Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries

Discusses the changes in population and economy of rural regions in Australia. Status of urban and rural populations in Australia; Factors that contribute to changes in rural populations; Overview of the disparity in incomes between urban and rural areas; Analysis of the future of farming communities in the country . Report Locationhttp://conne ....

Global development of the biofuel sector is proceeding rapidly, driven by national policy mandates, government subsidies, and profit opportunities for farmers, agribusiness and energy companies. To date, most investment in - and dialogue on - biofuels has focused on large-scale production of liquid transport fuels. A smaller set of effo ....

The growing use of the Internet is providing rural, regional and remote areas with new opportunities to communicate, purchase goods and services and make use of applications that can reduce transaction costs, generate revenue and/or provide access to new forms of entertainment. The development of more data-intensive applications is stimulating de ....

Analysis of the experiences of four farmer groups set up to learn how to jointly manage local natural resource issues shows that the groups are going though two simultaneous processes. One builds technical competency in natural resource management and the other is the underpinning social process that allows the groups to make decis ....

During the 20th century, US agriculture underwent vast transformations. The number of farmers has decreased, more farmers are relying on off-farm income, agriculture's proportion of the US GDP has declined, and a minority of non-metro counties in the US are farming dependent. Agriculture's evolution will continue and we have identified ....

One of the recurring themes of environmental sociology is the manner in which detrimental environmental effects are differentially distributed, disadvantaging those of lower class and lesser status. In the case of agricultural land in western societies, extensive restructuring and industrialisation of agriculture's biological processes has led t ....

In this paper, I compare reflections from my action research engagements with two Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) natural resource management (NRM) organisations, Murrumbidgee Irrigation (MI) and Murray Catchment Management Authority (CMA) in NSW, Australia. My engagement with MI (2005-2007) coincided with the most extreme years of the extended Millen ....

This issue of 'Climag' outlines CSIRO research on the effects of climate variability in the future which is forecast to influence the frequency of temperature extremes, and affect regional rainfall patterns and available soil moisture. Other reports in this issue include an article highlighting the need to integrate science and onfarm&n ....

Conflict over water allocations and the need to adapt to climate change in Australia's Murray-Darling Basin has resulted in decision makers choosing engineering interventions to use water more 'efficiently' for wetlands conservation. We review a range of policy and infrastructure adaptation measures implemented in the Basin by governments. The wa ....

Background: Anthropogenic climate change will affect global food production, with uncertain consequences for human health in developed countries. Objectives: We investigated the potential impact of climate change on food security (nutrition and food safety) and the implications for human health in developed countries. Methods: Expert input and s ....

In the past few years there has been renewed emphasis on the challenge of achieving food security for all. Policy initiatives that build on the theme of flexibility in coping with market instability, first introduced in Food Policy Analysis (Timmer CP, Falcon W and Pearson S, The World Bank, 1983), are an important element in meeting that challen ....

Tensions between the agriculture and mining sectors in Australia have increased in recent years, with the coal and CSG industries coming to loggerheads with agricultural communities in many areas across the country. Various attempts have been made to address the conflict, often initiated through government regulation where a 'balance' is sought b ....

Australia and Ireland are two countries in which the economic importance of agriculture has been steadily declining. There are few similarities in the form of agriculture in the two countries, with greater diversity of produce and larger scale evident in Australia. Despite these differences, there are similarities in the social and economic probl ....