This article examines the acceptance of aquaculture development by residents and visitors of two islands, Cephallonia and Ithaki, in the Ionian Sea, in western Greece. Aquaculture farms have been established recently in both islands, and processing and packaging units in Cephallonia, generating jobs for the local communities and land rents for the villages in the coastal areas near the fish cages. However, the farms and processing and packaging units entail certain negative impacts on the environment. This study reveals that aquaculture farms have found better acceptance in Ithaki, where aquaculture is a form of development suited to this remote, small, predominantly rural island. The degree of acceptability is higher for locals than for tourists, but also for islanders who do not live in the areas where the processing units are situated. Respondents who consider the pollution of the marine environment by the farms to be high, mostly locals and residents of the villages in the vicinity of the aquaculture infrastructure or the main cities in the islands, are more likely to express a negative attitude toward aquaculture and its further development.

Roundup Ready soybean technology (RR) lowers adopters' costs by (a) allowing postemergence use of the inexpensive herbicide glyphosate, (b) saving on management costs because of simple use, and (c) cutting risk by widening the time window for postemergence spraying. RR lowers nonadopters' costs by (d) creating competition that lowers other herbicides' prices. Our empirical results suggest that for most farms (a) is insufficient to cover the RR seed price premium, so (b) and (c) must be substantial for many adopters. Preliminary results indicate that RR provides bigger cost savings in the western Corn Belt than the eastern. Oligopolistic RR suppliers have set its price premium higher than potential cost/risk savings on many farms. We conclude that RR will not be fully adopted soon.

No abstract

This article examines the welfare effects of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) corn, cotton, and sugar beet regimes practiced in Greece after its 1981 entry into the European Union. Since Greek farmers produce corn, cotton, and sugar beets on the same land in different years, we model these markets as horizontally linked. By incorporating the demand for corn in our model, we take into account that corn is used as feed in livestock production. We use line integral theory to properly deal with the complications of welfare measurement in a multimarket setting. We estimate producer welfare effects of Greek corn, cotton, and sugar beet policy, and use bootstrapping techniques to obtain confidence intervals for the welfare measurements. Our analysis indicates that the income transfers to Greek farmers, (corn, cotton, and sugar beet growers as well as livestock producers considered as a total), rose between 1981 and 1992. The 1992 CAP reform led to a stabilization of income transfers to crop farmers, and lessened the negative impact on livestock producers. Copyright 2005 International Association of Agricultural Economics.

No abstract