Staple Production Research Articles

Northern naval superiority and the economics of the American Civil War

ADDRESSING AN ASPECT of the Civil War that has long been a source of controversy among historians, David G. Surdam offers an unconventional analysis of the Union's naval blockade. He questions common methods of evaluating the strength of the 3,500-mile siege line, disputes widely held interpretations of its impact, and explores previously unexamined aspects of the blockade as he presents a case for the effectiveness of the Union naval effort. Surdam seeks to explain the failure of the Confederacy to wage war and sustain independence despite an apparently sufficient supply of raw cotton to trade with Europe and Canada for war materiel and enough beef and corn to feed its troops. To do so he expands the traditional approach to the blockade, finding that a focus on the number of goods that slipped past Union ships overlooks two of the blockade's most important achievements: disrupting intraregional trade and denying the Confederacy badly needed revenue from the export of raw cotton and other staple products. Explicating the blockade's indirect yet devastating results, Surdam examines the degradation of railroad lines, collapse of specific internal markets, and effect on the exportation of cotton. He also explores how the blockade affected the cross-country movement of crops to hungry soldiers and civilians and how costs associated with the blockade consumed most of the higher prices that Europeans paid for Southern cotton.

The Challenge of Ending Rural Poverty

IFAD believes that the only way to reach the international poverty reduction target is to focus on rural development: in the early stages, with a strong focus on the production of food staples on small farms; in later stages, with more attention to commercial crops and the non‐farm sector (itself strongly linked to agriculture). The key interventions are: better access for the poor to assets, especially land, water and human capital; improved technology, both ‘old’ and ‘new’; better access to markets; and reform of institutions through decentralisation and devolution ‐ all designed to achieve rapid reduction of poverty, through employment intensity and the exploitation of local linkages with agriculture. IFAD’s approach and experience lay particular stress on supporting women and minorities.

Introduction to the Special Issues on Plant GM Technology

Introduction to the Special Issues on Plant GM Technology

London Publishing, 1640-1660: Crisis, Continuity, and Innovation

The period between 1640 and 1660, which experienced the English Civil Wars, the execution of the king, the establishment of a republican Commonwealth, its replacement by Cromwell's Protectorate, and, finally, the Restoration of Charles II, was one in which the printing press played a critical role, a role recognized by both contemporaries and later historians. Scholarly attention has tended to center on two kinds of publishing: the invention of the periodical and newspaper press and the extraordinary outpouring of heterodox ideas of all kinds in pamphlet form, both of which are extensively represented in the Thomason Collection. 1 However, the way in which they have been foregrounded has until recently obscured the importance of the trade's production of Royalist literary texts. As Lois Potter's Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641-1660 (1989), Steven N. Zwicker's Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 (1993), and James Loxley's Royalism and Poetry in the [End Page 1] English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (1997) have shown, these represented a sustained oppositional challenge to the Parliamentary victors. The role of the book trade, and more specifically the role of booksellers as publishers, is implicit in all these works, but it has been assumed rather than addressed directly. Lois Potter's opening chapter gives a general account of the press in these years, 2 and thereafter takes for granted the enabling function of the book trade. Since there is, as far as I know, no overall analysis of what the London trade was publishing in these years, 3 what follows is an attempt to give a broad outline of the trade's output in the 1640s and 1650s. This account brings together readily available examples, existing accounts of individual booksellers, publishing genres, or notable books, along with some less well-known cases. Importantly, it reaches well beyond the three most-studied genres: periodicals, heterodox pamphlets, and Royalist literature. This overview suggests that the two decades of successive political crisis offered the book trade new openings and possibilities that were quickly exploited. A necessary preliminary question is how far political upheavals affected the London book industry. While it is true that trade was disrupted by the Civil Wars and that the Stationers' monopoly was seriously threatened, 4 both the Company and the book trade survived the Interregnum. Parliament rapidly took measures to control the press: the Parliamentary ordinance of 14 June 1643 required all books and pamphlets to be licensed, followed by a further ordinance in 1647 and a Parliamentary act in 1649. In fact, the Company continued to function, copyholders continued to register books, tradesmen of opposed political and religious persuasions continued to publish, and there continued to be disputes over the rights to the ownership of copy, disputes that could go beyond the Stationers' jurisdiction and reach the attention of Parliament. 5 Many of the men trading in the 1640s were still at work in the 1660s, and some worked for both Cromwell and the Stuarts. Thomas Newcombe (fl. 1649-81), who was bitterly attacked as a printer for Parliament, 6 gained a one-sixth share in the King's Printing House in the Restoration and was the printer of the official Oxford and London Gazettes. Richard Royston (fl. 1629-86), imprisoned in 1645 for publishing anti-Parliamentary works and subsequently in frequent trouble with the Council of State, was granted the right to print Charles I's works at the Restoration and was elected Master of the Stationers' Company in 1673 and 1674. A clear sign of the overall continuity of the book trade and its control by the Company from the early 1640s is the publication of its staple products. Psalms carried on being printed throughout the period for the Stationers' Company, 7 as did schoolbooks and almanacs. 8 Bibles were, in the [End Page 2] troubled years of the Civil Wars, a dangerously large investment for the Company, but after a brief period in which this was taken...

Human Factors Gets Cooking

Even a staple product like cookware can achieve new market success through ergonomics research and design.

Inter-fiber Distances in Paper and Nonwovens

The statistical geometry of paper was studied by Kallmes, Corte, and others in a classical series of papers in the 1960s. The model they used consisted of infinitely long fibers in stacked layers, each layer conforming to a ‘Poisson process.’ Their model can thus be applied directly to a continuous filament (or spunbonded) nonwoven but must be replaced by a more general treatment for staple (finite fiber length) nonwovens and paper. This paper develops such a staple model and shows that the resulting fiber to fiber distances now follow a ‘general gamma’ distribution rather than the ‘negative exponential’ given by Kallmes and Corte for continuous filament structures. It is also shown that the ‘general gamma’ distribution can statistically describe ‘non-random’ as well as ‘random’ structures. Such ‘non-random’ fabrics can be flocculated (worse than random) or dispersed (better than random)! The structural differences between staple fiber and continuous filament products are roughly traced back to their formation processes. This improved model of the structure of paper and staple nonwovens should lead to a better connection between structure and all of the physical properties of these materials, which depend on inter-fiber distances.

A Decision Support System for Planning Manufacturers' Sales Promotion Calendars

A common event in the consumer packaged goods industry is the negotiation between a manufacturer and a retailer of the sales promotion calendar. Determining the promotion calendar involves a large number of decisions regarding levels of temporary price reductions, feature ads, and in-store displays, each executed at the level of individual retail accounts and brand SKUs over several months or a year. Though manufacturers spend much of their marketing budget on trade promotions, they lack decision support systems to address the complexity and dynamics of promotion planning. Previous research has produced insights into how to evaluate the effectiveness of promotional events, but has not addressed the planning problem in a dynamic environment. This paper develops a disaggregate-level econometric model to capture the dynamics and heterogeneity of consumer response. By modeling the purchase incidence (timing), choice and quantity decisions of consumers we decompose total sales into incremental and nonincremental (baseline plus borrowed). The response model forms the basis of a market simulator that permits us to search for the manufacturer's optimal promotion calendar (subject to a set of constraints, some of them imposed by the retailer) via the simulated annealing algorithm. Calendar profits are the net result of the contribution from incremental sales minus the opportunity cost from giving away discounts to nonincremental sales and the fixed costs associated with implementing promotional events (e.g., retagging, features, displays). Incremental sales result from promotion-induced switching, the acceleration and quantity promotion effects on those switchers, increased consumption and the carryover effect from purchase event feedback. We applied our approach to the promotion-planning problem of a large consumer-packaged goods company in a nonperishable, staple product category suggested by company executives (canned tomato sauce). Subject to a retailer pass-through constant rate of 80%, provided to us by the collaborating firm, the optimal promotion calendar produced by the modeling system followed a pattern of frequent and shallow temporary price reductions with no feature or display activity. We also analyze how that result would change under different retailer pass-through scenarios. Our findings indicated that the manufacturer could substantially improve the profitability of its sales promotion activity and that there would be a concurrent positive effect on retailer profit and volume levels. Management reported to us that the insights from the use of the system were implemented in their promotion-planning process and produced positive results. A validation analysis on follow-up data for one market showed that promotion activity could be significantly reduced, as recommended, with no adverse effect on the brand's market share, as predicted. To generalize the model beyond the specific category where it was implemented, we conducted a sensitivity analysis on the profile of the calendar (i.e., frequency, depth, and duration of deals) with respect to changes in market response, competitive activity, and retailer pass-through. First, we found that the optimal depth, frequency, and timing of discounts is stable for price elasticities ranging from near zero to around four (in absolute magnitude). We also found no systematic impact of competitive promotions on the profile of the optimal calendar. For example, variation in competitive activity did not affect the optimal depth or frequency of discounts. Lastly, we found changes in retailer pass-through to have a significant effect on the optimal depth and number of weeks of trade promotion that a manufacturer should offer. This emphasizes the importance to manufacturers of having accurate estimates of pass-through for purposes of promotion budgeting and planning.

FANUC ‐ the planning and development of a highly advanced robotized production system for servo motors

States that 16 years have passed since the commencement of operation of FANUC’s existing factory for assembling servo motors, the company’s staple products. The factory has attained a monthly production capacity of 25,000 units through persistent efforts to improve robotization and automation. To further improve productivity and enhance production capacity, FANUC recently constructed a new servo motor assembly factory. It employs the most up‐to‐date robots and linear motors. The new factory has a monthly production capacity of 50,000 units. This article introduces the new factory, focusing on the features of the physical distribution and production technologies it uses.

XML Is Hatching

T he intense promotion of Internet technologies makes it difficult for the busy scientist to separate fact from fiction. At the cutting edge, it is often pointless to try, since most new ideas fail to gain widespread acceptance in the marketplace. It is often best to watch as embryonic technologies mature in their “larval” stage, looking for signs that the technology is being incorporated into current software and tools. Use in solving practical problems and adoption by major organizations and companies are also good signs. However, many Internet “inventions” never make it to these last stages. One technology that has now developed to the point of hatching and is well on its way to leaving the nest is the extensible markup language, or XML. XML is being developed by a large and dynamic group under the leadership of the W3 consortium, the group that brought you HTML, the language of the World Wide Web. In the simplest sense, XML can be viewed as a way of attaching additional layers of meaning to any word or words. This is done by incorporating meta-information into the text in the form of tags. A text selection with XML tags will have the following structure: Item . The tags can be nested to create complex organizations. The additional meaning, or meta-data, that the tags deliver can be extracted easily by software tools. Simply viewing the tags by eye is useful. In an XML document you can extract selected pieces of data from the body of the text. If this all seems too abstract, a concrete example follows. Let's take the field of human genetics, where gene mutation data are a staple product of this research. Unfortunately, the actual data in most genetics manuscripts (the mutation positions, the phenotypes, the assays used, and so forth) are all buried in the body of the text at publication time. For instance, to review the world's literature for all of the mutations in the gene p16 that cause melanoma, you would have to find the hundreds of papers that mention p16, read them all, extract the data manually, correct the data for the different numbering schemes used in several hundred different mutations, and so on. The task is daunting, and it underscores the need for a different way to handle this type of scientific data. Mutation databases are being formed. Such databases are easy to start, but they are very difficult to maintain in the long run. Given the numbers of genes studied, it is hard to see how high-quality databases can be kept for each one. Also, without standards, it is difficult to compare or collate data from different databases. Instead, what if we just assigned a few XML tags to the published data as it resides on the publisher's Web site? Add tags such as p16 or E30A and it would now be easy for software tools to extract the actual data automatically, collect it into one data structure, and allow you to visualize it in many different ways. You could feed many papers into an XML grinder to get data from multiple sources. All you need for this to work is a common set of tags to describe mutations. This set does not yet exist for genetics, but it is easy to imagine by just extrapolating from work done in other fields. In the field of chemistry, an advanced set of XML tags has been created and deployed already. Termed Chemical Markup Language (CML), the tags provide a way of describing the structure of any molecule—the atoms, the bonds, the isotopic constitution. Think of CML as a networked version of standard chemical nomenclature. XML is now emerging as the standard method for passing structured data over the Internet. All major Internet-based companies have supported XML in this regard. In fact, Microsoft has embedded XML into the next version of its popular Office product. With this new release, Microsoft Word documents will be automatically translated into XML. This alone means that the general use of XML documents will rise considerably. The software development community as a whole is now focusing on incorporating XML into everything from browsers to databases. Currently, the 4.0 version of Microsoft Internet Explorer can process and display XML documents. The 5.0 versions from both Microsoft and Netscape will handle XML as well. This will make XML the de facto standard for distributed, tagged data. Additionally, many tools for creating XML and interacting with existing databases are in early releases today. Over the next few months, there will be many to choose from. Given the large support for XML and its incorporation into the infrastructure of the next wave of Internet computing, the field of science will realize many benefits from this technology.

Socio-economic change and rural morale in South Australia, 1982–1993

Australia, dubbed ‘the lucky country’ by Donald Horne in 1964, still carries a residual image of prosperity and egalitarianism. This paper seeks to show how the morale of its rural people has been impacted by a decade of crisis conditions brought about by natural events, political decisions and adverse terms of trade for export-dependent staple products. At the same time, counter-urbanisation trends have continued in the more accessible and environmentally attractive rural areas, producing two sharply differentiated zones within rural Australia. Using South Australia as a case study, the paper illustrates the results of these trends in terms of rural poverty and demographic change. It then uses qualitative data from responses to a postal survey of 2000 rural households to analyse their perceptions of change over the crisis decade, identifying ten recurrent themes and relating them to the observed patterns of depressed incomes and demographic change. Respondents' own words are used to tell the story.

Nutrition, labour productivity and labour supply of men and women in Ghana

Ghana’s population is expected to increase from 14.1 million in 1990 to 18.7 million in 2000 (Bumb et al., 1994). This growth in population along with growth in per capita income and urbanisation will create increased demand for food. Before the launching of the Economic Reform Programme in 1983 Ghana’s food production had fallen to an abysmally low level in response to the general deterioration in the economy. Output of food and cash crops declined at a rate of 0.3 percent per year between 1970 and 1980. Cereal production, which exceeded domestic demand by some 200,000 tonnes in 1971–73, registered a deficit of over 300,000 tonnes in 1981–83. Production of starchy staples fell from 7.9 million tonnes to 4.1 million tonnes between 1974 and 1981. As a result of declining food output combined with a rising population, per capita food availability in 1981–83 was 30 percent lower than it was in 1975. Efforts made under the Economic Recovery Programme have improved the food supply situation in the country although food production levels still remain low. Output levels of cocoyam and plantain have not reached their average levels in the early 1970’s (Table 9.1).

A produção de alimentos básicos: reestruturação regional?

The evolution of development policy and the behavior of farm prices is related to change in the production of the traditional staples beans, manioc, maize and rice during three distinct periods: 1940-1964, 1964-1979 and 1979 to date. From 1940 onward staple production in the economic heartland of Brazil came under increasing pressure from expanding export and agroindustrial production on one hand and from discriminatory pricing policy on the other. In response to this pressure staple farmers in the South, Southeast and more recently in the Central-West increased productivity through flexible capitalization. Production continued to expand in these regions so that they still dominate the national market for beans, maize and rice. At the same time horizontal expansion of food production on the distant frontier proved to be insignificant and fell drastically in the depressed peripheral Northeast region disproving theses which attribute staple production to pre-capitalist peasant farmers of these regions.

Goniophotometric Assessment of Bulk-Related "Optical" Carpet Streaks in Finished Nylon Carpets

Further work on bulk-related "optical" carpet streaks is reported here, focusing on their instrumental characterization. Texturing process conditions have been adjusted to create bulk variation in both commercial staple and bulk-continuous-filament (BCF) products. For the staple items, bulk is characterized in the fiber, in the pre- and postheat set yarns, and in the carpet tuft itself. Both the staple fiber and heat-set yam methods are new. Yarns from both carpet manufacturing processes have been implanted as tuftlines into multiple carpet backgrounds, each background made with different levels of bulk. Sixty such staple and 144 BCF implants, most obvious streaks because of their bulk differences, have been evaluated by graders for intensity and shade; these grades correlate well with those ranked instrumentally ( R2 = 0.91 and 0.94, respectively) and, for the staple products, with various measures of bulk ( R2 from 0.78 to 0.95). Goniophotometry has also been used to ascribe the unique optical effect commonly seen in bulk-related streaks, that of changing shade with view direction, to the carpet's surface filament configuration.

AGRICULTURAL COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGES IN DEVELOPMENT REGION G OF SOUTH AFRICA: AN APPLICATION OF A REGIONAL LINEAR PROGRAMMING MODEL

Abstract The purpose of this article is to model the agricultural production sector of Region G to determine whether Development Region G of South Africa has comparative advantages with respect to the production of certain agricultural commodities. The analysis is based on an application of an advanced regional linear programming model. With the present marketing system production of fruit and vegetables, livestock and livestock products, and animal feeds, e.g. soya beans, should be expanded. On the other hand, production of staples, e.g. maize and wheat, and other summer cash crops should be scaled down. Under a free market system there also seems to be, apart from the commodities already mentioned above, a comparative advantage for specifically dryland staple food production.

Food self-sufficiency in Micronesia: Effects of a nutrition assistance programme on agricultural production

Food assistance programmes in Micronesia have been blamed for creating disincentives to agriculture and nutritionally adverse dietary habits. In 1982 a USDA commodity programme in the Northern Mariana Islands was replaced by the Nutrition Assistance Program (NAP), which required that at least 25% of food coupons be used for the purchase of local foods. There were significant increases in production of fish, bread and eggs following implementation of the NAP, but little evidence of any stimulation of production of fruit, vegetables, staples, milk, pork or beef. A farmers survey indicated that frequent typhoons, lack of farm services and inadequate marketing have hindered development of the agricultural sector. Thus the impact of incentives to increase demand for local foods will be limited unless sufficient attention is also given to increasing the supply.

Complex hunter-gatherers: Exception or common phenomenon?

What economic systems were capable of providing a substantial foundation for the development of social differentiation in archaic kin-oriented societies? What were the natural, social and demographic requirements for these systems to come into beinz? Were there any natural or technological constraints for the~'r emergence and evolution? V.G. Childe gave currency to the idea that a transition to a foodproducing economy was a crucial turning point in human prehistory, 1 stimulating important economic, social and demographic changes. 2 Childe was apparently right in stressing economic, rather than technological, criteria for the Neolithic. Indeed, the presence or absence of special technological innovations .(polished axes, ceramics, and so on) could be of an accidental nature m any particular case, whereas an attempt to relate the Neolithic to economic evolution provided the concept with a more substantial base. In fact, what can be more logical than to contrast societies that devoted themselves to the appropriation of wild natural resources with those that occupied themselves with the artificial production of staples? As K. Marx pointed out many years ago, 3 land, plants and animals were not only objects but also products of human labor among; the earliest farmers and pastoralists, whereas land and wild animals were a natural factor of economic activity among hunters, gatherers and fishermen. This observation was frequently quoted by those Marxist anthropologists who treated a transition to a food-producinl~ economy-as a great benefit that allowed farmers and pastoralists to advance far ahead of the rest of the world s populations. 4 From this perspective, the latter became socially backward and dropped out of the main trajectory of human evolution.

Peasant Patriarchy and the Subversion of the Collective in Vietnam

The Vietnamese peasant family economy operated according to its own dynamic, which sustained itself and undercut the collective economy. Although the Workers' Party was successful in some early aspects of collectivization, peasant patriarchs ultimately challenged collective institutions, forcing a return to family farming. The mechanism of this success was their careful control of the labor of women and children in small plot, kitchen garden and handicraft activities that, because of socialist pricing policies, were more profitable than the collective production of staples.

Marketing Policy and the Loss of Food Self-Sufficiency in Rural Belize

Past observers attributed Belize's record of national deficits in staple crop production to the country's colonial legacy of suppressed agriculture and underdeveloped infrastructure. Yet following marketing policy revisions in the mid-1970s, Belizean agriculture was able to satisfy the country's requirements for basic staples, suggesting that cultural-historical factors need not preclude food self-sufficiency. Since 1983 food shortfalls and importation have once again developed following the abandonment of earlier incentives for staple production. Marketing policies in agriculture are constrained by patterns of capital accumulation distinctive to peripheral economies as well as Belize's position within the world economy. While the former requires the provision of low-cost food to wage-earning sectors, the latter precludes price incentives for staple crop producers. The effects of these constraints are illustrated with longitudinal data from rural Stann Creek district in southern Belize. Problems in staple...

1992 from the perspective of the UK food manufacturer

SummaryAccording to a recent survey*, ‘British companies are not perceived to be a major threat by rival European firms. In contrast, the UK is a heavily targeted market for foreign companies’.Real expenditure on food is increasing but at a lower rate than total consumer spending. Food expenditure as a percentage of total consumer spending has dropped to 14% in the UK. This is the lowest of any European country but still a few points higher than in the USA.Expenditure on food consumed outside the home is also increasing at a much faster rate than expenditure on food for consumption at home. This type of expenditure now amounts to 30% (much less in terms of the quantity of food consumed, of course) of consumer spending, compared with 45% in the USA and is still growing.Within household food consumption, an increasing proportion of expenditure is going on convenience products.Throughout Europe similar trends are apparent — increased opportunities for prepared products offering high quality, high nutritional value, freshness' and convenience. The balance between the various attributes most valued by consumers has varied over time within countries and differs between countries at any given time.The UK is one of the most developed markets in terms of expenditure on convenience foods, ownership of freezers and microwave ovens. (Fig. 1) This provides home companies with a large base from which to export and an attractive target for continental companies looking for diversification from staple products.

Epidemiological and experimental studies on the antitumor activity by green tea extracts.

Vital statistics for Japanese people showed that the death rate from cancer, especially stomach cancer in both males and females in Shizuoka Prefecture is much lower than the average of Japanese people. We further investigated this phenomenon epidemiologically and experimentally. The results were as follows:1) The standardized mortality ratio (SMR) for cancer of all sites and stomach cancer in the midwest areas of Shizuoka Pref. where green tea is the staple product was much lower compared with the national avarage in both sexes.2) Significant differences in habitual green tea drinking of the inhabitants between “3K Town” with low SMR and “O Town” with high SMR due to stomach cancer were observed in both sexes.3) The extracts from fresh green tea leaves were effective on growth inhibitory activity against mouse sarcoma 180.These data suggest the possibility that the green tea may be capable of diminishing cancer risk.