Month: October 2023

The final component of the agreement was a set of three non-binding accompanying measures

The portion of land affected varied by type of production. Financial support for the rest of the land would come as before, via a system of guaranteed prices. In other words, direct income payments were only partially decoupled from production. The third component of the agreement was a mandatory land set-aside program, to remove land from production with the objectives of reducing output and improving the health of the land. Reducing output would also in the long run reduce CAP expenditures, as costs for storage and dumping would decrease. While long-term savings was an oft-repeated refrain of the reforms, details of exactly when these savings would come and how much they would be were murky at best. Contrary to the stipulations of the initial proposal, in the final agreement, land that was required to be set aside was eligible for compensatory payments for price cuts.These measures sought to improve the environmental health of the land via a series of programs, including agri-environmental initiatives, afforestation, and early retirement. These measures were significantly watered down from the initial proposal circulated by Agricultural Commissioner Ray MacSharry. A fifth major proposal, modulation, which would redirect money from the biggest CAP beneficiaries to the smallest farmers, was defeated and thus did not make it into the final agreement. Table 3.1 below presents the initial and final form of each key measure included in the agreement. Not only were price cuts much smaller than initially proposed, but compensation was extended further. Specifically set-aside land,blueberry plant container which was not supposed to be eligible for a compensation payment, was included in that scheme.

Beyond having smaller than proposed pricecuts and a broader extension of compensation, beef and dairy producers benefited from an additional, hidden form compensation in that price cuts to cereals lowered their input costs related to animal feed. In addition, efforts to redirect additional compensation to small farmers and to reduce the payments of the largest CAP beneficiaries via modulation were completely thwarted. As a Financial Times editorial noted, “the more muscular reform that MacSharry had originally envisioned was sapped by the fierce outcry of the EC’s farm lobbies, echoed and targeted by their agricultural ministers” . The MacSharry Reform fits a broader pattern observable across CAP reforms. Changes to CAP policies and programs rarely if ever take money away from farmers; instead, they change how farmers are paid. In the case of the MacSharry Reform, price cuts did not ultimately take money away from farmers. While EU farmers had previously been supported by the CAP through a system of high prices, that support was transitioning to a direct income support system. In the end, farmers were still being paid the same money; it was merely coming from a new pot. This pattern holds up across other CAP reforms. In CAP reform, there is never direct retrenchment, only recalibration. In other words, spending is not cut, but the operation of the program, including how funds are delivered, is reformed. Of the twin goals of lowering spending and reducing production levels and overall output, most progress was made toward achieving the latter. Mandatory set asides removed land from production, a direct initiative to counteract out of control commodity production. The introduction of partial decoupling through a system of price cuts and compensatory payments also worked to reduce at least the incentives for production. It replaced a system that previously encouraged and rewarded farmers for extracting as much as they could from the land. While the reforms included major strides toward reducing production, the MacSharry Reform failed to decrease overall spending.

Although the reform was undertaken with a major objective of reducing CAP expenditure, and proposals were written with this goal in mind, the end result was a reform that actually increased CAP costs in the short run and, due to the lagged implementation of price cuts, would not actually deliver cheaper prices to consumers until the mid-to-late 1990s . On top of the lack of savings related to smaller price cuts and the broader than anticipated extension of compensation, the accompanying measures targeted for early retirement, rural development, and other agri-environmental concerns added an additional 6 billion ECU to CAP spending. The failure to include modulation in the final agreement, which would have limited the maximum payment earnable by the largest farmers, and thus reduced total payment output levels, added another 6 billion ECU in CAP spending. Savings could be expected only in the long term as production levels fell and the EU would no longer have to finance the purchase, storage, and dumping of vast stocks of excess goods.The CAP reform agreed to in March of 1999 was one part of the EU-wide Agenda 2000 initiative. The scheme, formally called “Agenda 2000: For a Stronger and Wider Europe” was intended to prepare the EU for the new millennium, including the adoption of a common currency, the Euro, enlargement towards Eastern and Central Europe, and challenges related to globalization and the continued spread and development of new technologies. The Commission intended for Agenda 2000 to consider “how to develop the European mode of society in the 21st century and how to best respond to the major concerns of citizens” including unemployment, social exclusion, and the environment . In specific reference to agriculture, the report acknowledged that the 1992 CAP reform had been successful but suggested that “the time has come to deepen the reform and to take further movement towards world market prices coupled to direct income aids” . More broadly, the Commission’s guiding document for the Agenda 2000 reforms suggested that the EU had to modernize and reorganize its structures while also concentrating on the essentials and those areas where Europe could provide real added value.

Despite the ambitious agenda, the end result was a CAP reform whose major proposals were either defeated outright, or, at best, made optional for member states to adopt. A key factor explaining the failure to adopt meaningful reform is that there were no major crises that exerted pressure on the CAP. The next round of the WTO had yet to commence. Enlargement was still several years down the road, and the formal terms of CAP accession had not yet been determined. CAP spending was running high, as was normal, but there was no major spending threat, especially since the MacSharry reforms, combined with global price and production yields, seemed to be achieving their intended goal of reducing production. Ultimately,30 plant pot there was no powerful crisis that could credibly be used to justify truly dramatic change or to force an agreement. Unlike his predecessor Ray MacSharry, Agricultural Commissioner Franz Fischler was leading this reform during politics as usual conditions. Fischler thus had little mandate for reform. The purpose of this chapter is to account for the content of the 1999 Agenda 2000 CAP reform and to explain why the reform proposals were largely gutted. The Agenda 2000 CAP agreement contained no landmark reform. Instead previous reforms were preserved and the Commission’s major initiatives in the areas of greening and balancing payments were either made optional or entirely defeated. First, decoupling was preserved and further extended through a series of market reforms to the three most important areas of production: arable goods, beef, and dairy. The cuts were overall somewhat smaller and slower and with greater compensation than reformers had hoped. Beef prices, for example would be cut by 20% as opposed to the 30% proposed and price cuts for milk would be delayed by 6 years, beginning in 2006 instead of 2000 as the Commission hoped. More importantly, these cuts were expected as part of the agreement reached in 1992 to move to decouple the CAP; they do not constitute a new change to CAP policy. Second, the new environmental measure, called cross-compliance, that sought to link direct payments to good environmental practices was made optional instead of mandatory with the member states given virtually complete discretion over if and how to implement the program. If a member state actually chose to participate, it would also be allowed to use its own environmental standards. Modulation, a program to account for payment imbalances across member states by redistributing CAP funds, was likewise made entirely voluntary. Finally, a cap on farmer income payments over 100k ECU was entirely rejected. To the extent that any change was made, CAP reform mirrored the process of welfare state retrenchment, with reformers employing a variety of tactics to slip through any reform possible and hopefully position themselves to achieve more substantial retrenchment in the future. While the environmental programs introduced under Agenda 2000 were voluntary, their inclusion in the CAP agreement positioned policymakers to make more significant reforms in that direction in the future. In this way, the path of these environmental reforms is quite similar to how systemic reforms occur in the process of welfare state retrenchment.

As is typical, the final package included a number of side payments, concessions, and exemptions in order to facilitate the agreement. For example, the measures to cut prices and further decouple payment from production included smaller cuts than initially proposed, with implementation delayed by a number of years and substantial income supports provided to farmers.Agenda 2000 illustrates the importance of disruptive politics for achieving meaningful CAP reform. It demonstrates what reform efforts look like when there are no crises to drive forward major change: major proposals are substantially watered down, made optional, or entirely defeated. The far-reaching reforms that bookended Agenda 2000 were driven by disruptive politics: failing trade negotiations and a CAP system that would be unsustainable in a newly enlarged Europe. In these cases, disruptive politics allowed for fundamental change to CAP programs. The situation surrounding the Agenda 2000 reform was vastly different, with Fischler attempting to lead negotiations during politics as usual. While at first glance it might seem that enlargement, a powerful source of disruptive politics might be at play in the Agenda 2000 reform, a closer look at the circumstances reveals that no such pressure was brought by enlargement. In 2004, ten new member states were scheduled to join the EU. All the new member states, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, were from Central and Eastern Europe, and were comparatively poorer and less developed than the existing member states. In addition, these countries had agricultural sectors that were much larger and less efficient than the current member states. For this reason, it was projected that it would be difficult and expensive to transition the new Central and Eastern European countries into the CAP. One, albeit narrow, area where enlargement did exert some pressure on reformers was in the domain of price supports. Studies conducted suggested that, without price cuts, the costs of integrating the new member states to the CAP would be “unacceptably high” . Specifically, a 1997 DGVI study estimated that the accession of the ten new Central and East European countries to the CAP would cost between 10-12 billion ECU, with roughly half of that, or 5-6 billion ECU needed to cover direct payments . The study suggested that, if the CAP remained unreformed, these costs could even increase further, as the new member states would exacerbate existing stock build up problems. In addition, if existing EU prices were not brought closer to the lower levels in the new member states, analysts warned that these prices might trigger a new surplus problem, which the MacSharry Reform had worked sohard to combat, and could also result in higher domestic food prices, which would place further financial strain on a population that was already comparatively poorer . Enlargement was ultimately not a significant pressure for reform, however, because member states and the Commission were operating under the assumption that farmers in the new member states would not be eligible for the direct income payments introduced under the MacSharry Reform. Their exclusion was based on the grounds that farmers in these countries had not faced the price cuts for which the direct payment scheme compensated and were actually likely to see prices for their goods increase .

Dutch agriculture is defined by small but incredibly efficient holdings

Although a transition from agriculture to industry and rural to urban might seem natural, it is in reality perilous and difficult. Both Karl Polanyi and Alexander Gerschenkron provide cautionary tales of the mismanagement of class decline. They demonstrate that the most fundamental potential consequences of poor class management are collapse of democratic regimes and the rise of authoritarian alternatives, accompanied by social unrest. Thus in the wake of a war that destroyed the continent and saw the rise of fascism in the heart of Europe, the post-war task of successfully managing the decline of the farmers was immensely important. The Common Agricultural Policy was the plan for navigating the peaceful transition from agriculture to industry without destroying democracy along the way. Along with these significant successes, however, came major costs and what proved to be systemic problems.Although the CAP brought many benefits to European farmers and society, its reliance on high prices generated several problems, starting with a growing imbalance between supply and demand. The introduction of the CAP coincided with a substantial leap forward in technical and scientific progress, such as improved chemical fertilizers and new farming equipment. These advances resulted in a dramatic increase in output. While the baby boom was in full swing when the CAP was being debated and designed, by the 1970s, population growth was slowing. The improved agricultural output quickly resolved the post-war food crisis and ensured that the vast majority of the population was well fed. Consequently, total food consumption remained steady while food output skyrocketed. Meanwhile, the CAP continued to incentivize production, yielding chronic surpluses for a growing number of products, including sugar, wheat, and milk. CAP rules required these surpluses to be purchased and stored at the European Community’s expense. Their disposal quickly became a serious problem. The products could not be sold on the Community market without depressing prices,bluebery pot size which would undermine the CAP’s goal of increasing farmer incomes.

One alternative, destroying surpluses, was politically unviable. The memory of starvation in Europe was still strong, and thus there was a powerful morally negative association attached to the destruction of food. Given these restrictions, the surpluses were disposed of in three main ways. One was to sell the products back to farmers at low prices. This option was primarily utilized with those goods that could serve as animal feed. To prevent farmers from reselling the bargain-priced feed for the higher guaranteed prices on the market, the surplus grains sold to farmers were “denatured” . A second option was to use export subsidies to sell the commodities purchased at intervention prices at the much lower world prices . The third option was to use the surpluses for food aid. Overall, surplus disposal was very expensive and quickly became one of the largest expenditures of the “Guarantee” portion of the EAGGF7 High CAP prices did not necessarily lift all farmers’ boats. On the contrary, the CAP created vast inequality among farmers, both across and within member states. With CAP support based on market intervention, the amount of support received was directly proportional to the amount of goods produced. Under this system, the larger, commodity producing farmers raced ahead, while the smaller and/or non-commodity producers made little gain. Larger farmers, who produced more, benefited the most. Moreover, the gap widened as they bought up available land and invested in the latest machinery to boost output. Meanwhile, subsistence farmers, many of whom still milked their cows by hand, continued to survive on the land, but lacked the means to modernize and expand. Essentially, the CAP served to modernize and improve the larger farms, but for the small family farms, it did little more than allow them to survive and did not improve small farmer incomes in a meaningful or sustainable way. This income problem, both within and across member states, has persisted to the present day and is an issue that current CAP reform is still struggling to address. High CAP prices also caused recurring budgetary crises as the EU was required to purchase and store or dump whatever was produced at prices that were inflated.

Indeed, these obligations consumed the budget, while other important CAP projects, such as modernization and rural development, were woefully underdeveloped and underfunded. The problems stemming from inflated prices were obvious very quickly, but became hard to change since farmers violently opposed price cuts. The budgetary crisis could be resolved in one of two ways: cutting prices or overhauling the fundamental operation of the CAP. The former solution ran contrary to the CAP’s use of inflated prices to improve incomes. In addition, as studies of social welfare state retrenchment reveal, it is exceptionally difficult to cut benefits once they have been extended. The second solution, to achieve paradigmatic reform by altering the core operation of the CAP, was highly controversial. Agricultural differences among the member states made it almost impossible to agree on any kind of significant CAP reform. CAP reform, whether in 1968 or in 2019, is defined by a lack of consensus. Member states are split on every issue from how farmers should be paid, to the methods for protecting the environment, to if such rules should even exist in the first place. While every member state plays an active part in CAP negotiations, there are four countries that tend to drive negotiations and dominate the narrative. In addition, these four countries, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, play a role akin to a coalition leader. The dividing line on most, but not all, issues tends to be drawn between the coalition led by the former two countries and that led by the latter two. Where these countries are positioned on any CAP issue is almost always driven by their agricultural production profile. French agriculture is diverse on all accounts. It includes the highly productive and the uncompetitive, the commodity producers and the specialty goods cultivators, and the large landholders and the small family farmers. Not all groups and preferences are equal, however, and the large landholding cereals producers tend to have more political influence than other farmers. Since the CAP was essentially France’s compensation for supporting German industry, France is typically the most ardent defender of the portions of the CAP committed to supporting and improving farmer incomes. Particularly in the early years of the CAP, these policies were how France forced other countries, most notably Germany, to pay for the modernization of French agriculture. France typically leads a coalition that seeks to preserve CAP support for farmers, to keep prices high, and to ensure compensation for any burdens or new standards imposed on farmers. Germany’s production profile and CAP preferences are best understood by dividing them temporally, pre and post-unification.

At the time the CAP was created, smaller, family-style farms predominated in West Germany. A notable exception, however, were the grain farmers in Bavaria. So, at the CAP’s creation and in its first decades, Germany preferred higher prices. At this time, high prices were a means for modernizing the sector and also for preventing its sudden and total collapse, with industrial jobs looking increasingly attractive in Germany. Indeed,raspberry container size the post-war recovery and modernization of its agricultural sector were particularly important. Around the time of reunification, however, Germany’s preferences began to shift and it has come to slightly prefer more financial discipline as the burden of its financial contribution to the EU has increased. Specifically, by the late 1980s, agriculture in the west had long since modernized. Now, Germany was confronted with the massive financial burden of absorbing the East, essentially a Soviet colony that lagged behind West Germany on every measure. Given the financial burden associated with reunification, Germany sought to contain expenditure as much as possible elsewhere. Essentially, Germany no longer wanted to pay to subsidize French farmers when it needed to modernize all aspects of society and the economy in half of its own country. Despite calling for financial discipline, however, Germany tends to oppose efforts to limit the amount an individual farmer can receive, given the internal structural diversity of its agriculture. Moreover, farms in the East tended to be large, and would be likely to be hit with the effects of any effort to cap incomes. One important similarity has persisted, pre and post-unification, which is that Germany is traditionally a strong supporting member of France’s coalition. Though it breaks with France from time to time, those moments are the exception and not the norm. The United Kingdom is home to some of the largest farms in the EU, with a mean holding size nearly six times the EU average. Until eastern enlargement in 2004 the UK had, on average, the largest farms with a mean holding size of 94 hectares compared to an EU average of 16.4 hectares . Though there is some diversity, the dominant production is in cereals and livestock-related goods. In addition, UK farmers tend to be efficient and competitive, even without price supports. The relative competitiveness of British farmers, coupled with the UK’s substantial financial contributions to the EU, is the major factor driving British attitudes toward the CAP. Although UK farmers are among the largest individual beneficiaries, the situation is spun as one where British government is paying to subsidize its own farmers’ competitors. For the UK, the preferred CAP outcome is to cut spending as much as possible, ideally eliminating income supports entirely. Indeed, the UK routinely favors cuts to prices and income supports. However, because its farms are so large, the UK also opposes any efforts to limit individual benefit levels.

If prices and income supports cannot be entirely removed, then the UK will see its farmers disproportionately bear the burden of income limits. In negotiations, then, the UK typically leads the price-cut coalition.Most production is concentrated in livestock and horticulture, as opposed to commodity products. In addition, the Netherlands places a particular emphasis on research and innovation in agriculture and agricultural technology. Indeed, the world’s leading agricultural research institute is located in Wageningen, the Netherlands. This commitment has allowed the Dutch to become one of Europe’s top agricultural-exporting countries despite having very little land available for agriculture. Dutch agriculture is also defined by a robust commitment to rigorous environmental standards, important in a densely populated country with limited arable land. The ideal CAP outcome for the Netherlands would include the elimination of any price supports and direct income payments so that the most competitive and efficient countries, like the Netherlands, would not be forced to subsidize those who are weaker. In addition, the Netherlands would prefer to see stronger environmental standards. It is typically part of a coalition led by the UK that seeks to cut spending on prices and income supports. These sharp and persistent divisions help explain why systemic reform is only possible under conditions of disruptive politics. Disruptive politics help reformers overcome these divisions among the member states. Challenges such as enlargement or trade negotiations can force member states to reevaluate their policy preferences and priorities. These additional pressures can also raise the stakes for reaching an agreement, incentivizing member states to find a compromise or to agree to a larger policy change than they otherwise normally would. For example, these external actors can threaten to impose change that is broadly disagreeable to agricultural interests. As disruptive politics makes member state divisions and preferences less rigid, paradigmatic reform becomes possible. When CAP reform is negotiated during politics as usual, as the following examples in this chapter will demonstrate, the fundamental divisions on core policies cannot be overcome. There is little incentive for member states to reevaluate their preferences. As a result, the policies that emerge from CAP reform initiatives tend to produce little meaningful change to the operation of core CAP programs. The policies and changes that do result in these situations are those that upset no one. They are often defined by lax rules, extensive exemptions, and/or their voluntary nature.

The prioritization uses language variables to evaluate the management alternatives

The management of today’s complex water supply and demand systems rely on assessment models combining climatic, social, economic, and environmental factors. A model was developed using the concept of risk by identifying hazards, exposure, and vulnerability. Te vulnerability was classified into two domains, i.e., sensitivity and adaptive capacity, and two spheres, natural/built environment and human environment. A geographical information system modeling and satellite data were developed for water management in agricultural areas by modulating the irrigation water demand based on several vegetation indices. Te water allocation rules were evaluated among water user groups considering environmental, economic, and social criteria involving agricultural water user groups across France. Transferring of irrigation management was defined as the complete or partial transfer of responsibility for management and investment in irrigation systems from government institutions to water users and non-governmental organizations. A combination of the Adaptation Pathways approach was used with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool to assess the actions under different climate conditions. Conjunctive management requires a strong institutional capacity, which can be achieved through regional planning,raspberry container based on a sound understanding of the interactions between surface water and groundwater. Sustainability in basins with existing irrigation and drainage networks requires a strategic planning according to sustainable development principles.

Strategic planning refers to an organizational infrastructure that prioritizes plans and maximizes potential opportunities and benefits. Sustainable development achieves present economic, environmental and social needs while fulfilling the needs of future generations. The lack of strategic vision with respect to sustainability practices and goals was discussed. A SWOT analysis consists of well-structured strategic planning to assess the status of a system by evaluating its strengths , weaknesses , opportunities , and threats. A review of works based on SWOT analysis was reported. A strategic approach was applied to water management in Africa with SWOT. Strategic planning approaches were analyzed in Austrian food-risk management by identifying background conditions to facilitate scaling and replication of catchment regional planning tools in food-prone areas. A raster-based regional conservation action planning tool was developed for prioritizing local and regional scale conservation actions in heterogeneous landscapes. A stochastic method was developed to determine the water availability in agricultural lands that resulted from drought management plans. A regional optimization model of crop water consumption using cellular automation , crop suitability , and a regional distributed crop water use model was applied to improve irrigation benefits in the context of regional water management. A study was reported to determine deficiencies in irrigation networks and remediation measures . Multi-criteria decision making is a branch of operations research that provides methods for choosing among alternatives ranked by multiple criteria. The Analytic Hierarchy Process is a widely used decision-making tool in various multi-criteria decision-making problems. The AHP, is an approach that uses ratio comparisons among attributes and alternatives.

A method of scaling ratios using the principal eigenvector of a positive pairwise comparison matrix was proposed. This work defines and measures the consistency of the pairwise comparison matrix by an expression involving the average of the non-principal eigenvalues. The literature on methods and applications of Multiple Attribute Decision Making has been reviewed and classified systematically. A review of the TOPSIS method for decision making was presented. A new step‐wise weight assessment ratio analysis was introduced to determine the criteria weights in decision making problems. The weights of the criteria were calculated using the integrated Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis -SWARA-TODIM multi-criteria decision-making method. The weighting methods in decision making process including the DEMATEL and BWM was applied to achieve the importance of supplier criteria in a combined manner. The fuzzy set in the form of a class of objects was introduced with a continuum of grades of membership. The fuzzy extension of the AHP method was introduced. Fuzzy TOPSIS method was applied for decision-making process. The model integrating SWARA and Additive Ratio Assessment methods was introduced under uncertainty. A new decision-making approach was developed by measuring attractiveness through a categorical-based evaluation technique and a new combinative distance-based evaluation method in a supplier selection problem during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Level-based weight assessment in fuzzy environment was developed using actual score measures of the picture fuzzy numbers. A novel extension of a developed multi criteria decision making algorithm known as the preference ranking on the basis of ideal-average distance method in fuzzy environment was applied to address a real-life complex decision making problem in social science research. A comparative analysis of supply chain performances of leading healthcare organizations in India with three MCDM frameworks was reported. Uncertainty analysis was conducted using an integrated fuzzy lambda–tau and fuzzy multi criteria decision making method. The integrated Fermatean fuzzy information-based decision-making method was introduced based on the removal effects of criteria and the additive ratio assessment methods, and applied it to a food waste treatment technology selection problem.

A triangular intuitionistic fuzzy linear programming model was proposed for planning of sustainable production system in Baluchistan, Pakistan. A fuzzy multi-criteria group decision-making model was investigated for watershed ecological risk management. A fuzzy-TOPSIS-world open account -based model was developed to identify the impacts of parameters influencing the water quality failure potential. A scenario-based fuzzy interval programming approach was developed for planning agricultural water, energy, food, and crop area management. Game theory was applied for solving decision making problems. The method was applied to construction site selection, and demonstrated that game theory can be applied for supporting decision in a competitive environment. SWOT analysis can be improved by combining it with MCDM. The Analytic Hierarchy Process and the Analytical Network Process analysis have been combined with SWOT analysis. Multiple criteria group decision making applied for prioritizing SWOT factors. Despite numerous studies on sustainable water management by researchers and research on sustainability principles, sustainable agricultural water management at the local level and scale has received less attention. Studies by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development on water sustainability indicators show that analysis at the local level and scale is necessary to demonstrate the effectiveness of the principles of water sustainability. The analysis of large-scale water resource systems involving multiple components, resources, stakeholders, reservoirs, small irrigation reservoirs, and water transfer schemes is a complex process. This work develops and applies a conceptual framework for sustainable agricultural water use and supply by applying regional management alternatives at multiple spatial scales. The framework is applied to a large scale water resources system considering social,plastic plants pots economic and environmental factors. The framework applies conceptual and analytical methods to sustainable agricultural water management relying on strategic planning and regional multi-criteria decision-making. Previous works have evaluated the sustainability of water resources from different perspectives and methods. This study is novel in its introduction of a framework that measures the sustainability of large-scale agricultural water systems relying on regional management plans.The type of available water resources , the crop pattern and quality of soil and water sources vary throughout the study area. Therefore, a database of water-use statistics was prepared to estimate the water use by agricultural lands within the Sefdroud irrigation and drainage network. The water use in the agricultural lands is a function of various factors such as the type of water resources, the method of water conveyance and distribution, the irrigation method, the type of crop products, climatic conditions, soil type, management practice, and others. Therefore, estimating the amount of water use in the agricultural areas in the study area is beset by complexity . The inputs to the agricultural water use model are the cultivated area and crop pattern of irrigated lands, the crop water requirements, the irrigation efficiencies and the surface and ground water withdrawal data. The agricultural water use analytical model calculates water use in each irrigation unit by comparing the water requirements of the crop pattern with the water withdrawals of surface water and groundwater. The outputs from this model are actual water use, the contributions of surface and groundwater to water use and the volumes of return flow.

The details of agricultural water use from different water sources within the irrigated units of the Sefdroud irrigation network are depicted in Fig. 4 and listed in Table 1 for three irrigation management zones. It can be seen in Table 1 that the cultivated area of paddy fields in the Sefdroud irrigation and drainage network has been estimated at about 179,181 hectares. The total annual water use of cultivated area in Sefdroud irrigation and drainage network is about 1.8 billion cubic meters, of which about 1707 million cubic meters are surface water and 90 million cubic meters are groundwater. Of the total volume of surface water use about 1.4 billion cubic meters are from the Sefdroud dam and related canals, 260 million cubic meters from local rivers and farm wastewater, and about 47 million cubic meters from small irrigation reservoirs. The average volume of water use in the 191,141 hectares of irrigated lands of the Sefdroud irrigation and drainage network equals 9404 cubic meters per hectare.The management alternatives to improve the agricultural water demand and supply management in the irrigation management zones in the study area were determined to be: Development/Rehabilitation of the Sefdroud irrigation network; Improve the management of operation and maintenance of the Sefdroud irrigation network; Wastewater management, and Inter-basin water transfer within the Sefdroud irrigation network system . The spatial distribution of the management alternatives within the Sefdroud irrigation and drainage network were defined according to the management alternatives for agricultural water demand and supply management, and are shown in Figs. 5, 6, 7 and 8. Under current conditions the management alternative of development/rehabilitation of the Sefdroud irrigation network’s infrastructure has not been fully implemented. Accordingly, completion and implementation of the main irrigation and drainage network in about 90,000 hectares represents one of the most important priorities in the Sefdroud irrigation network. Carrying out this management alternative would raise the irrigation efficiencies of the Sefdroud irrigation network. Furthermore, in spite of the implementation of the main irrigation and drainage network in 10 irrigation units of the Sefdroud irrigation network, the rehabilitation of the irrigation network in 102,000 hectares is imperative to achieve operational effectiveness. Figure 5 displays the spatial distribution of development and rehabilitation lands in Sefdroud irrigation network. One of the effective management alternatives for maximum use of internal water resources in the study area is using the natural potential of small irrigation reservoirs existing in the Sefdroud irrigation and drainage network. The spatial distribution of small irrigation reservoirs is depicted in Fig. 6. It is seen in Fig. 6 that the total number of small irrigation reservoirs in the study area for agricultural water supply is equal to 527, and the total area of the small irrigation reservoirs is 4935 hectares. The total volume of stored water in small irrigation reservoirs is estimated at 197 million cubic meters under the rehabilitation and improvement conditions.The alternatives and criteria for decision making are determined and a hierarchical structure is formed. The hierarchical structure has a first level consisting of goals to be achieved, the second level consists of the decision criteria, and the third level consists of the management alternatives. The weights of the criteria are determined by the hierarchical analysis method once the hierarchical structure is defined, which involves constructing a pairwise comparison matrix to determine the weights. The comparison matrix’s values are determined using Saaty’s table, and the weights of the criteria are calculated based on the geometric mean values. The next step applies the fuzzy TOPSIS algorithm to evaluate the management alternatives in each of the irrigation management zones of the Sefdroud irrigation and drainage network. Lastly, the management alternatives are prioritized. The fuzzy TOPSIS calculates the CCj indexes of the management alternatives, such that the alternatives’ rank or desirability increases with increasing value of the CCj index. The CCj index is a dimensionless metric in the range [0,1] that measures the closeness of a management alternative to an ideal management alternative or solution.The first line of argumentation suggests that demography is destiny, and expects farmer influence to decline over time along with the sector’s share of the population .

Economies of Scope and Other Determinants of Breeding Costs

The data also show some evidence that average costs fall with increases in output in joint wheat and maize institutes. The average cost per wheat variety is consistently lower in joint institutes than in wheat-only institutes. Similarly, the average cost per maize variety is consistently lower in joint institutes compared with maize-only institutes. For wheat , the cost per variety falls from 187,000 yuan in wheat-only institutes to 145,600 yuan in joint wheat and maize institutes. The same patterns also appear in data when the area-weighted output measure rather than number of varieties is used. Moreover, the evidence of economies of scope becomes stronger as the scale of research effort increases. Hence, our descriptive data provide evidence that economies of scope may be a source of efficiency differences among institutes. The evidence of economies of scope suggests a potential cost saving associated with combining a wheat-only institute and a maize-only institute into a bigger, joint, wheat and maize institute. Further analysis of the data also points to other factors that potentially could affect costs,plastic pots for planting although in some cases the descriptive statistics do not show a particularly strong correlation. The relatively low education level of China’s agricultural researchers has long been claimed to be one of the key factors limiting agricultural research productivity . Based on our data, the human capital in China’s wheat and maize breeding institutes is low compared with other countries . Our data also show that increases in the educational level of breeders help to reduce the cost of variety production. The institutes that have the highest average cost of variety production also tend to have the lowest proportion of breeders with post-secondary education .

Byerlee and Traxler suggest that efficiency in crop breeding increases when agricultural scientists from other disciplines work in conjunction with breeders. Although the share of scientists working on other agricultural disciplines in wheat and maize breeding institutes is quite high , compared to 30 percent in an average wheat improvement research program in a developing country , there is little difference in this share between institutes with low and high average costs. Finally, it is also unclear from visual inspection of the data in Table 3 whether breeding efficiency is affected by the source of a breeding institute’s genetic materials or the presence of retirees. In this section, we specify the econometric model to be used to study the efficiency of China’s crop breeding institutes, and discuss our strategy for estimating the model. We begin by specifying the relationship between costs and the factors that affect them in institutes that produce either one or two types of varieties . We also define measures for economies of scale, ray economies of scale, and economies of scope. Here we treat a breeding institute as a typical “firm” which applies inputs to produce research output . The total variable cost of an individual institute is expressed as a function of its research output, the price of its inputs and other institutional characteristics affecting the cost structure of crop breeding research.10 A wide range of different types of cost functions have been applied in the literature.We estimate economies of scale and scope in two ways: from a base model, where we estimate the relationship between cost and output taking account of the effects of annual salaries , time, province and institute type without the Z variables; and from a full model, which also includes the four covariates . In the final section we discuss the implications for economic efficiency of crop breeding that can be drawn from the estimated relationship between cost and output after controlling for other variables . We do so for both equation , the single-output cost function, and equation , the multiple-output cost function. Hence in our analysis we have four fundamental units of analyses: the base model for the single-output cost function ; the full model for the single-output cost function , and the base and full models for the multiple-output cost function.

We estimate the base cost function model with ordinary least squares to get initial estimates of economies of scale and scope. However, the OLS estimates of the parameters may be underestimated if there is measurement error in the construction of the output variable . One source of measurement error arises from the special nature of crop breeding and the decision making of its directors. The implicit behavioral assumption that underlies the cost function is that the research manager minimizes costs given the output of the institute. Such an assumption, even for a quasi-productive entity like a research institute, often has been made in cost analyses . While it is not difficult to imagine that the typical research manager in a breeding station strives to minimize the institute’s costs of given output, one characteristic that makes the plant breeding industry special is the long time lag between expenditure and the realization of the output. We are assuming that research managers make their cost-minimizing expenditure decisions based on the expected output of the breeding station. But the econometrician does not observe expected output; only actual output is measured. We measure actual output from a crop-breeding institute as the number of new varieties from that research institute adopted by farmers in the five-year period, 6-10 years after the research expenditure. This measure might vary systematically from the output that the manager was anticipating when expenditure decisions were made. One solution to measurement error is the use of instrumental variables . In order to account for the measurement error, we identify a set of instrumental variables and reestimate our model using three-stage iterative least squares. Since the relationship between output and cost basically depends on factors associated with supply-side decisions of the research institute, we turn to a series of demand-side factors in our search for exogenous IVs: farm-gate prices of wheat and maize, the prices of fertilizer and pesticides in input markets, the land-labor ratio in a region, the share of irrigated land to total cultivated land, and the multiple cropping index. We are also concerned with several other assumptions. In order to test for the effect of our assumption about the length of the lag between costs and research output , we conducted sensitivity analysis using data generated by an array of different lag structures. Further, the presence of unobserved heterogeneity may bias the estimates of our parameters of interest.

To eliminate the unwanted covariance between the unobserved factors and the other regressors we took advantage of the panel nature of the data, using both fixed- and random-effect methods. Finally, it is also possible that the cost minimization assumptions that underlie cost function analyses may not all be valid. As noted above,plant pot drainage these assumptions are avoided— albeit, at the expense of some other disadvantages—when we use a production function approach rather than a cost function approach. As a check on this aspect, we also estimated a Cobb-Douglas production function model, and found that the main findings regarding returns to scale are quite similar between the two approaches . The base model produced remarkably robust estimates of many of the parameters . The quadratic specification fits the data well with R2 estimates ranging from 0.53 to 0.75 for wheat and 0.52 to 0.72 for maize . The goodness of fit measures, however, systematically demonstrate that, for both wheat and maize, the models that use the area-weighted and area-yield weighted outputs have a significantly better fit. In all of the models the effect of an increase in wages on costs is positive and significant, in keeping with expectations and theory. All of the variables were normalized by dividing at their sample mean such that we can interpret the regression coefficients as elasticities at the mean. Economies of Scale After controlling for wages, region and year effects, and the institute type, the measures of economies of scale calculated from the estimated parameters are all much less than one and significantly so . The estimates of SCE for wheat institutes range from 0.22 to 0.26; those for maize institutes range from 0.14 to 0.32. The results imply that at the mean levels of research output and other explanatory variables, strong economies of scale exist for both wheat and maize institutes. If output increases by 10 percent, costs would increase no more than 3.2 percent. Evidence of such strong economies of scale from the multivariate analysis is consistent with the descriptive evidence and reflects the patterns in Figure 1. The elasticities of cost with respect to output are relatively small compared with those found in studies of non-profit institutions . The strong economies of scale are largely unchanged when we control for other institutional factors. Comparing results in Tables 4 and 5, after controlling for the four Z factors and their interactions with output, the SCE elasticities still fall in a similar range . Although the coefficients on variables representing several of the institutional factors are significant and suggest that there are other ways to affect breeding efficiency , the remarkably low and highly significant measures of SCE indicate that significant cost savings could be attained if the scale of China’s breeding institutions were expanded. Accounting for a number of the potential econometric problems does not significantly alter the magnitude or significance of the measures of economies of scale, as can be seen in Table 6.

To address concerns of measurement error, exclusion restriction tests of the validity of our demand-side instrumental variables show that they meet the statistical criteria required for identification. Using these instrumental variables and the 3SLS estimator does not substantively change the estimates of the economies of scale parameters. The economies of scale parameters range from 0.12 to 0.26. The results hold for both wheat and maize in both the base model and the full model. Allowing for lags of different lengths, or controlling for the unobserved heterogeneity also does not materially affect the estimates of economies of scale.11 Similar to the results generated by the parameter estimates of the single-output cost function, results based on the multiple output cost function also imply high and statistically significant estimates of ray economies of scale. The estimates of SOEray, which range from 0.33 to 0.39, mean that if wheat and maize institutes double their output of both wheat and maize varieties, the total variable cost of wheat and maize breeding would increase by only 33 to 39 percent. The strong ray economies of scale are also not affected by alternative estimation strategies or model specifications. While not as strong or as robust as the evidence of economies of scale, our multioutput cost function models show the existence of economies of scope between wheat and maize variety production, as summarized in Table 7. The estimates of SOE based on the parameter estimates of the base model indicate that there would be cost saving of about 10 percent if a wheat-only and maize-only breeding institute were combined into a joint wheat-maize institute. Bootstrapped confidence intervals show that the measured elasticities are statistically significantly different from zero. Unlike economies of scale, however, economies of scope are affected when other institutional factors are added. For example, if we control for the educational level of breeders, the cost savings from merging wheat and maize institutes drops from 10 to 5 percent, and it drops to only 3.8 percent when both human capital and spill-in variables are added to the model. In addition to the cost efficiency associated with the scale and scope of wheat and maize variety production, the statistical analysis supports the early descriptive findings and shows that economic efficiency is also affected by other institutional variables, as can be seen in Table 5. For example, except for one case, the coefficients on the interaction between breeder’s education and output are negative and significant. The magnitudes of the coefficients show that if research managers can increase the share of breeders with college and more education by 10 percent , the marginal cost will fall by around 1.0 percent. An increase in the proportion of genetic material used in breeding that comes from outside the province also increases efficiency .

Weather has often been seen as the ideal exogenous right-hand side variable

The bounty of plenty, in the twenty-first century, is questioned not due to its productive capabilities but rather because of its lack of a palatable narrative of place and transparency to which it could inform, and reassure, its consumers and citizens. This conundrum is eloquently summed up by Connerton : “As natural ecosystems became more intimately linked to the urban marketplace of Chicago, they came to appear ever more remote from the busy place that was Chicago. Chicago both fostered an ever-closer connection between city and country, and concealed the very linkages it was creating.” Problems and issues associated with modern agricultural production, for instance is to a large degree perceptual. This is not to say that these developments are not indeed real, but that the ultimately overall meanings and thus societal importance and individual significance rest, to a large degree, in the perceptions of such developments and their perceived effects, as one cannot know everything for sure, and even what sure, or the truth, means might be debatable as we move from “Authority to Authenticity” . Perceptions about agriculture, food and people, therefore, does not just serve to navigate, interpret and/or internalize the symbols imposed by other agents and structures, but also, in their appropriation, circumvents and re-invents meanings and understandings of these. In other words, the importance of perceptions lies both in their use as “interpreters” of the surrounding world and as creators of the surroundings – the change perspective. These must, surely, not be underestimated, as is evident in the burgeoning food movements and its spatial outlets,precio de macetas de plastico as well as the increasing organic production worldwide. Also, important is the fact that participation in the local sphere is for many in the Western World a choice made out of want and less so out of social and economic necessity as in the past – perhaps reflected in an increase in informalization .

This “choice,” it should be noted still, often, excludes and eludes people with low socio-economic status, who still depend very much on locality, as their mobility and often also skills are more limited and less “mobile.” Context continues to matter, greatly, if for different reasons, and with different effects, than in yesteryears. Lastly, I would like to add that this paper is not a rebuff of the criticism levelled at the food markets and its actors in regards to its, at times, exploitative attitudes towards the nature of resources , workers governance and politics , among others. It is rather an attempt to show how these held perceptions came about, and how structural and historical developments can contribute to explaining their emergence, without retorting to complete structural determinism or complete rational-choice “free” actor perspectives, the two preferred methodological and philosophical lenses that the oppositional camps of these issues wear. Rather, reality is formed by perceptions that both influence and are influenced by individual choices and structural developments, whose autonomy and power structures vary depending on context. There is mounting evidence that the global climate has already changed and it is projected to continue changing for the coming centuries . The world has experienced many new record highs that suggest that the mean temperature is increasing. For example, Munasinghe et al. examine the frequency of new record temperatures across the global landmass and find that the frequency of extremely high temperatures increased tenfold between the beginning of the 20th century and 1999–2008, the most recent decade for which they obtained gridded weather data. At the same time, the frequency of new record lows has also increased, suggesting that the variance and not only the mean may have increased. A spatially disaggregate analysis reveals that the tropics experienced a larger increase in the frequency of record highs during the last 100 years than higher latitudes. This is consistent with forecasts of global circulation models . Looking across 23 circulation models, the authors find that countries in the tropics have a probability greater than 90% of experiencing average summer temperatures by the end of the 21st century that are larger than the hottest summers on record in 1900–2006.

In higher latitudes, the average seasonal temperature will be about equal to the hottest on record for the period 1900–2006. On the other hand, Hsiang and Parshall plot the distribution of absolute changes in predicted temperatures for a number of global circulation models and emphasize that the higher latitudes have larger predicted increases in temperature. While this might at first seem like a contradiction, the reason for this finding is that there is less historic variation in the tropics than in the higher latitudes, and more of the increased warming in the higher latitudes will occur during the winter time. The key features of observed trends as well as future warming are the observed and predicted non-uniformity of warming as well as sharp increase in record highs, especially in lower latitudes that generally have less institutional capacity to adapt to these new records. The predicted change in the mean and variance of weather has direct implications for agriculture, since weather is a direct input into the production function. Unlike many other sectors of the economy that are shielded from weather fluctuations through buildings, agriculture is still at the direct mercy of weather fluctuations . As we will discuss below, the relationship between yields and weather is highly nonlinear and concave. The best predictor of corn yields is a measure of extreme heat over the growing season that only incorporates temperature above29 °C , and slightly higher thresholds apply to soybeans and cotton. Future impacts crucially depend on how often and by how much this threshold will be passed, which can both occur due to an increase in the mean or the variance. As Munasinghe et al. have shown, the observed trend is fairly large. It is generally easier to adapt to shifts in the mean than to shifts in the variance, as optimal crop varieties have to be chosen and planted before the unknown weather is realized. An anticipated change in the mean can be incorporated at the time the planting decision is made, while a change in the variance increases the uncertainty of what will happen after the crop is planted.

Adequate adaptation to an increase in the variance hence has to allow for flexible adjustments during the growing season, e.g., the construction of irrigation systems that can counterbalance fluctuations in temperatures, which increase water demands, as well as fluctuations in precipitation. The majority of studies so far have examined the effects of changes in the mean climate, while estimates of the effects of an increase in the variance are just starting to emerge. It is therefore paramount that empirical studies as well as integrated assessment models move away from impact evaluations that only look at changes in average global temperature or rely on a single global circulation model . Further, reliance on average temperature in these modeling exercises does not properly capture the spatial and seasonal heterogeneity in predicted temperature changes. This reasoning carries over to predicted changes in precipitation, for which there is much less agreement across models. There is a myriad of studies examining the effect of weather/climate on agriculture, both structural integrated assessment models and reduced-form empirical studies. Chetty sees the advantages of reduced-form strategies in “transparent and credible identification”, while the important advantage of structural models is “the ability to make predictions about counterfactual outcomes and welfare.” This paper discusses the issues involved in identifying the impact of climate change on agriculture both on the intensive and extensive margins. We put a special focus on the role of extreme temperatures. Hertel and Lobell in this issue discuss the literature on structural modeling approaches for this important sector. The paper is not meant to be a universal overview of the literature,macetas para viveros but as a survey of issues facing empirical researchers interested in identifying impacts in this important coupled human/natural system. The remainder of our paper is organized as follows. Section 2 summarizes the issues involved in identifying the impact of climate/ weather on agriculture, emphasizing the importance of extreme weather outcomes. Section 3 discusses issues involved in identifying evidence of adaptation in the agricultural sector. Section 4 concludes.There is a long history of empirical estimates of the effect of weather on agricultural outcomes. For example, Fisher developed the concept of maximum likelihood estimation by linking wheat yields to precipitation outcomes.Weather impacts agricultural outcomes, yet humans traditionally have not been able to influence year-to-year weather fluctuations. Only recently have cloud seeding experiments been used to influence precipitation. While it is impossible to summarize the entire history of empirical studies, we focus our attention to the most recent studies. Advances in computer power and data availability have made it possible to fit models with a huge number of observations, which allow for the identification and estimation of a more flexible relationship between weather variables and agricultural outcomes.

One of the most important differentiating factors between econometric studies is the source of variation the study uses to link agricultural outcomes to weather/climate: one has to either rely on time series variation, cross-sectional variation, or a combination of the two in a panel setting. Each source of identifying variation will be discussed in turn. Agronomic field experiments have linked agricultural outcomes to various weather measures in both controlled laboratory settings as well as real-world settings that rely on farm-level data. The number of plots or parcels has traditionally been very limited. For example, McIntosh outlines how time-series variation over two or more field experiments can be combined in a statistical setting. Such field experiments have been used to examine not only the effects of weather variables, but more generally of all sort of inputs, including fertilizer, CO2 concentrations, etc. The estimated weather parameters have been used to predict the effects of changes in climate. This approach has been criticized as “dumb farmer” scenario, as it implicitly assumes that farmers continue to grow the same crop even if the climate is permanently altered. One extension is hence to derive predicted yields under various climate change scenarios and then model the effect of inputs, crop choice, and prices . In their seminal paper, Mendelsohn et al. use a cross sectional analysis that links county-level farmland values in the United State to climatic variables as well as other controls . The advantage of the cross-sectional approach is that farmers in different climatic zones had time to adjust their production system to different climates. For example, if it were to become permanently warmer in Iowa, farmers could adjust their production systems to cope with the hotter climate, just as farmers in Florida have done in the past. Florida farmers currently face higher average temperatures than farmers in Iowa, and hence might be a good case study of how farmers will adapt. There are, however, at least three significant drawbacks to cross sectional studies of this type. First, any cross-sectional analysis is subject to omitted variable bias, as statistical correlations do not imply causation. For example, Schlenker et al. show that access to highly subsidized irrigation water is positively correlated with hotter temperatures. The benefits of higher temperatures in a cross-sectional analysis are upward biased as they also include the beneficial effect of access to subsidized irrigation water. Second, Timmins shows that within-county heterogeneity and endogenous land use decisions can bias Ricardian analyses by allowing for use-specific error terms in his cross-sectional analysis of county-level Brazilian farmland values. Farmers endogenously select the crop they are best suited to grow. The effect of climate on land values hence depends both on how a particular land use responds to climatic conditions, as well as what land use is selected as a function of climate. Third, traditional cross-sectional analyses of farmland values are partial-equilibrium studies. If weather were to make farming either greatly more or less productive, prices for agricultural goods would adjust, and so would farmland values. This is evident in the recent sharp increase in commodity prices that led to a significant increase in the US farmland values. Consumer surplus decreased while producer surplus increased. A decrease in farm productivity might in some circumstance even be good for farmers as demand for agricultural products is highly inelastic and weather-induced yield reductions increase the price of agricultural commodities.

The DEA approach is chosen to avoid functional form specification error

Assessing the sustainability of agricultural systems is challenging because measurements frequently mix multiple dimensions, scales, and benchmarks. This study uses data envelopment analysis to develop benchmarks for comparing the sustainability of different agricultural systems and cropping techniques with a measure of sustainability called sustainable value . Incorporating DEA into the sustainable value approach expands upon the work of Figge and Hahn , who first introduced SV in the journal Ecological Economics. SV calculations integrate human, natural resource, and financial dimensions to generate a monetary measure of sustainability. The Loess Plateau provides a rich context to illustrate how sustainability measurements can be used to assess natural resource management trade-offs. It is a highly distressed region where intensive crop production is undermined by high soil erosion rates that threaten the long-term sustainability of the land and local food production . The Loess Plateau is one of the most severely degraded areas in the world, with over 60% of its land subjected to soil degradation and an average annual soil loss of 20–25 t/ha . Land use changes are often extreme. Much of the agricultural land has already been planted to trees through the Grain for Green program . However, converting from cropland to trees is an extreme conservation measure that generates little economic return to farmers who make a living mostly on their land. Many have migrated to urban areas in order to compensate for lost farm jobs, leading to other unintended consequences. In some cases child-care and other parental activities have been left to the elderly or older children . Rather than focusing on extreme land use changes,arándanos azules cultivo the analysis presented in this paper investigates how to balance environmental objectives with continued crop production.

Many frameworks have been proposed to measure sustainability. Macro scale proposals include the Green National Product , Ecological Footprints , and Genuine Savings . These methods are generally used to readjust Gross Domestic Product or Gross National Product calculations to account for net changes in environmental degradation. While ecologically minded organizations promulgate these alternative accounting approaches, the frameworks are not widely applied in China. Unlike the DEA/SV method proposed in this paper, these macro-level approaches do not explicitly map the value of meeting different environmental targets that are affected by local and regional agricultural production practices.SV is used to calculate net sustainable values, rather than the environmental burden imposed by natural resource use. First presented in Ecological Economics by Figge and Hahn , SV is based upon Capital Theory . SV assesses the sustainability of a proposed or existing system by comparing the opportunity cost of using capital in that system rather than a predetermined benchmark. SV can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of local or regional natural resource management decisions. For example, Van Passel et al. apply the SV approach to the Flemish dairy industry, finding the method to be useable and workable for smaller enterprises. Two years later the authors improved upon the method by applying a parametrically estimated efficiency frontier to provide individual benchmarks for each system . The research presented in this paper takes advantage of the SV approach to study cropping systems in the Loess Plateau, but refines it by creating discrete, customized individual benchmarks using a DEA. The DEA allows for comparison between similar systems and creates a discrete benchmark that is specifically comparable to that system. In contrast to previous studies that chose a single “best” benchmark, or a parametrically estimated frontier, the DEA method allows us to create a non-parametric frontier of benchmarks that takes into account the most efficient use of capital for each unique system .

The SV for over 2000 cropping systems reviewed for the Loess Plateau is recorded in a series of comparison matrices and organized by crop type, cropping technique or land type. These matrices are then used to determine which management practices, like rotation or terracing, have the greatest impact on sustainability. Although this would be the first known integration of the DEA with SV methods, the DEA method has been applied to other sustainability measures. For example, it has been used to compute environmental efficiency . Environmental efficiency is formulated in the same way as technical efficiency except that environmental impacts, rather than observed inputs, are calculated. One limit of environmental efficiency is that it becomes difficult to measure environmental impacts. Eco-efficiency, defined as the ratio of a created value over the environmental impact, is another popular indicator for measuring sustainability that used DEA . According to Van Passel et al. , the rebound effect is one major shortcoming of eco-efficiency. The rebound effect means that advances in environmental performance may be over stated because better eco-efficiency may also lead to growth and thus increase the use of environmental resources. The paper is organized, as follows: The methodology, presented in Section 2, updates Figge and Hahn’s SV approach by introducing frontier benchmarks estimated with DEA. Section 3 contains a description of the Loess Plateau study area and the simulation data, created from the Environmental Policy Integrated Climate model . This simulation is conducted on more than 2000 different cropping-system variations that are based upon Lu’s original work and a subsequent publication that uses approximately 500 of these cropping systems . The sustainability measurements evaluate different combinations of crop rotations, production situations, terracing techniques, tillage techniques, crop residue management techniques, mechanization levels, and land units. The empirical results are reported in Section 4. Discussion and conclusions are provided in Sections 5 and 6, respectively.This section provides a summary of steps for calculating SV and SE, which are applied to the Loess Plateau example.

According to Van Passel et al. , the SV and SE can be calculated in three steps. First, the scope of the analysis is determined. The data used in the presenting study employs 2006 distinct cropping systems as entities to create sustainable value. The entities all employ all three forms of capital. Different cropping systems are characterized by various technologies and practices such as crop rotations and terracing techniques. Second, relevant resources must be identified. In the context of sustainable development, the weight of relative importance of the capital forms used by a firm can be judged by the scarcity or degree of depletion of the capital . Over 60% of land in the Loess Plateau is subjected to soil degradation. Nitrogen loss is associated with soil loss. Thus, in this study soil and nitrogen are recognized as two forms of natural capital. Soil and nitrogen data are rare to observe at the farm level or national level, which strengthens the rationale for utilizing a SV measurement. Fortunately, the simulation model in Lu et al. , which is verified by experiments, provides extensive and realistic estimates of soil and nitrogen losses associated with various cropping practices. In addition to natural capital, financial capital and human capital are also taken into account through enterprise budgeting. Third, appropriate benchmarks must be determined. Four possible benchmarks were proposed by Van Passel et al. . First, the weighted average of a sample can be used. For example,maceta de 30 litros cropping systems with conservation practices can be chosen to calculate benchmarks. Second, a super-efficient firm that uses every single type of capital in the most efficient way can serve as the super-efficient benchmark. In practice, a super-efficient cropping system is highly unlikely. Third, a performance target can be used as a benchmark. A performance target example given by Van Passel et al. is 150 kg nitrogen per ha for the farm gate nitrogen surplus for dairy farms. Fourth, the unweighted average of all firms in the sample can be used as a benchmark.The benchmark choice reflects a normative judgment of sustainable development, and thus biases the way in which the SV is interpreted . Benchmarks should therefore be chosen with great care. Since the goal of this study is to identify the most sustainable cropping systems, the best performance benchmark is preferred. A performance target may also be appropriate, but it may not be easy to specify the reasonable target level. In this paper, many possible cropping systems for the Loess Plateau are considered, so a frontier is constructed for all the possible cropping systems. The frontier takes into account the most efficient use of capital for each unique system, rather than assuming that there is a single best system. Instead of using the parametric frontier benchmark proposed by Van Passel et al. , this study adopts a non-parametric DEA to determine benchmarks. Both parametric and non-parametric approaches have been proposed in the frontier literature . Data noise can be taken into account in the parametric approach, but specification error may arise from the choice of the functional form. The dataset incorporated in this study is simulated from the EPIC model, which is described in greater detail in Section 3.

Data noise is not expected to play a significant role in the estimation of the production frontier in this study because simulated data do not present sampling bias; that is, the simulated data can be readily replicated. The DEA method is also more computationally efficient, especially when multiple capital types are considered in the production process. Another advantage is that a unique frontier benchmark is specified for each cropping system through the consideration of each technology possibility. Lu et al. identified the cropping systems in Ansai County of the Loess Plateau. A summary of these systems is presented in Table 2. Their dataset includes 2006 cropping systems that are comprised of different combinations of 5 land units, 17 crop rotations, 3 production situations, 3 terracing techniques, 2 tillage techniques, 2 crop residue management techniques and 2 mechanization levels. Corresponding outputs of interest were simulated for each system using the Environmental Policy Integrated Climate model and validated with the experimental data as described by Lu et al. . EPIC is a comprehensive simulation model designed to predict the effects of management decisions on soil, water, nutrient and pesticide movements and their combined impact on soil loss, water quality and crop yield . It consists of weather, surface runoff, water and wind erosion, nitrogen leaching, pesticide fate and transport, crop growth and yield, crop rotations, tillage, plant environment control , economic accounting, and waste management. Lu et al. developed the comprehensive dataset regarding soil, weather, crop management, fertilizer and other parameters to meet the basic requirements to run the EPIC model. Hundreds of equations are applied in EPIC to then simulate processes such as crop growth and soil erosion. As described in Section 2, in order to apply the SV approach with DEA benchmarks, the value added and capital need to be specified. As previously defined, crop revenue minus intermediate consumption is specified as “value added” in the SV approach. To cope with multidimensionality, it is assumed that each cropping system uses all forms of capital to produce value. Typically, natural capital is difficult to measure. However, the EPIC model provides an opportunity to measure soil loss and nitrogen losses directly. Nitrogen losses are estimated in EPIC through “runoff and sediment, nutrient movement by soil evaporation, denitrification, ammonia nitrification and volatilization, mineralization, immobilization, biological-fixation, contribution of rainfall and irrigation, and NO3-N leaching Lu et al. .” Lu et al. note that most of the losses of N resulted from volatilization, runoff and soil erosion. Soil loss and nitrogen loss from the EPIC model are treated as natural capital inputs in the production process. Labor is viewed as human capital. Financial capital is calculated by aggregating all conventional inputs, including seeds, nutrients , biocides, irrigation if applicable, and farm equipment . Descriptive statistics of the data are given in Table 3. Revenue and cost data, except labor, are expressed in Chinese monetary units, the RMB. Natural capital, soil and nitrogen, are described in physical units. Financial capital and human capital are expressed in the RMB monetary units. On average, 5221 RMB/ha in revenue can be produced by a 3112 kg/ha soil loss and 15.3 kg/ha nitrogen loss, a cost of 1654 RMB/ha and 1390 RMB/ha for labor. Prices used to calculate aggregate value added and capital are taken from Lu et al. .

Official reports of the Philippine Commission differed little from promotional pamphlets

Each penal farm produced enough copra for direct sales to oil refiners, in turn encouraging Americans to point to each as exemplars of progressive penology and labor control.San Ramon, one report boasted, “well merits classification as an educational centre rather than as a penitentiary.”All four hundred and seventy-two prisoners were “employed in productive labor … their employment is limited to the sort of work in which training will be of the greatest value to them upon their return to their homes, whether these be in the mountains or in the most remote fishing villages”—a remarkable assertion given that a third of prisoners were serving life sentences and excepting what the report elsewhere referred to as the occasional “escape of prisoners from San Ramon Farm and the Iwahig Penal Colony.”Prisoners absorbed the risks inherent to the large-scale planting of a tree that takes seven years to come to maturity. But once this period had passed, private investors flocked to the southern Philippines and financed the operations of the coconut empire. The largest was the International Banking Corporation, the first American bank with a charter granting it the power to open branches outside the continental United States. Its executive board and shareholders included rail and shipping magnates, many with close connections to the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, in turn, authorized the IBC to act as the fiscal agent of the state in the Caribbean, notably Panama during the canal’s construction, in China, to collect indemnities from the Boxer Rebellion, and in the Philippines.48 IBC credit smoothed the transition of colonial administrators to private business. Worcester and the former director of prisons, ML Stewart,macetas con drenaje used an IBC loan to form the American-Philippine Development Company in 1913. The company operated a private plantation near San Ramon managed by a former San Ramon superintendent.

The connections and proximity effectively created a prison-to-plantation pipeline filtering freed prisoners into contract work on the APDC plantation. Ever the agricultural entrepreneur, Worcester portrayed the conversion from Muslim dissident to disciplined laborer as complete. “Our laborers,” he wrote to a family member in the US, “are all either Samal Moros or exconvicts from the San Ramon penal station, and they are real workers, who work by the hour, and complain of a SHORT day, never of a long one.”49Wartime demand for oleochemicals and nitroglycerin sparked a rush to clear more land for coconut plantations and to open facilities for oil refining in the Philippines. In 1915, Worcester took over the management of the American-owned Visayan Refining Company’s $2 million facility in Cebu, strategically located near that island’s deep port and a short distance from the penal colony and plantations of Northern Mindanao. He would amalgamate this facility with two other firms, selling a large share of the capital stock to Lever Brothers, Ltd. of London.The Philippine National Bank, meanwhile, extended credit to Philippine landowners and businessmen eager to enter the market and limit American control of the economy. Cebuano tycoon Vicente Madrigal opened a competing oil refining facility near Worcester’s. A promise from the Philippine National Bank to compel a Manila-based shipper to buy from Madrigal at an inflated price allowed him to offer local growers and pickers higher prices than that paid by Worcester. Such competing infusions of capital, high demand, and inflated copra prices brought small farmers into the coconut market. By the end of the war, the total area planted to coconuts had trebled.Between 1910 and 1918, imports of copra into the continental US grew from 9.914 million pounds to a staggering 326 million pounds.The expansion of the coconut economy carried significant environmental and economic risks. In 1924, the American Dean of the Philippines’s College of Agriculture, Charles Fuller Baker, received a “gift” from Fiji—“a little box containing a specimen of a very small blackish moth … [that] is devastating the coconut plantations of Fiji, and the government of this group of islands, in alarm, has sent abroad for men to come and study it and try to control it.

Through this one extremely insignificant thing, the chief source of income of Fiji is imperilled.” Baker ordered an investigation in Mindanao and discovered another moth, “which may, on occasion, be nearly as bad and which may someday spread all over this Archipelago.”Baker’s investigation also uncovered a bud-rot, “which is destroying more and more of our trees” and necessitated cutting and burning of the infected plants.Baker turned the need for the scientific management of the risks of plantation agriculture into a reason for extending the American occupation. “In the Philippines,” he wrote, “we have as yet barely emerged from the ‘Dios cuidao’ stage of cultivation.”The moth, the rot, and plummeting postwar demand for copra rendered the nearly four million Filipinos linked to the coconut commodity chain precarious. Thirty-four refining facilities closed, all of which were Filipino owned. US and European firms owned the majority shares in the remaining seven mills. The US remained the main market for ninety percent of Philippine copra, rendering the coconut plantation economy more dependent on the United States at the very moment American dairy and cottonseed farmers responded to the economic crisis of the 1930s by decrying “unfair” Philippine competition.Just as the logic of tropicality informed the production of copra, so too did tropicality shape North American consumption of copra. More often, this logic emphasized the risks that tropical environments and goods posed to white Americans. The logic was not unique to copra. Louisiana cane and Western beet sugar growers, fearful of competing with Philippine and Puerto Rican sugar, invoked images of the tropics as overly sexual and damaging to white health in their campaigns to impose tariffs on insular sugar. Drawing on an assemblage of forms that April Merleaux calls “antiimperial populism,” continental sugar growers framed the “sugar trust’s” exploitation of “cheap” tropical labor as a move to undercut the well-being of white settler family farmers.United Fruit countered suspicion of the banana with mass marketing campaigns and cookbooks that domesticated the fruit.Shippers and food manufacturers of coconut oil, however, had to overcome both suspicion of the tropics and an older oleomargarine controversy. Beginning in the latter nineteenth century, North American dairy farmers retaliated against the competition posed by vegetable fats by waging a campaign for “pure food.”

The campaign tapped into the consuming public’s anxieties over the growing complexity of food processing in an age of rapid industrialization and urbanization.In this campaign, the golden yellow of butter signified purity whereas the coloring of an otherwise white oleomargarine marked it as artificial and hence impure. The campaign culminated in the 1886 “Oleomargarine Act,” which imposed a prohibitive tax rate on the import and sale of oleomargarine, then defined as any dairy butter alternative. Additional state laws prohibited oleomargarine manufacturers from dying the product yellow—a ban that crossed the northern border and was not lifted in Quebec until 2008. Other states required manufacturers to dye the product pink, further reducing oleomargarine’s likeness to butter by drawing a color line around foods considered pure and ingestible. The earliest campaigns for coconut oil products in the United States played with tropes of the tropics and the pure food controversy. The Troco Nut Butter company of Chicago and Wisconsin blended coconut oil with milk into a solid spread. The company’s landscape advertisements acknowledged the amalgamation but sought to contain the larger threat of racial miscegenation and food adulteration by depicting dairy cattle vacationing on tropical shores. The cattle lolled under the shade of tall and spindly coconut trees. The landscapes, not surprisingly,macetas 7 litros were devoid of the stout dwarf trees engineered by economic botanists and the Filipino prisoners who had picked the nuts. The company also turned the state-regulated whiteness of oleomargarine into a selling point. Far from a pale imitation of butter, Troco was “made from the white meat of tropic coconuts,” “wholesome natural ingredients,” and “appetizing natural foods we especially like to eat. The dainty white meat of coconuts churned with pasteurized milk are inviting ingredients.”The company’s 1918 Troco Cookbook further domesticated the coconut by guiding readers on how to use the product in place of butter, the price of which skyrocketed to a high of sixty cents a pound during the war. Authored by domestic science educator Ida Bailey Allen, the Troco Cookbook urged readers to think of coconut oil as part of a “balanced ration as a promotion of family health and a means toward economy.”The substitution of the oil for butter and other cooking fats contributed to a popular perception that coconut oil and butter were indistinguishable. This conflation hid the myriad industrial uses of copra, from the manufacture of nitroglycerin to detergents. It also positioned North American dairy farmers to wage a protectionist war on coconut oil when prices for butter slumped after the war. Agricultural producers on both sides of the Pacific experienced a postwar slump but dairy farmers allied with cottonseed oil manufacturers and blamed “the ‘coconut cow’ for their plight.”Beginning in 1921 and escalating during the crisis of the 1930s, organizations from the National Board of Farm Organizations to the National Conference of Dairy Organizations passed resolutions against the menace of “Oriental and foreign oils.”These groups joined with the Southern Tariff Association to form a “Tariff Defense Committee of American Producers of Oils and Fats.” Drawing on the template set by continental cane and beet sugar growers, the dairy campaign “employed racial tropes that connected the hygiene and safety of Philippine imports to the race of the workers who produced and transported them.”The Butter and Cheese Journal depicted a shipment of Philippine copra as “impossibly filthy,” smelling “like stable manure or worse” with “an army of naked Malays sweating under the tropical heat, tramping copra that is going to be made into the poor man’s butter. Think of it!” As Paul Kramer notes, the “journal’s nightmare vision joined dark visions of bodily corruption and racial invasion.”

The visions contributed to the “American liberation of the Philippines” in the form of the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act creating the Philippine Commonwealth with the promise of independence in 1946. The Philippine planters who had embraced the coconut boom now found themselves atop a 2,000,000-acre plantation hierarchy faced with ecological crises from the black moth to bud-rot, and the loss of duty-free access to its largest market. In 1939, Manuel Quezon ordered the Philippine National Assembly to investigate the coconut industry at home and abroad. The resulting commission headed by Maximo Kalaw traveled throughout the islands, Ceylon, and Marseilles, then on the eve of German occupation. Kalaw found that the attacks of North American farmers had reverberated loudly and globally. “Everywhere one goes, be it in Europe or Asia, and inquires about the copra market, he finds that Philippine copra has that black mark. It is generally placed at the bottom of the list. This has been the sad history of Philippine copra.”In addition to being held in low esteem, Philippine copra faced obstacles that had resulted from the crop’s symbiotic relationship to the US Pacific coast. The ports of San Francisco and Los Angeles removed copra from ships through sucking pumps, which meant Philippine exporters were better off packing in bulk rather than bags. The Port of Marseilles did not have this capacity. Entry into French markets therefore meant Philippine exporters would have to change copra packing methods, take on the expense of building bag factories, and forge regular shipping links to Marseilles, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen.Kalaw’s proposed solution to the loss of the American market and barriers to European markets was twofold. The first was to develop a National Coconut Corporation with the goal of improving copra production and consumption. The organization Kalaw wrote should tackle the taint on Philippine copra by imposing new measures of standardization and regulating the sanitation of copra drying facilities. Kalaw also imagined a post independence economy fuelled by coconuts not just as an export commodity but as a domestic food: “The diet of the Filipino is very deficient in fat, and that is why the average Filipino is not found to be so strong. Increase in the consumption of coconut products will give this necessary fat to the average Filipino.”Filipinos, in short, needed to eat more of the plantation crops they grew.

Baseline salinity is highest in the western Delta and lowest in the northern Delta

Researchers at Oregon State University have developed an irrigation management tool for planning, targeting and tracking the application of ET . It uses a comprehensive and sophisticated modeling of the disposition and fate of applied water in order to accurately project crop water availability into the future. Existing decision support systems used by growers do not incorporate energy and demand in their management strategies. Researchers at Oregon State University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Irrigation for the Future are collaborating on development of a decision support system that can facilitate load control automation, increased DR program participation and customer cost optimization under available electricity tariff structures. In order to do so, researchers need to develop an approach for anticipating DR event days using historical DR events, system load, and temperature data. The output from this analysis will complement the original site-specific irrigation schedule, and avoids irrigation sets from being scheduled on days with a high probability of DR. If an interruption in a planned irrigation schedule renders the original schedule infeasible, as illustrated in Example 3, the algorithm will generate alternative new schedules, reject schedules that violate operational constraints, evaluate the outcomes of feasible schedules in terms of a specified objective function,frambueso maceta and repeat this sequence in a systematic search for the best schedule. The final decision support system will provide irrigators a way to more accurately evaluate their opportunities to work with energy markets with less risk and greater transparency. This also gives energy providers and the grid a way to more accurately evaluate and predict which irrigators within their portfolios can participate in DR events as grid demands spike.

Salinity-driven reductions in agricultural production have long been a policy concern for California’s Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta . In this study we quantify the economic effects on local agriculture of changes in localized Delta water salinity for a range of sea level and water management conditions during the irrigation season. We employ the Delta Agricultural Production model , an agro-economic model for crops in the Delta that accounts for crop yield response to changes in irrigation water salinity. This work demonstrates the combined application of hydrodynamic, water salinity, and agro-economic modeling to provide policy and management insights for a major water resources problem in California. The economic effects of changes in irrigation water salinity vary in magnitude by crop, location, and the initial level of water salinity. By connecting hydrodynamic simulations with the crop production model, we find that small changes in salinity generally cause little change in Delta crop yields and revenues. Land use surveys indicate that higher-value and generally less salt-tolerant crops tend to be grown in areas of the Delta that currently have lower-irrigation water salinity; these areas do not experience major salinity changes in the simulated scenarios. These conditions allow lower-cost adaptation of cropping patterns, irrigated areas and the intensity of production factors per unit area within the Delta in response to the modeled salinity changes. Salt accumulation has affected agriculture since ancient times in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and modeling of crop salinity response has been in the literature for some decades. Crop production response to salinity also has a history in the economics modeling literature at various temporal and spatial scales . Models usually involve optimization to maximize profits or minimize costs in farming under different salinity scenarios. Also, Cardon and Letey applied Darcy’s law on “flow through a porous medium” to model plant water uptake under salinity conditions.

Knapp and Wichelns review dynamic optimization methods, finding that initial conditions matter and that large enough drainage disposal costs make water recycling more attractive. This paper uses results from Delta hydrodynamic and salinity transport modeling to provide irrigation water salinity levels for various locations in California’s Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta under a variety of sea level and water management conditions; we use these values as inputs to an agroeconomic model of crop production that includes the effects of soil salinity . Our modeling framework, presented in Figure 1, shows the flow of information among models. The hydrodynamic models provide water salinity data for different locations in the Delta. The DAP model takes crop production information from the Statewide Agricultural Production model , crop response to salinity models , and land use information from the Department of Water Resources for each water salinity scenario to produce economically optimal cropping patterns for each Delta island. Sensitivity analyses for more recent Delta export periods and fixed salinity scenarios are also part of the modeling framework. Several underlying assumptions are worth discussing. First, our approach assumes that soil salinity in the root zone is the same as that of irrigation water applied in the surface. Second, following Hoffman , we assume sufficient drainage exists in irrigated areas to avoid salt accumulation in the root zone . Hoffman concluded that many factors influencing soil salinization in general, including leaching requirements, crop salt tolerance at growth stages, shallow groundwater table, effective rainfall, irrigation efficiency and uniformity, climate, soil bypass flow, salt precipitation and dissolution, are not major factors for salt accumulation in soils in the southern Delta. In Delta locations where drainage is a concern for crop productivity, subsurface drainage has been already installed. Third, we use a sigmoidal approach for crop salinity response, as it is the best developed and well-suited for non-linear cropping optimization models like the one employed in this paper.

In addition, the sigmoidal response-function approach showed good performance compared to the threshold-linear and exponential approaches . Mass and Hoffman pioneered comprehensive assessment of crop response to soil salinity. Mass provided a threshold approach in which different crop types have relative yields constant up to thresholds in soil salinity. Beyond a threshold, relative yields decline at a constant rate. Another approach describes crop response to soil salinity in the root zone using a sigmoidal function that calibrates to a soil salinity at which crop yields are reduced by 50 percent. Other factors that may affect crops include drainage and irrigation water salinity. Drainage salinity is closely related to soil salinization, because poor soil drainage conditions retain salts. A rising groundwater table with brackish or saline water can degrade soil at the root zone with prolonged exposures. Salinity in irrigation water decreases yields for many crops. However, brackish or slightly saline irrigation water may not affect yields for some crops if the appropriate drainage exists, in which case salts do not accumulate in the root zone. Below, we present the DAP model structure and data sets, the water salinity scenarios and hydrodynamic modeling work, and model results for the water salinity scenarios . We conclude with a summary of the findings and some suggestions for further research.The Delta Agricultural Production Model estimates the irrigated crop area and the crop mix that maximizes total net revenues on land areas within the Delta, taking into account production costs, crop prices, water use,cultivar frambuesas and yield changes from irrigation water salinity . DAP is a customized version of the SWAP agro-economic model of California agriculture, augmented to examine the effects of irrigation water salinity. SWAP uses positive mathematical programming to calibrate a base case to observed values of input use, namely land, water, labor and supplies. SWAP has been used for numerous agricultural modeling applications in California including water markets, soil salinity in the Central Valley , climate change , and regional economic impacts of water markets and drought in the Central Valley . The hydrodynamic modeling used to estimate salinity changes of Delta waters is based on two models developed by Resource Management Associates, Inc. for the state-commissioned Delta Risk Management Strategies study and reported in Fleenor et al. . Development, verification, calibration and validation of both models can be found in Fleenor et al. , Bombardelli et al. and , and Fleenor and Bombardelli . First, the one-dimensional Water Analysis Module is used to estimate salinity changes with the introduction of dual conveyance of water exports and sea level rise. Fleenor et al. performed simulations with WAM over water years 1981 through 2000. Second, a two-dimensional RMA Bay-Delta model was used to estimate salinity changes from the permanent flooding of five western islands that serve as a salinity barrier at the Delta’s western edge .

RMA performed these 2-D simulations that spanned the April 2002 through December 2004 hydrologic period for the DRMS study. Permanent flooding represents conditions where the islands have either been flooded for some time or during winter months when considerable freshwater flows are available, but not the near-term results of a “Big Gulp” of salt water flowing into the Delta that might occur with catastrophic island failures during the summer or fall. We summarize these modeling results and show the model output water salinity sampling locations . To assign irrigation water salinity for each island and water salinity scenario we located the two closest sampling locations and then selected the sampling station with the highest monthly average salinity during the irrigation season. The supplementary tables in the project website provide detailed information on the sampling stations used and simulated monthly average salinity levels by island and hydrodynamic modeling scenario. To account for the largest possible monthly average salinity levels, we explored salinity conditions within a relatively long irrigation season . This choice also likely overstates the average salinity conditions most farmers face when irrigating their crops, because salinity tends to be highest in the late summer and fall, when most irrigation is finished except for pasture and hay crops.WAM simulations contrast 1981–2000 salinity conditions for three sea levels . The sea level rise projections are within the range the California Ocean Protection Council recommends for long-term planning purposes, based on recent model projections for the mid- and late-21st century . Some projections anticipate the potential for higher sea level rise by the end of the century, and these would likely generate higher salinity levels than those shown here. WAM simulations also include two Delta export configurations . RMA 2-D simulations contrast a 2002–2004 base salinity case with all islands intact and a scenario with five western islands flooded , the hatched area in Figure 3. RMA 2-D runs do not consider sea level rise. For WAM, we also contrast a base case and a dual conveyance case for critically dry years within the modeled time period . For both WAM and RMA 2-D runs, all cases assume the same daily hydrology and water system operations as those which actually occurred during the modeled periods. In the case of dual conveyance, the model draws exports through the new conveyance system unless these exports would cause Sacramento River flows to fall below a minimum environmental flow of 283.2 m3 s-1 . This environmental constraint is introduced to avoid reverse flows at the intake points that could harm fish . Average export levels during the 1981–2000 reference period used for WAM were 5.96 billion m3 yr-1 , and 7.14 million ac-ft yr-1 for the 2002–2004 reference period used for RMA 2-D. Reference salinity for each hydrodynamic model run are shown in supplementary tables in the project website . Figure 4 shows salinity as electrical conductivity during the irrigation season for the five agricultural sub regions within the Delta under different export conveyance and sea level rise cases.At current sea level, dual conveyance would increase salinity in most regions , though not necessarily in the eastern and central parts of the Delta . Sea level rise increases salinity in most cases . However, dual conveyance operations combined with sea level rise may not increase salinity in the eastern and central Delta . During dry years, salinity is generally higher than during other years in the modeled time period, and dual conveyance increases average salinity at least marginally in all regions in both the irrigation and non-irrigation seasons, as shown in Figure 5. The permanent flooding of western islands does not result in large increases in salinity over the base case during the irrigation season, although it does increase salinity somewhat more in the non-irrigation season .