Consumer Perceived Value Analysis of New & Incumbent Brands of Gudang Garam & Sampoerna

Gudang Garam and Sampoerna are the biggest cigarette companies in Indonesia. Both ofthem haveboth incumbent and new brands. Gudang Garam has Surya 16 as its incumbentbrand and just released Surya Slim as its new brand, while Sampoerna has A Mild as itsincumbent brand and introduced Avolution as its new brand. The companies pursued differentapproaches in introducing the new brands.Print ads are the main source of information abouttheir strategy. It conveys messages about value to be offfered to the market. Analysis of visualand text or copy elements of the ads are analyzed and mapped into the Consumer PerceivedValue (CPV) framework from Sweeney & Soutar. The framework is divided into fourdimensions: emotional, social, quality and value for money. Qualitative analysis shows howthe two companies introduced their new brands and its relation to the incumbent brands

Rural poverty reduction strategy for South Asia

Roughly 40 percent of the worlds poor live in South Asia, where poverty is basically a rural problem. Therefore, a significant gain in rural poverty reduction in this sub-region will be crucial to reach the international poverty reduction target. Based on the analysis and experience of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), this paper argues that to be successful, poverty reduction policies in South Asia must focus on the less-favoured rural areas and on most disadvantaged sections of the rural poor (mainly women, the landless and indigenous peoples). In order to overcome disadvantages arising from remoteness, lack of social services, insecure and unproductive jobs, and discrimination as women or ethnic minorities, the rural poor need legally secure access to productive assets (mainly land, forests and water); sustainable or regenerating agricultural technology; access to markets; opportunities to participate in decentralized resource management; and access to financial services

Value chains to improve diets: Diagnostics to support intervention design in Malawi

Governments and development partners looking to accelerate progress in addressing malnutrition have been examining how to use interventions in value-chains to improve diets. However, the links between interventions in value chains and diets involve a range of direct and indirect effects that are not yet well understood. We apply a mixed-method multisectoral diagnostic to examine potential interventions in food systems to improve diets of smallholder farmers in Malawi. We examine entry points for interventions involving public and private-sectors, and explore the methodological requirements for undertaking this type of multisectoral analysis. We find that although food consumption is dominated by maize, a range of nutritious foods are also being consumed; including leafy greens, fruits, chicken, dried fish, dried beans and peas, and groundnuts. Yet important deficits in nutrient intake remain prevalent in low-income households due to inadequate quantity of consumption. While increasing consumption through own-production is one potentially important channel to increase quantity of nutritious foods available (particularly fruits and leafy green vegetables), markets also play a potentially important role. Nutritious foods are available on markets year-round, although strong seasonality impacts the availability and price of perishable products. For beans, peas and groundnuts, supply appears to be available throughout the year, with price fluctuations relatively controlled due to storage capacity and imports. The capacity of markets to supply safe and nutritious food is limited by a number of issues, including poor hygiene; lack of infrastructure for storage and selling; limited information on nutrition, and weak coordination among sellers and producers. Other bottlenecks include: on-farm constraints for expanded production, consumers with limited purchasing capacity, intense competition among sellers and few services for sellers to increase volume of product sold during peak demand. The diagnostics identify the role of information-related interventions to optimize decisions related to food choices, involving a range of different foods and value-chains, that could potentially lead to short- and medium-term improvements in diets. Longer-term and more resource-intensive interventions are also identified, such as improving capacity for product differentiation, processing, storage, and market infrastructure across a different range of food chains, so as to maximise coherence between short- and long-term planning. The findings highlight the benefits of applying a strategic, food systems-based approach of identifying specific and complementary actions for both the public and private sectors that can improve the diets of low-income populations

Food production and consumption in Bamyan Province, Afghanistan: the challenges of sustainability and seasonality for dietary diversity

In Asia, high levels of malnutrition threaten the health and livelihoods of millions of households. This paper concentrates on linkages between agriculture and nutrition in Afghanistan where food and nutrition insecurity are increasing and agricultural sustainability is increasingly compromised by climate change. We explore seasonal patterns of food production and consumption in the remote and robust ecological environment of Shah Foladi, Bamyan Province. Analysis of qualitative data from household interviews in eight villages has provided a wealth of insights into the seasonality of diets. Even within a broadly homogeneous environment, households were found to be markedly heterogeneous in respect of their assets, production, market, finance and employment strategies. The so-called ‘lean season’ was found to vary accordingly. Nevertheless, a general lack of dietary diversity during much of the year is likely to cause micronutrient malnutrition, especially for the vulnerable groups of children, adolescent girls and women. Potential interventions are proposed which need to account for the local context in order to overcome the natural and political constraints. These strategies include agricultural innovation and multi-sectoral policy approaches. In the end, reducing national insecurity is a pre-requisite for sustainable improvement in nutrition-sensitive agricultural development

Walking and the social life of solar charging in rural Africa

We consider practices that sustain social and physical environments beyond those dominating sustainable HCI discourse. We describe links between walking, sociality, and using resources in a case study of community-based, solar, cellphone charging in villages in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Like 360 million rural Africans, inhabitants of these villages are poor and, like 25% and 92% of the world, respectively, do not have domestic electricity or own motor vehicles. We describe nine practices in using the charging stations we deployed. We recorded 700 people using the stations, over a year, some regularly. We suggest that the way we frame practices limits insights about them, and consider various routines in using and sharing local resources to discover relations that might also feature in charging. Specifically, walking interconnects routines in using, storing, sharing and sustaining resources, and contributes to knowing, feeling, wanting and avoiding as well as to different aspects of sociality, social order and perspectives on sustainability. Along the way, bodies acquire literacies that make certain relationalities legible. Our study shows we cannot assert what sustainable practice means a priori and, further, that detaching practices from bodies and their paths limits solutions, at least in rural Africa. Thus, we advocate a more “alongly” integrated approach to data about practices.Web of Scienc

Consumer Perceived Value Analysis of New & Incumbent Brands of Gudang Garam & Sampoerna

Gudang Garam and Sampoerna are the biggest cigarette companies in Indonesia. Both ofthem haveboth incumbent and new brands. Gudang Garam has Surya 16 as its incumbentbrand and just released Surya Slim as its new brand, while Sampoerna has A Mild as itsincumbent brand and introduced Avolution as its new brand. The companies pursued differentapproaches in introducing the new brands.Print ads are the main source of information abouttheir strategy. It conveys messages about value to be offfered to the market. Analysis of visualand text or copy elements of the ads are analyzed and mapped into the Consumer PerceivedValue (CPV) framework from Sweeney & Soutar. The framework is divided into fourdimensions: emotional, social, quality and value for money. Qualitative analysis shows howthe two companies introduced their new brands and its relation to the incumbent brands.Keywords:brand, innovation, consumer perceived value, advertising, cigarette industr

Pollination and biological control research: are we neglecting two billion smallholders

Food insecurity is a major world problem, with ca. 870 million people in the world being chronically undernourished. Most of these people live in tropical, developing regions and rely on smallholder farming for food security. Solving the problem of food insecurity is thought to depend, in part, on managing ecosystem services, such as the pollination of crops and the biological control of crop pests, to enhance or maintain food production. Our knowledge regarding regulating ecosystem services in smallholder-farmed (or dualistic) landscapes is limited and whilst pollination has been the focus of considerable research, the provision of natural enemy services, important for every crop worldwide, has been relatively neglected. In order to assess whether ecosystem-service research adequately represents smallholder-farmed landscapes, whilst also considering climatic region and national economic status, we examined the constituent studies of recent quantitative reviews relevant to biological control and pollination. No regulating ecosystem service meta-analysis, to our knowledge, has focussed on smallholder agriculture despite its importance to billions of peoples’ local food security. We found that whilst smallholdings contributed 16% of global farmland area and 83% of the global agricultural population (estimated using FAO’s World Census of Agriculture 2000) only 22 of 190 studies (12%), overall, came from smallholder-farmed landscapes. These smallholder studies mostly concerned coffee production (16 studies). Individual reviews of biological control were significantly and strongly biased towards data from large-scale farming in temperate regions. In contrast pollination reviews included more smallholder studies and were more balanced for climate regions. The high diversity of smallholder-farmed landscapes implies that more research will be needed to understand them compared to large-scale landscapes but we found far more research from the latter. We highlight that these skews in research effort have implications for sustainable intensification and the food security of billions in the developing world. In particular we urge for balance in future ecosystem-services research and synthesis by greater consideration of a diverse range of smallholder-farmed landscapes in Africa and continental Asia

Multifunctionality of Agriculture Products: Towards Collaborative Policy Guidelines on Sustainable Agro-Related Fuel Development

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Biofuels on 23 January 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17597269.2017.1278930.The primacy of food security overrides that of energy. This is a reasoned view under the United Nations rights-based theories and practice. Within this context, there are voluntary guidelines according to which countries must secure an adequate food supply. Nevertheless, agro-related fuel has recently attracted scientific and commercial attention, following revolutionary thinking concerning the multifunctionality nature of agriculture products and the innovative use of crop resources as conduits in building our energy security and promoting economic growth. Consequently, many countries may be facing the need for strategic decision-making in developing an agro-related fuel programme, given the lack of a credible global framework to inform policy approaches. On the back of this complexity, a key objective of this paper is to provide a critical assessment of whether a credible global collaborative framework can bring much-needed certainty to enable developing countries to weigh up the importance and risks involved and to manage all of the related biodiversity intricacies connected to agro-related policy development in relation to the realisation of sustainable food security.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio