Latin American Agricultural Trade: The Role of the WTO in Sustainable Virtual Water Flows

International agricultural trade has been growing significantly during the last decade. Many countries rely on imports to ensure adequate food supplies to the people. A few are becoming food baskets of the world. This process raises issues about the food security in depending countries and potentially unsustainable land and water use in exporting countries. In this paper, we analyse the impacts of amplified farm trade on natural resources, especially water. Farm exports and imports of five Latin America countries (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru and Chile) are examined carefully. A preliminary analysis indicates that virtual water imports can save valuable water resources in water-short countries, such as Mexico and Chile. Major exporting countries, including Brazil and Argentina, have become big exporters due to abundant natural resource endowments. The opportunity costs of agricultural production in those countries are identified as being low, because of the predominant green water use. It is concluded that virtual water trade can be a powerful tool to alleviate water stress in semi-arid countries. However, for exporting nations a sustainable water use can only be guaranteed if environmental production costs are fully reflected in the commodity prices. There is no basis for erecting environmental trade tariffs on exporters though. Setting up legal foundations for them in full compliance with WTOs processes would be a daunting task.farm trade, water, blue water, green water, global sustainability, food production, global food demand, water pricing, WTO, International Relations/Trade, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Perspectives on institutional change - water management in Europe

CONTENTS: Mapping institutional change... 3, Insa Theesfeld, Frauke Pirscher; Affordability as an institutional obstacle to water-related price reforms... 9, Erik Gawel, Wolfgang Bretschneider; Analysing the shortcomings of the Ukrainian urban waste water sector - Institutional options for modernisation ... 35, Herwig Unnerstall, Nina Hagemann; Gemeinschaftsgüter und Gemeinwohl - Theoretischer Erkenntnisgehalt und praktische Relevanz für die Regionalentwicklung am Beispiel von Wasserinfrastrukturen und Kulturlandschaften ... 55, Andreas Röhring, Timothy Moss, Ludger Gailing, Rita Gudermann; Explaining top-down institutional design: The introduction of River Basin Management in Portugal... 85, Andreas Thiel, Catrin Egerton; Decentralization failures in post-socialist fishery management ... 107, Insa Theesfeld, Oscar Schmidt --

Understanding why, knowing why, and cognitive achievements

Duncan Pritchard argues that a feature that sets understanding-why apart from knowledge-why is that whereas (I) understanding-why is a kind of cognitive achievement in a strong sense, (II) knowledge-why is not such a kind. I argue that (I) is false and that (II) is true. (I) is false because understanding-why featuring rudimentary explanations and understanding-why concerning very simple causal connections is not a cognitive achievement in a strong sense. Knowledge-why is not a kind of cognitive achievement in a strong sense for the same reason knowledge-that is not. The latter thesis requires showing that having (p because q) information is not equivalent to having information about facts or principles that establish the explanatory connections between the phenomena in question. I make a positive case for this claim and defend it against objections. Based on this argument, I identify an alternative feature that sets understanding-why apart from knowledge-why: The minimal condition for understanding-why and knowledge-why with respect to their content, respectively, is not identical. Knowing why p merely requires information that some explanatorily relevant dependency obtains. Understanding why p additionally requires information about facts or principles that establish the explanatory connections between the phenomena in question

From welfare to lawfare: environmental suffering, neighbour disputes and the law in UK social housing

Social housing authorities in the UK frequently invoke a language of ‘anti-social behaviour’ and neighbour nuisance in dealing with disputes between tenants. But this language fails to recognise the poor environmental conditions that cause disputes between tenants in the first place. An ethnographic analysis of neighbour disputes identifies a double move from a politics of welfare to one of lawfare: just as housing providers shift the blame onto individual tenants for tenants' perceived failure to act in socially appropriate manners, so tenants end up calling for more policing and tougher neighbourhood control. This politics of lawfare not only places a moral economy of blame at its core but further undermines the possibilities of transforming environmental suffering into redistributive struggles. </jats:p

The labour of care: why we need an alternative political economy of social care

Caring is often taken for granted as an activity. But what happens when a social emotion is monetised? Insa Koch explains what the consequences are for those dispensing and those in receipt of care at a time of austerity politics, and in a legal system where female carers have never had the same rights and protections as their male counterparts

What's in a vote? Brexit beyond culture wars

The result of the United Kingdom’s EU referendum has been interpreted as evidence of a “culture war” between proponents of liberal cosmopolitanism and defenders of socially conservative values. According to this interpretation, voters on both sides are seen as driven by identity-based politics. But on a council estate (social-housing project) in England, what made the EU referendum different from an ordinary election was that citizens perceived it as an opportunity to reject government as they know it. Citizens’ engagements with the referendum constitute attempts to insert everyday moralities into electoral processes. They provide an opening into alternative, if yet unknown, futures that go beyond any singular narratives that divide the electorate into camps of so-called Leavers and Remainers

Adapting agricultural water governance to climate change : Experience from Germany, Spain and California

This study describes and discusses initiatives taken by public (water) agencies in the state of Brandenburg in Germany, the state of California in the USA and the Ebro River Basin in Spain in response to the challenges which climate change poses for the agricultural water sector. The drivers and actors and the process of changing agricultural water governance are its particular focus. The assumptions discussed are: (i) the degree of planned and anticipatory top-down implementation processes decreases if actions are more decentralized and are introduced at the regional and local level; (ii) the degree of autonomous and responsive adaptation approaches seems to grow with actions at a lower administrative level. Looking at processes of institutional change, a variety of drivers and actors are at work such as changing perceptions of predicted climate impacts; international obligations which force politicians to take action; socio-economic concerns such as the cost of not taking action; the economic interests of the private sector. Drivers are manifold and often interact and, in many cases, reforms in the sector are driven by and associated with larger reform agendas. The results of the study may serve as a starting point in assisting water agencies in developing countries with the elaboration of coping strategies for tackling climate change-induced risks related to agricultural water management