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In late 2015, the El Nĩno phenomenon induced Vietnam’s worst drought in 60 years, which lasted until mid-2016 and intensified the most expansive saline intrusion in 90 years. The combination of the two hazards resulted in a large-scale disaster, which has led 18 provinces of Vietnam, most of them from the Mekong Delta, to water shortage, insanitation, human and animal diseases, food emergency need and a considerable disruption in local communities’ livelihoods. These devastating effects raise the question of what makes local households vulnerable to drought and saline intrusion. The chapter argues that vulnerability to the natural disaster is not something resulted from external threats, but rather, is derived from the interplay between social structures residing deeply inside the socio-economic systems and agency’s conditions presenting at the household level. Social structures are rules and procedures that constrain and/or enable human actions in agricultural production, risk taking and adaptation. Agency refers to the capacities of disaster-affected households in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta who cultivated third rice crop and suffered heavily from the 2015–2016 disaster. In addition to households’ lack of planning and coping capacities, the constitution of vulnerability to drought and saline intrusion can be attributed to the interaction between farmers’ choice of extra rice crops and the state’s policies and directions in agricultural and irrigation development since 1990s to date.

Food security is at risk from climate change. In fact, climate change and its drivers already affect food production through increased temperatures, changed precipitation patterns, extreme event frequency, and escalated carbon dioxide (CO₂) and ozone. These effects are expected to continue for the foreseeable future. This will cause changes to agricultural production worldwide with regional consequences for global food security. In the face of this, adaptations must be pursued that help agriculture maintain and enhance productivity under climate change while meeting growing demands for food. This chapter reviews the current literature on the impacts of climate change on agriculture and possible adaptation strategies to combat its effects. Specifically, this chapter focuses on research conducted on crop systems, livestock, fisheries, and food access.

This study concluded that food production systems around the world will be altered unevenly by climate change, with some gaining and many losing. Possible adaptation strategies will be suggested and successful implementation will need to include both public and private actions.

Given the inevitability of climate change impacting agricultural systems, adapting to the impacts is necessary to maintain future food security. More research is encouraged to determine how to best incorporate multiple systems, actors, and interests in adaptation, as well as how to best respond to the imminent threat to the food system.

Malnutrition is widespread and affects about one-third of humanity. Increasing production and consumption of vegetables is an obvious pathway to improve dietary diversity, nutrition and health. This chapter analyses how climate change is affecting vegetable production, with a special focus on the spread of insect pests and diseases. A thorough literature review was undertaken to assess current global vegetable production, the factors that affect the spread of diseases and insect pests, the implications caused by climate change, and how some of these constraints can be overcome. This study found that climate change combined with globalization, increased human mobility, and pathogen and vector evolution has increased the spread of invasive plant pathogens and other species with high fertility and dispersal. The ability to transfer genes from wild relatives into cultivated elite varieties accelerates the development of novel vegetable varieties. World Vegetable Center breeders have embarked on breeding for multiple disease resistance against a few important pathogens of global relevance and with large evolutionary potential, such as chili anthracnose and tomato bacterial wilt. The practical implications of this are that agronomic practices that enhance microbial diversity may suppress emerging plant pathogens through biological control. Grafting can effectively control soil-borne diseases and overcome abiotic stress. Biopesticides and natural enemies either alone or in combination can play a significant role in sustainable pathogen and insect pest management in vegetable production system. This chapter highlights the importance of integrated disease and pest management and the use of diverse production systems for enhanced resilience and sustainability of highly vulnerable, uniform cropping systems.

Why did peasants in old-regime Europe scatter their land in small strips within open fields? According to an influential theory advocated by Deirdre McCloskey, the system’s main aim was risk reduction. By spreading out land, peasants were less exposed to the caprices of nature: heavy rains, droughts, frost, or hailstorms. In a time when other insurance institutions were lacking, this approach could be a rational solution, even if, as McCloskey suggests, it could be achieved only at the expense of overall agricultural productivity.

Over the years, McCloskey’s theory has repeatedly been debated. Still, it has never been empirically established to what extent the open fields actually reduced risk. McCloskey offered only indirect evidence, based on hypothetical calculations from short series demesne level yields. Risks on enclosed and open-field land farms were thus never compared.

This chapter presents farm-level harvest variation series, including observations from both types of land. It is based on tithe records of 1,700 farms in Southern Sweden from 1715–1860. Results show that scattering had a limited effect on agricultural risk. The system did protect against small-scale local crop failures. It was less efficient, however, when it came to the large-scale regional harvest disasters that constituted a much more serious threat to peasants of the time. From this perspective, the inner logic of the open-field system is taken up for renewed consideration.

This paper compares the agrarian development of two indigenous communities in the highlands of Ecuador who specialize in nontraditional agricultural exports (NTAE). It brings together the peasant theory with literature on the environmental impact of globalization.

Through a comparative ethnography, based on six months of participant observation and interviewers, I illustrate the differences in production processes and explain the divergent trajectories of agrarian modernization.

I found that NTAE impacted the two communities differently: one became more ecologically sustainable and the other became more environmentally exploitative. However, neither case fits squarely within the framework of modern/traditional or peasant/capitalist. Instead of traditional environmentalism and individualistic exploitation, we see the reverse: individualistic environmentalism and traditional exploitation. That is, ecological methods are paired with individualistic competition, and environmental exploitation takes place within a system of communal solidarity.

With buyer-driven organic certification standards, global integration does not always lead to ecological degradation. For quinoa growers, traditional production practices persist not as resistance to global capitalism but as a strategy to access high-value export markets. Broccoli farmers, although exploitative of local natural resources and their own health, do so within communal institutions that buffer against individualistic risk-taking.

This comparative case presents an alternative depiction of modernization as complex and nonlinear.

The application of modern biotechnology to crop and food production is one of the most significant technological advances to impact modern agriculture. Barely a dozen years since their introduction, genetically modified (GM) crops are currently grown on more than 300 million acres worldwide. GM (or transgenic) crops are produced using plant biotechnology to select desirable characteristics in plants and transfer genes from one organism to another. As a result, crops can survive under harsher conditions, costs are lowered, and yields are improved. Scientists are introducing genes into plants that will give the plants resistance to herbicides, insects, disease, drought, and salt in the soil. Crop research in bioengineering is also aimed at improving the nutritional quality of food, such as providing healthier vegetable oils. Pharmaceutical and industrial crops (or “pharma” crops) are also on the horizon, with the potential to dramatically reduce drug production costs. Compared to traditional plant breeding, biotechnology can produce new varieties of plants more quickly and efficiently, and it can introduce desirable traits into plants that could not be established through conventional plant breeding techniques.

Agricultural and fishery disasters are rather obscure emergency management research topics. However, the Food and Agriculture Sector is one of only 16 critical infrastructure sectors included in the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988, and the sector is a vital component of the United States economy. As climate change continues to increase the frequency and severity of agricultural and fishery disasters, the Food and Agricultural Sector must adapt to and cope with unprecedented levels of risk. This chapter provides an overview of federal agricultural and fishery disaster policy and explores whether such policies are consistent with Jerroleman’s (2019)principles of just recovery.

Purpose – The chapter examines the international welfare effects of biotech crop adoption, based on a transversal literature review and a case study of the introduction of genetically modified (GM) food crops in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Methodology/approach – The analysis is based on (a) a review of lessons from the applied economic literature and (b) simulations using an improved multimarket, multicountry, computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, calibrated with productivity hypotheses formulated with local scientists in the four Asian countries.

Findings – Results from the analysis show that, in the absence of trade-related regulations, GM crop adoption generates economic gains for adopting countries and importing non-adopters, that domestic regulations at adopters and especially non-adopters can reduce these gains, and that import regulations in other countries can also affect gains for exporting adopters. The case study illustrates these conclusions, but it also shows that net importers will mostly benefit from adoption in their terms of trade, and that segregation of non-GM crops for export markets can be beneficial if it is not too costly.

Research limitations/implications – The use of a CGE model allows for accounting for cross-sectoral effects, and for regulations affecting bilateral trade flows, but it also has a number of limitations. The model used here, like the ones used in the other papers in the literature, is static, based on an aggregated representation of the global economy (GTAP database), and assumes perfect competition. This means that the absolute results of each scenario may not perfectly represent the actual welfare effects engendered by the adoption of biotech crops. Still, what matters here is the comparison of the relative welfare effects across countries and scenarios. The simulations are also done ex-ante, so, even if the model here was calibrated with country-based data, the results do depend on hypothetical assumptions about the performance of the selected technologies.

Originality/value of the paper – The chapter aims to illustrate the welfare effects generated by GM crops for adopters, non-adopters, in a segmented and regulated international market. Unlike other papers, the review section provides key transversal lessons from the literature, accounting for results from both partial equilibrium and CGE model studies. The empirical application focuses on four populous Asian countries that have been largely left out of the literature. The model used in the simulation presents a number of improvement from the CGE literature on GM crops, including partial adoption, factor-biased productivity shock in each adopting country, GM labeling regulations modeled as trade filters, and the inclusion of costly non-GM segregation as observed in the international market.

Purpose – To identify how agricultural biotechnology addresses the two challenges facing agriculture: to feed a world growing to 9 billion people by 2050 and to provide a liquid fuel alternative to petroleum.

Design –This chapter relies on econometric modeling, a review of existing literature, and diagrammatic modeling to articulate the impact of agricultural biotechnology on food and energy markets.

Findings –Agricultural biotechnology reduces the tension between food security and biofuel production. It reduces volatility in food and fuel markets and can mitigate risk to biofuel processors.

Originality – The analysis is original although it relies on previous research to some extent. The analysis is compared to and contrasted with related work.