The Mexican tortilla crisis of 2007: the impacts of grain-price increases on food-production chains
This article examines the case of the Mexican ‘tortilla crisis’ of 2007. Drawing on reviews of literature and the media, key-informant interviews, and secondary databases, the authors explore the response of the Mexican maize–tortilla chain to a price shock. Price increases should theoretically be passed on to the consumer as a progressively less significant percentage of the overall price of value-added food products. However, in Mexico, price increases were magnified along the maize–tortilla production chain. This was due largely to asymmetries among segments of the chain, which conditioned the responses of industrial-scale corporations and small-scale family businesses. This case study suggests that, in order to understand the impacts of price-shocks on poor consumers, more detailed, country-level analyses of market chains and price-transmission structures are needed.
Extending bioenergy towards smart biomass use Issues of social acceptance at Park Cuijk, The Netherlands
BackgroundWhile the share of bioenergy in the overall energy supply has increased over the last decade, its social acceptance is fragile, mainly due to concerns about negative sustainability impacts. In this paper, we will investigate to what extent the extension of bioenergy towards ‘smart’ or ‘cascaded’ biomass use enhances a project’s social acceptance. Smart use involves the prioritised use of biomass for food and materials.MethodsWe adopt an explorative single case study approach to investigate issues of social acceptance. Our case is the Biobased Economy Park at Cuijk, in The Netherlands. The central element in this project is the revival of an existing but off-line biopower plant. For the power company involved, the integration of biopower into a broader smart use scheme, involving several new business partners, is a strategy to make the exploitation of the plant profitable again. For the data collection, we used interviews, as well as information provided by members of our expert panel, in addition to information collected from websites and provided at a bioeconomy event. The data was analysed by taking existing conceptual work on the social acceptance of renewable energy innovation as a guide.ResultsWe found that issues of social acceptance changed rather than diminished when entrepreneurs extended a project’s focus from biopower to smart biomass use. This change can be observed in relation to all three conceptual categories: market acceptance, sociopolitical acceptance and community acceptance.ConclusionsWe conclude that the extension from bioenergy towards smart biomass use does not necessarily enhance a project’s social acceptance. Compared to the social acceptance of renewable energy innovation, the social acceptance of smart biomass use is fuzzier, more open to recursive patterns and more dependent upon inter-firm trust. Importantly, embracing the principle of smart biomass use instigates the question of how biomass use can be optimised—either with or without purposes related to energy. We suggest further comparative case study research into the social acceptance dynamics of smart biomass use, for which we identify the following variables as relevant: the type of bioenergy, the sector that takes the initiative, the greenfield character of the project and the complexity of the smart use scheme.
Comparison of different antenna configurations for probing of layered media
The paper presents the results of a comparative analysis of the different configurations of antenna systems (bistatic, monostatic, differential) in terms of the simplicity and accuracy of determining the thickness of the subsurface layers of stratified environment. To this end, corresponding diffraction problems are solved by the finite-difference time-domain forward solver for each measurement setup. The analysis has shown the advantages and prospects of using differential system with vertically spaced antennas in solving of practical problems of the layered medium GPR probing.