In October 2011 the European Commission presented a set of legal proposals designed to make the Common Agricultural Policy more effective. Pending a debate in the European Parliament and the Council, approval is expected by the end of 2013. This Forum aims to identify the proposals' shortcomings...

Der steile Anstieg der Nahrungsmittelpreise hat zu einer allgemeinen Verunsicherung geführt. Nach Ansicht von Joachim von Braun, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, können die Lebensmittelpreise langfristig nur durch eine Steigerung der Produktion stabilisiert werden. Vor...

Over the past decades, the modernization of agriculture in the Western world has contributed not only to a rapid increase in food production but also to environmental and societal concerns over issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, soil quality and biodiversity loss. Many of these concerns,...

The paper revisits the fundamental question of the nature of the firm by contrasting two philosophic worldviews suggested by process philosophy and the Luhmannian systems theory. Whereas the former worldview takes reality to be internally related, the latter ones underscores the tendency of...

In a recent contribution to this journal, Deng et al. (2021) draw on an extensive range of theoretical and empirical literature to make the case for the tendency of social capital resources of agricultural cooperatives in the Western world to decline over time. The present paper revisits this...

Purpose: Despite the worldwide importance of third sector organizations in rural areas, the theoretical connection between the third sector and rural development remains largely unexplored. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical explanation of why and how third sector...

Modern stakeholder theory is premised on the ‘integration thesis’, according to which business and ethics constitute an inseparable unity. For many management scholars, this thesis raised the difficult question of how far business can pursue ethical goals without losing its functional...

Based on a case study of two Moldovan regions, the paper challenges the favourable assessment of recently established peasant farms in a World Bank study by LERMAN et al. (1998). The main arguments in favour of a more critical view of the results of land privatisation and farm restructuring are...