Dragons with Clay Feet? presents state-of-the-art research on the impact of ongoing and anticipated economic policy and institutional reforms on agricultural development and sustainable rural resource in two East-Asian transition (and developing) economies-China and Vietnam. The contributions to this volume focus on the regional and sectoral impact of transformational policies, farm household decision making under a changing economic and institutional environment, and potential tr...

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.This hard-headed crit...

Though China's economy is projected to become the world's largest within the next twenty years, industrial pollution threatens both the health of the country's citizens and the natural resources on which their economy depends. Capturing the consequences of this reality, Bryan Tilt conducts an in-depth, ethnographic study of Futian Township, a rural community reeling from pollution.The industrial township is located in the populous southwestern province of Sichuan. Three local facto...

The EPA was established to enforce the environmental laws Congress enacted during the 1970s. Yet today lethal toxins still permeate our environment, causing widespread illness and even death. Toxic Loopholes investigates these laws, and the agency charged with their enforcement, to explain why they have failed to arrest the nation's rising environmental crime wave and clean up the country's land, air and water. This book illustrates how weak laws, legal loopholes and regulatory negligence ...

Just as people schedule regular check-ups with physicians, our planet needs regular check-ups to catch issues as early as possible, before they become more serious and harder to heal. That is the much-needed service provided on a global scale by the Worldwatch Institute in this new book, Vital Signs 2012.By taking stock of global consumption, Vital Signs 2012 offers the facts that need to guide our stewardship of the Earth's resources-and some of these facts are s...

To millions of people in the world, rice is the center of existence, especially in Asia, where more than 90 percent of the world's rice is grown. This book is about the trends and changes that have occurred in the Asian rice economy since World War II, but particularly since the introduction of new varieties of rice and modern technology in the mid-1960s. Although there is now a vast amount of literature and statistical data on various aspects of the subject, no single comprehensive treatm...

Like all industrialized countries, China has encountered increasing problems with land contamination in recent years. Abandoned mining and manufacturing sites and obsolete industrial complexes, while also creating new polluting industrial enterprises, represent impending environmental threats. More importantly, a number of social and economic problems have developed and must be dealt with, in some cases urgently. Contaminated land laws and regulations have been established and have evolved...

Agricultural Investment and Productivity provides a deep and systematic look at the opportunities for and constraints to investments in sustainable agriculture in East Africa, offering important insights into what works and how to analyze agricultural investments in one of the poorest regions of the world. The book critically examines the reasons behind East Africa's stagnant agricultural productivity over the past forty-five years, using the primary lens of investments in fertilizers, see...

In countries such as the UK, the energy used in constructing, occupying and operating buildings represents approximately fifty percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Pressure to improve the environmental performance of buildings during both construction and occupancy, particularly to reduce carbon emissions from buildings, has become intense.Understandably, legislation and regulation are driving green development and compliance. And this is happening in a wide variety of ways. This r...

Biofuels and Rural Poverty makes an original contribution to the current controversial global debate on biofuels, in particular the consequences that large-scale production of transport fuel substitutes can have on rural areas, principally in developing countries but also in some poor rural areas of developed countries.Three key concerns are examined from a North-South perspective: ecological issues (related to land use and biodiversity), pro-poor policies (related to food...

The global food crisis is a stark reminder of the fragility of the global food system. The Global Food Crisis: Governance Challenges and Opportunities captures the debate about how to go forward and examines the implications of the crisis for food security in the world’s poorest countries, both for the global environment and for the global rules and institutions that govern food and agriculture.In this volume, policy-makers and scholars assess the causes and consequences o...

The depletion of the tropical rain forests has attracted considerable attention in recent times, and the serious consequences for the global biosphere are widely acknowledged. Yet deforestation continues apace, and in some areas (for example, southeast Asia) the very existence of the forests is seriously threatened. Contrary to popular belief, evidence suggests that local economic and living conditions are more significant in this than timber exploitation for exports to the Northern countr...