Rural Sociology graduate student presentations at the
Rural Sociological Society
Eight Ph.D. students in Rural Sociology at Mizzou, Billy Jivetti, Lila Khatiwada, Diana Bryant, Robin Mabry Hubbard, Kenneth Sherin, Justin Thomas, Rene Tacastacas and Cecilia Turin, presented papers and/or posters at the Rural Sociological Society Annual Meetings held in Madison, Wis., between July 30 and August 2, 2009. A recently graduated undergraduate minor in rural sociology, Melissa Spain, who majored in biochemistry and plans to go to medical school was also in attendance to present a poster.
Lila Khatiwada
Best Poster Award
Lila Khatiwada’s poster titled “Structural determinants of rural poverty: A Spatial analysis” won the “Best Poster Award” under the Rural Poverty, Housing and Food Security category.
In describing the project Lila pointed out “The purpose of this project is to develop spatial models utilizing structural factors to see the effects of labor market, local institutions, and civic agriculture in the poverty in the rural counties.”
Khatiwada’s paper titled "Spatial approach to model factors associated with prosperity" developed a spatial model to locate prosperous counties and discern the factors associated with prosperity. For this, a county level prosperity index was created using four measures: percent high-school graduate population, percent occupied housing, percent self-employed population and percent population with low poverty rate in the counties.
Five categories of independent variables, demography, economy, geography, agriculture, and human and social capital, were identified and used in the analysis.
The spatial autocorrelation method was used to determine the spatial pattern of prosperous counties and the spatial econometric method was used to develop a model that explains prosperity. The result shows that counties with higher prosperity have more economic opportunities, higher social and human capital, higher civic agricultural activities, and are less rural.
A policy reformulation is important to address the issues of less prosperous counties by creating employment opportunities and enhancing social and human capital.
Kenneth Sherin
Consumption, Consumerism and Churches: What Catholics, Baptists and Methodists In America Are Saying
By Kenneth M. Sherin and Dr. Mary Grigsby
Consumerism in America is fueled by Rationalization, McDonaldization and commodification, which influences social life, institutions, and the environment. This paper investigated the websites of the three largest church organizations in the United States, which are The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Southern Baptist Convention and The United Methodist Church, to see how they directly address the issue of consumerism. The study found all of them do provide information to their adherents. The issues covered vary depending on the church organization.
Cecilia Turin
Advocacy coalitions and power relations in the Peruvian Altiplano:
building agency to improve households’ response to climate and market change
By Cecilia Turin, Edith Fernandez-Baca, Pedro Condor
This paper describes the process of using the Advocacy Coalitions Framework in two rural Aymara communities from the Peruvian Altiplano at different agro-ecological zones with the purpose to increase their agency (political capital) to build alliances with key external institutions they identified may support their community desired goal that helps them to deal with climate and market changes. It also addresses how the community power structure encourages or undermines local development opportunities.
Rene Tacastacas
Upgrading Small Vegetable Growers for the High Value Chains: A Philippine Experience
The Philippines, as a highly urbanizing developing country in Southeast Asia, continues to undergo transformations in its agro-food systems. One concrete change is the emergence of modern value chains for vegetables such as supermarkets, food retailers, and food services, from which opportunities for greater value added are offered for the small vegetable growers. This study explores the upgrading process of the small farmers in terms of enhancing their participation in the modern high value chains through vertical cooperation with downstream players and horizontal cluster cooperation among small producers. Initial results indicate that linkage with final markets is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Government and private support from non-governmental organizations are crucial in the establishment of clusters and, more importantly, in undertaking specific product and process upgrading activities to increase the small farmers' competitive advantage. The farmers' experiences thus far prove to be a promise yet the challenge to be more cost-effective and to develop economies in scale remains much to be desired.
Cecilia Turin and Justin Thomas
Comparative analysis of livelihood strategies across Aymara communities of the Peruvian and Bolivian Altiplano
By Cecilia Turin and Justin Thomas
This poster compares and contrasts livelihood strategies of eleven Aymara communities of the Peruvian and Bolivian Altiplano with the purpose to demonstrate that livelihoods in this region vary according the different agro-ecological zones, national and local governments, type of development interventions, distances to market and urban centers, historical processes of social exclusion and marginalization, and respective political, social and economic contexts. Therefore, climate and market changes challenge Aymara households and communities in different ways which should be considered at the moment to formulate development policies.
Justin Thomas
On-Farm Agricultural Diversification and Sustainable Livelihoods
By Justin Thomas
A working concept of on-farm agricultural diversification is developed and introduced into the framework of sustainable rural livelihoods in order to focus on some of the natural capital assets involved in agricultural food production. Following a comparison of the ways that the concept of on-farm agricultural diversification might be constructed as a dependent variable, household level survey data from nine Aymara communities in Bolivia is introduced into a multilevel model to test for possible relationships with other household characteristics and available resources. Preliminary results indicate that when the dependent variable of on-farm agricultural diversification is constructed as an count of the richness of varieties of plants and animals involved in household food production, this measure of diversity can be associated with several factors, including the available land and labor resources, involvement in community labor sharing arrangements, and the numbers of different types of animals involved in the production system.
Understanding the Decline of Organic Fertilizer Use in the Altiplano
By Jere Gilles, Peter Motovali and Justin Thomas
Although agronomic trials have shown that the best potato yields in the Altiplano of Bolivia are obtained when a farmer uses a combination of manure and chemical fertilizers on their crops there has been a decline in the use of manure in areas where farmers have the resources needed to purchase chemical fertilizers. In this poster we examine the case of several communities in the Altipano of Bolivia where many farmers have abandoned the use of manure–even though it is available on their farms. Among the factors examined are migration, labor availability and involvement in commercial dairy production.
