Update Sciences & technologies

After a monoculture phase, it is becoming an unavoidable necessity to diversify perennial crops (cocoa, rubber, palm or coconut oil) in humid tropical areas. Why and when should these diversification processes take place? What type of planter is involved? What are the constraints to diversification? How do public policies and private actions interfere? The authors answer these questions through fifteen case studies, mainly located in Africa and South-East Asia, thereby providing a better understanding of the economies of family plantations and their recent changes.

This book outlines how the concept of geogovernance makes the spatial issues in managing their territory visible and comprehensible to its citizens. Geogovernance is defined by numeric tools used in geography (spatial analysis, modelling, GIS, public Web). These share information between residents, users, development professionals, experts and elected representatives in order to build up jointly the decisions to be made for the territory.

The work addresses the interactions between landscapes and sustainable development measures in a few French regions. The landscape is studied as a whole at the crossroads of numerous disciplines: social sciences (geography, economics, sociology, development and town planning), living sciences (biology and ecology) and political science (participation, governance modes).

French rural areas are acquiring new roles - lighthearted, recreational, residential and also environmental and landscape - as they continue with their transformation.They are developing as a response to the assertion of new social concerns plus a diversity of key players and a wide range of goods and services.

The book is based on a deep-seated analysis of three rural areas in South-West France that all have strong heritage and food-processing potential.The author covers the promotion of food heritage and considers local food productions as resources for the future of regions.

Political ecology, a well-known approach in English-speaking countries, is a method of studying environmental issues and managing natural resources.Based on the study of powers or dominant relationships between players in these fields, it focuses especially on analysing the views and narratives that are the foundation for dominant political debates.This book attempts to broadcast this approach to a French-speaking academic audience.

The forest is not just a stock of wood or a biodiversity reserve.It is also a leisure area and, as such, is well-frequented. However, although the first two concepts are echoed genuinely within the world of forestry, the idea of opening the forest up to the public is lagging behind in France.

In the current context of neoliberal globalisation and the questions raised over its negative effects, the aim of this book is to show through miscellaneous case studies that the standardisation systems are not only new forms of regulation, institutions and social practices, but that in reality they refer to eminently political issues and to the building of a specific balance of power between players.

"Natural things simply have the status granted to them by the societies." 

Showing an interest in the future of agricultural water implies both an understanding of the transformations affecting the economic and social vocation of this water in our times as well as the irrigation networks formed by all engineered structures and equipment required to make the water resource available to the farmer.

This book is the culmination of several years of research by teams of widely-differing origins. All the researchers found themselves facing a few common questions: how to design and use a software model to understand farmer strategies? How to quantify a farm's inputs and outputs and, more globally, how to estimate the impact of changes in technical choices on the operation of farms in France and in the developing world?

Harvest losses of legumes due to contamination by the insects can be restricted using Integrated Pest Management strategies. These methods come from results obtained in Africa on the biology of coleoptera: bruchinae, hymenopteran parasitoids, biopesticides and resistant legume varieties.