Faculty of Political Sciences

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://localhost:4000/handle/123456789/4

Browse

Browsing Faculty of Political Sciences by Subject "Agriculture"

Filter results by typing the first few letters
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Evaluating the effectiveness of the EU's approach to the sustainable use of pesticides
    (Public Library of Science (PLOS), 2021) Helepciuc, Florența-Elena; Todor, Arpad
    By adopting the 2009 "pesticide package," the EU proposed a common approach to limiting the harmful effects of pesticides, promoting Integrated Pest Management, and the progressive replacement of the most dangerous pesticides with low-risk alternatives through a comprehensive but flexible framework for all EU Member States. Each EU Member State had to develop a National Action Plan that would propose measures to achieve the package’s goals. Nevertheless, the choice of actions and indicators remained to be established at the national level. A series of recent evaluations of how Directive 2009/128/EC of the European Parliament and the Council on the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive (SUD), a central piece of the "pesticide package," was implemented showed limited success in achieving its goals. Aiming to explain these failures, we compare the National Action Plans eight EU Member States adopted after the SUD. We assess the degree to which the countries’ proposed measures and indicators would achieve the Directive’s three overarching objectives (reduce risks and impact; promote Integrated Pest Management; promote approaches and techniques to reduce reliance on pesticides). We develop the comparative analysis along three dimensions: the promotion of measures to achieve SUD’s three goals; the evolution of the pre-and post-Directive action plans of some of the old EU Member States; and the differences between old and the new EU Member States. The comparison along ten variables shows that the SUD had a minimal effect in homogenizing different states’ approaches to develop their National Action Plans to systematically treat problems, propose measures, and timetables for implementation and indicators. Given that the overall effect in generating a common EU approach to raise the sustainability of pesticide use and agriculture, in general, was still limited, as no common measures, indicators, or process to planning were identified, we discuss some suggestions to improve the situation.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Out of one, many: hydro-economic logics in a World Bank-financed irrigation project in Romania
    (Taylor & Francis, 2024) Iancu, Bogdan; Stroe, Monica
    The study of irrigation systems has been relatively absent from research into socio-ecological transitions in ex-socialist countries, with a few exceptions. Using a World Bank designed and financed irrigation system constructed by a British contractor in 1974 in southern Romania as an entry point, we work with what we term hydro-economic logic to understand the economic and ecological transformations supported by large-scale irrigation systems in the context of rapid post-socialist change. While the socialist-era hydro-economic logic reflected the property regime over land during state-socialism, post-1990 processes of government-backed land restitution and land privatization, the collapse of the vertically-integrated economy that accompanied the network of the canals, pumps and pipes, and the advent of European Union farm payment schemes, created three distinct hydro-economic logics: independent vertical irrigation by small landholders; land grabbing next to the canals; and water grabbing by large agro-industrial business. This suggests that a long-term analysis of infrastructure systems yields unique insights into their changing techno-political rationalities and world-making capacities and may help future efforts to assess the ecological legacies of high modernist infrastructural mega-projects.