Environmental Valuation & Cost-Benefit News

According to The New York Times:
...Wheat prices have doubled in the last six months. Corn is on a tear. Barley, sunflower seeds, canola and soybeans are all up sharply.
...
Everywhere, the cost of food is rising sharply. Whether the world is in for a long period of continued increases has become one of the most urgent issues in economics.

Many factors are contributing to the rise, but the biggest is runaway demand. In recent years, the world’s developing countries have been growing about 7 percent a year

Farmers the world over are producing flat-out. American agricultural exports are expected to increase 23 percent this year to $101 billion, a record. The world’s grain stockpiles have fallen to the lowest levels in decades.

“Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe,” said Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource Company, a Chicago consultancy. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.”

In contrast to a run-up in the 1990s, investors this time are betting — as they buy and sell contracts for future delivery of food commodities — that scarcity and high prices will last for years.
...
Rising food prices in the United States are already helping to fuel inflation...

The [price] increases that have already occurred are depriving poor people of food, setting off social unrest and even spurring riots in some countries.
...
The Agriculture Department forecasts that farm income this year will be 50 percent greater than the average of the last 10 years.

[However],Farmers’ own costs are rising rapidly.
....
Around the world, wheat is becoming a precious commodity. In Pakistan, thousands of paramilitary troops have been deployed since January to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour.
...
In the United States, the price of dry pasta has risen 20 percent since October, according to government data. Flour is up 19 percent since last summer. Over all, food and beverage prices are rising 4 percent a year, the fastest pace in nearly two decades.
...
The Agriculture Department forecasts that world wheat production will increase 8 percent this year. In the United States, spring and durum wheat plantings are expected to rise by two million acres, helping to drive prices down to $7 a bushel, the government said.

Yet the competition among crops for acreage has become so intense that some farmers think the government and analysts ... are being overly optimistic.
...
Nigeria grows little wheat, but its people have developed a taste for bread, in part because of marketing by American exporters. Between 1995 and 2005, per capita wheat consumption in Nigeria more than tripled, to 44 pounds a year. Bread has been displacing traditional foods like eba, dumplings made from cassava root.

by David Streitfeld
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/worldbusiness/09crop.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
The New York Times www.NYTimes.com
March 9, 2008

Abstract: This paper aims to give a comparative analysis of the different enforcement approaches with respect to both civil and common law systems (i.e. Europe vs. USA) by analyzing some crucial aspects of their underlying normative systems. Therefore, the role of the juridical institutions in these two diverse contexts is analyzed, in order to identify economic efficiency implications based upon the theory of public enforcement of environmental laws.

Keywords: environmental enforcement, economic analysis of law, common law, civil law.

Actual Title: The Environmental Enforcement in the Civil and the Common Law Systems. A Case on the Economic Effects of Legal Institutions

by Anna Rita Germani; University of Rome “La Sapienza”; Institute of Economics and Finance, Department of Juridical Sciences, Law School; p.le Aldo Moro, 5 – 00185 – Rome; e-mail: annarita.germani@uniroma1.it

Università degli Studi di Foggia; Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Matematiche e Statistiche; Largo Papa Giovanni Paolo II, 1; 71100 Foggia (Italy); Tel. +39 0881-75.37.30, Fax +39 0881-77.56.16
Quaderno n. 22/2007, 2007
http://www.dsems.unifg.it/q222007.pdf
via REPEC www.REPEC.org

Abstract: Tradable water right systems are becoming important ways to achieve distributive efficiency in water resources. In 2002, China's Ministry of Water Resources initiated a pilot project in Zhangye City in Northwest China. The project was designed to establish a new water use rights system with tradable water quotas with the hope of reallocating water resources more efficiently through market-based instruments. However, the tradable water right system is not well enforced. Based on both primary and secondary data, we find that mutual monitoring can improve the effectiveness of a water allocation and trading program. For both surface water and groundwater irrigation systems, the conditions needed to stimulate mutual monitoring include: (1) a hierarchical management system; (2) well defined water rights or quotas; (3) control of total water quotas and water sources by the upper hierarchy; and (4) an approximate balance between the water supply or pumping capacity and the water quota. We describe also the institutional requirements for stimulating mutual monitoring.

Keywords: Transaction costs; Principal–agent theory; Irrigation area

by Jun-Lian Zhang and Feng-Rong Zhang; both of College of Resources and Environmental Science, China Agricultural University, No. 2 Yuanmingyuan West Road, Beijing 100094, China; Tel.: +86 10 62732950; fax: +86 10 62732498.

Agricultural Water Management via Elsevier Science Direct www.ScienceDirect.com
Volume 95, Issue 3; March, 2008; Pages 331-338
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2007.10.016

Abstract:
Objectives: Asthma can be associated with substantial productivity loss and activity impairment, particularly among those with the most severe disease. We sought to assess the performance characteristics of an asthma-specific adaptation of the Work Productivity and Activity Impairment Questionnaire (WPAI:Asthma) in patients with either severe or difficult-to-treat asthma.

Methods: We analyzed 2529 subjects from The Epidemiology and Natural History of Asthma: Outcomes and Treatment Regimens (TENOR) study. The WPAI:Asthma was administered at baseline and at 12 months. Asthma control and quality-of-life were simultaneously assessed using the Asthma Therapy Assessment Questionnaire and Mini-Asthma Quality-of-Life Questionnaire, respectively.

Results: Severe versus mild-to-moderate asthma was associated with a greater percentage of impairment at work (28% vs. 14%), at school (32% vs. 18%), and in daily activities (41% vs. 21%). At baseline, greater asthma control problems correlated with higher levels of impairment as measured by the WPAI (work: r = 0.54, school: r = 0.37, activity: r = 0.55). Over the 12-month follow-up period, improved quality-of-life correlated with decreased levels of impairment (work: r = −0.42, school: r = −0.36, activity: r = −0.48). In multivariate analyses, greater than 10% overall work impairment at baseline predicted emergency visits (OR 2.6 [1.6, 4.0]) and hospitalization (OR 4.9 [1.8, 13.1]) at 12 months.

Conclusions: The WPAI:Asthma correlates with other self-reported asthma outcomes in the expected manner and predicts health-care utilization at 12 months when administered to patients with severe or difficult-to-treat asthma.

by Hubert Chen 1, Paul D. Blanc 2, Mary L. Hayden 3, Eugene R. Bleecker 4, Anita Chawla 5 and June H. Lee 6, TENOR Study Group
1. MD, MPH, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA and Genentech, Inc., South San Francisco, CA, USA; E-mail: hubert.chen@ucsf.edu
2. MD, MSPH, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA;
3. FNP, AE-C, School of Nursing, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA;
4. MD, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
5. PhD, Genentech, Inc., South San Francisco, CA, USA;
6. MD, Genentech, Inc., South San Francisco, CA, USA

Value in Health via Blackwell Publishing www.Blackwell-Synergy.com
Online early article
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1524-4733.2007.00229.x
doi:10.1111/j.1524-4733.2007.00229.x