municipality-level growth regressions control for the effects of local crop production and their price movements, the sectoral composition of the local economy, income inequality, inflation, ethnic and religious composition of the population, and a conditional conver...

Global food production needs to be increased by 60-110% between 2005 and 2050 to meet growing food and feed demand. Intensification and/or expansion of agriculture are the two main options available to meet the growing crop demands. Land conversion to expand cultivated land increases GHG emissions and impacts biodiversity and ecosystem services. Closing yield gaps to attain potential yields may...

Recent predictions of growth in human populations and food supply suggest that there will be a need to substantially increase food production in the near future. One possible approach to meeting this demand, at least in part, is the control of pests and diseases, which currently cause a 30-40% loss in available crop production. In recent years, strategies for controlling pests and diseases have...

For crop production it is desirable for the mapping between genotype and phenotype to be consistent, such that an optimized genotype produces uniform sets of individual plants. Uniformity is strongly selected in breeding programs, usually automatically, as harvest equipment eliminates severely non-uniform individuals. Uniformity is genetically controlled, is known to be increased by interplant ...

Designing a reliable plant growth system for crop production in space requires the understanding of pore fluid distribution in porous media under microgravity. The objective of this experimental investigation, which was conducted aboard NASA KC-135 reduced gravity flight, is to study possible particle separation and the distribution of discontinuous wetting fluid in porous media under micrograv...

'Drought' has many meanings in relation to crop production. These range from: statistical (say, the lowest decile of annual rainfall) to a meteorologist; through yield being limited by too little water to an agronomist; to sudden severe water deficits to many molecular biologists. To a farmer, the corresponding management issues, respectively, are risk management (how best to manage a meteorolo...