Horticulture

This addendum called for the establishment of an Urban Agriculture Program to coordinate public efforts to encourage and develop urban gardens . The legislation also updated city goals for urban agriculture to facilitate incentive programs and resource distribution to urban gardens . In April 2013, the City Administrator’s Office initiated a task force to gather information from the Recreation and Park Department, SFUAA, and SPUR’s Food Policy Committee . The resultant report recommended establishing the Urban Agriculture Program housed within the Recreation and Park Department . After Supervisor Chui and the Recreation and Park Department co-hosted an open house in May 2013 to present and gather feedback on the City Administrator’s recommendation, the Board of Supervisors passed legislation and funded the creation of the Urban Agriculture Program in July 2013. On January 1, 2014, Hannah Shulman, a former CASFS apprentice and coordinator of the SFUAA, was hired as the full-time program coordinator with a one-year contract,greenhouse snap clamps with the expectation of future funding . SFUAA members celebrated the creation of the Shulman’s position and the institutional imprint the position could make in the long term.

Since January 2014, Shulman has worked with other City Departments, such as the Department of the Environment’s Urban Forestry and Agriculture Coordinator and other agencies, to coordinate an urban agriculture working group whose goal is to figure out the commonalities between urban garden efforts of different offices and to make City policy more cohesive and strategic . Thus far, the land inventory has not been made public, potentially due to differing information contained in different lists agencies have developed. To accomplish the goals of increasing access to material support for urban gardeners, the Program has opened their first resource center in Golden Gate Community Garden where during each summer month, gardeners can obtain free mulch, compost, and soil . Yet, the commitment to Shulman’s position and the program has been an inexpensive one as compared to the overall municipal budget. Several other City efforts have increased support and visibility of urban gardening with more significant financial support. This included support for many garden projects through Community Challenge Grants, which in 2010 alone offered nearly $300,000 to twelve garden projects and one farmers market . It also included the development of gardens on agency land at the airport, libraries, public housing, and La Honda Hospital and the expansion of gardening projects within the San Francisco Public Utilities Commissions .

In 2011 the PUC initiated an Urban Agriculture Pilot program to actively engage PUC land in urban gardening . Prior to 2011, the PUC had already offered land for urban agriculture and food movement projects including Garden for the Environment, the Garden Project, and the Sunol Ag Park. The Pilot program intends to extend PUC’s engagement and commitment to “harvesting public land to promote environmental, social and economic equity in our communities”. The PUC owns or operates approximately 66,000 acres of land in the Bay Region and watersheds that provide water for Bay municipalities. According to Yolanda Manzone, “fundamentally with that land ownership comes with both a responsibility to have, you know, maintain good environmental stewardship but, we think, also a great opportunity to grow actively and provide secondary opportunities on our land for community purposes like growing food, whether it’s a community garden footprint or more of an actual farm footprint.” . She goes on to describe that gardens are good uses for PUC land that may have pipes or tunnels underground, where playgrounds or permanent structures aren’t possible, and parcels that are oddly shaped or small enough that they would likely never be developed, which means the PUC is not forfeiting potential profit from rent nor needing to ask gardeners for rent to offset costs. In addition to piloting three new projects in San Francisco over the next five years, the PUC has developed a simple application process for any residents interested in using PUC land .

These projects, while receiving more municipal financial support, depict the city’s commitment to using public land for gardening when it is not viable for other development.Since the 2009 directive, The City of San Francisco has increased the opportunities and visibility of urban agriculture to the City’s benefit. As San Francisco continues to get local and national press for their support for urban agriculture, the multiple benefits of gardens to the City or personal careers have not been lost on officials such as Supervisor David Chui . Gardening advocates at the SFUAA and SPUR are also aware of the potential benefits to building their political capital with supporters in the city.On October 6th 2014, SFUAA along with CUESA, the Marin Food Bank, and Roots of Change, hosted California’s first food-focused political debate between the two candidates for a San Francisco seat in the State Assembly, San Francisco supervisors David Chiu and David Campos, a race that Chiu went on to win . San Francisco has developed new zoning and city policy, which encourages the development of urban gardens and commercial urban agriculture. City officials have enthusiastically supported gardening as a part of the continued growth of the city’s economy, as evidenced by San Francisco being the first California city to enact AB 551. Projects like the Growing Home Garden, Hayes Valley Farm, and AB 551 have encouraged gardens as temporary community improvement projects that can align well with developers or the City’s real estate development priorities. Through visible partnerships between city officials and projects such as Little City Farms, San Francisco is able to draw on the appeal of creative sustainable food businesses. Allowing for the sale of garden produce and urban gardening throughout the city promotes the image of San Francisco as an environmentally focused, creative hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. At the same time city officials have committed public space not suitable for residential or commercial development to urban gardening, sometimes with financial support from the city and sometimes by encouraging citizen public space management. The City has developed an active and supportive relationship with the SFUAA, which has played a key role in the relatively smooth and quick implementation of their initial goals.

As a community, Oakland has in many ways been at the forefront of the new wave of urban agriculture projects focused on food justice with projects like People’s Grocery, City Slicker Farms, and Acta Non Verba. And yet, unlike San Francisco, the City has had only a tentative relationship to this movement. Urban gardening has thrived throughout East and West Oakland in communities where food insecurity, poverty, and histories of racism deeply affect residents. Oakland has had a majority non-white, predominately African American, population for decades since African American migration began during WWII with Oakland’s industrial and maritime expansions. The city has been the home to iconic anti-racist struggles including the Black Panther Party and significant organizing in the Chicano movement. Today’s food justice activists place institutional racism at the forefront of their work. Yet Oakland is also experiencing rapid gentrification,snap clamps for greenhouse losing about a quarter of the African American population between 2000 and 2010 largely in part due to lack of affordable housing . Neighborhoods like North Oakland are attracting residents priced out of San Francisco and new tech industry employees. The complex struggles over gentrification and its relationship to social movement gardeners are discussed in Chapter 4 and relevant here to a municipality both actively trying to attract investment and serve its current population. In contrast to San Francisco, Oakland city officials are suspect that enthusiastic municipal support for urban agriculture will aide with these goals. In September of 2014, after a five-year advocacy process, the city revised its zoning regulations to better support gardening. In addition, while it had embraced public-private partnerships to allow garden projects to use parkland, little progress had been made on codifying these partnerships into programs or long-term agreements, such as the proposals from the Edible Parks Task Force. The City has taken the position that they are responsible for promoting the well being of all residents and that while gardeners are residents they are only a minority whose interests may be in tension with other community members and interests. In June 2005, the office of former Oakland Mayor and now Governor, Jerry Brown, initiated a study of the Oakland food system. The study, A Food Systems Assessment for Oakland, CA: Towards a Sustainable Food Plan, was conducted by two masters students in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning . It provided a baseline analysis in which the authors advocated the passage of a city council resolution authorizing “the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability to develop an Oakland Food Policy and Plan for thirty percent local area food production,” . In December 2006 the City Council allocated funding for the creation of the Oakland Food Policy Council in support of the primary recommendation of the report to establish a Food Policy Council and Plan . In May 2008, after a competitive RFP process through the City Department of Human Services, Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy was contracted by the city to be the incubating agency for the Oakland Food Policy Council . In fall 2009 the OFPC met for the first time with twenty-one volunteer members selected through an application process.

In 2009, using the Public Health Law and Policy’s work on North American urban agriculture , OFPC members developed a set of recommendations outlining land use definitions for urban agriculture, providing guidance on where it could be practiced and the purpose of agricultural production . Similar to in San Francisco and occurring at about the same time, Oakland advocates wanted to make zoning policy more friendly to urban agriculture. The first objective of the recommendation was to eliminate the need to obtain Conditional Use Permits for small scale, neighborhood urban agriculture. Municipal code allowed for “Agricultural and Extractive Activities”, which included crop and animal raising and plant nurseries, throughout most of the city with a CUP, but excluded the industrially zoned flat lands where many urban agriculture projects had arisen. In addition to addressing the restricted geographic range of the previous code, OFPC proposed changes to the expensive and time consuming process needed to obtain a CUP – approximately $3000 and up to twelve months . Gardeners and advocates expressed strong opposition to city policy that required residents to pay to be able to grow and eat their own food. McClintock described these changes, “While we felt that a CUP made sense for large-scale commercial urban farms—the type of urban agriculture that still existed in Oakland in 1932 and 1965 when the use definition was written and last updated—the requirement no longer seemed appropriate for the community gardens and small-scale market gardens that typify urban agriculture in Oakland today… Updating these use definitions and zoning to better reflect contemporary forms of urban agriculture therefore seemed a low hanging fruit on which to focus during our first year. Furthermore, these changes seemed to also be fundamental to protecting and expanding urban agriculture.” . In their recommendations, OFPC advocated for the permitted use of “urban agriculture – civic” and “urban agriculture – residential” in all zoning districts without permit, and the use of “urban agriculture – commercial” in commercial and industrial zones without permit and “urban agriculture – commercial” with CUP in residential areas . Commercial urban agriculture was differentiated as for the primary purpose of food production for sale. In addition to zoning code definitions, the OFPC recommended operating standards including standards for hours of operation, fencing and on-site structures, accessibility, and ecological practices . The OFPC first introduced these recommendations to the city in 2009 during a period when the City was updating residential and commercial zoning regulations. Unfortunately for advocates the agency leading the updating work, the Community and Economic Development Agency , had already concluded the majority of their work and were unwilling to include the recommendations at that time. During a public comment period, the Deputy Planning Director stated “that there was not time, staff, or money available to include such changes into the current Zoning Update” . The OFPC continued their advocacy throughout the next year lobbying CEDA, Planning, and City Council representatives.

While squatting and the politicized aims of land reclamation remain in common, gardens have become an important part of oppositional spatial politics of radical urban movements not necessarily interested in long-term gardening. Today organized garden projects engaged in occupations may have momentary, short-term, or long-term aspirations of access to garden space. Guerilla gardening continues to be an important frame for numerous garden activists employed and engaged in non-profit supported gardens. One such gardener describes his desire for new kinds of subjectivities of responsible city residents: “the city had planted crabapples here, and they plant plums that don’t fruit. We went in and we cut them during the winter, we cut the tree and grafted it… Yeah, so now all these trees that are in the front here, they used to be crabapples and now they fruit Fujis. But people did that in San Francisco and it’s called ‘misdemeanor vandalism’… So we want to, I guess, elevate the vandalism, and say ‘Ok well if this is vandalism, then, we need more rebels, we need more vandals, because this is the type of vandalism that we want’” . Other activists discussed their first experiences with getting their hands dirty by gardening the land outside the homes in the city owned space on the other side of the sidewalk and engaging neighbors in conversations about growing food in these spaces.

Squatting vacant lots is a popular strategy to gain land access despite the rapid turn-over of properties due to increased development. Squatting is most popular in Oakland,pot with drainage holes where at several locations where I interviewed respondents who were involved in squats. Typically, neighbors or particularly motivated activists see a vacant lot that may be enclosed with a fence and lock. The land may have been vacant for a few years or decades. For example, on one site in Oakland, the garden was located on a lot where a house burnt down over fifty years ago. Many gardeners look up the property with the County Assessor to determine if there are back taxes that haven’t been paid, indicating an absent landlord. Gardeners know they may not have long term access to this space but feel their contribution to the community, the land, and their lives are worth the short term access. For these squatters, the need for healthy food and engaging spaces for youth expression outweigh the boundaries of private property, the lock on a fence or the ideology that says they are breaking and entering another’s property. Gardeners express the need to value the land for its uses to the community above the economic motivations of landlords. Temporary uses of vacant spaces, the neighborhood organizing necessary to transforming these into used, vibrant spaces, and the resistance to their closure when the city or landlord eventually reclaims the land are as important to these gardeners as the horticultural practices they engage in.

In San Francisco and Oakland there is significant overlap between urban gardening and occupy activists. This has brought a new approach to even temporary occupations of potential garden space. For many activists, gardens prefigure the ways land can be valued in non-capitalist markets. But the act of occupying the land can be equally important in shifting cultural approaches to property and land. Several gardeners, who have been involved in momentary occupations of land, cite that their actions are intended to disrupt norms of development. For one gardener of a momentary project: “[The garden] was successful insofar as it challenged this idea of private property being the be-all-end-all of how urban space is divided and designed… and inspired and educated a lot of people around how to garden… and to questions the access to the land that was around them” . Another gardener described the questions she would like people to ask themselves: “I think an occupation is an exercise of one’s entitlement to place and home and to have a voice… We have every right to do it sort of mentality, you know? That asks questions of a lot of the basic assumptions that we make about who makes the rules and what are their rights and what role we have in questioning those roles and those systems” .

For a third gardener, an occupation and garden creation was important in his personal reframing of possibility in the current capitalist context of cities: “we were certain that if we actually picked a fight about land we were sure we were going to be crushed, so when we stayed through the night, stayed through the week, through three weeks, we were like what’s going on… We were able to achieve something we didn’t think was possible” . Many of the claims of occupiers engaged in garden projects are similar to those of occupations in general, i.e. , to the degree that their actions gain attention by reclaiming land, oppositional activities force the public to consider the questions: What should urban space be used for? And who should decide? The case of the Hayes Valley Farm, which became the Gezi Garden, provides an important example of a garden project that turned into an occupation and the controversy that occupations bring up within urban gardening communities. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the Central Freeway was damaged and torn down on the 2.2 acre site to later become the farm. In January 2010, after two decades of slow clean-up with the land laying vacant, the Hayes Valley Farm opened. Leading up to the opening of the farm, the ownership of the land had changed hands from Cal Trans to the former Redevelopment Agency, and then to the City of San Francisco’s Office of Housing, and the two parcels had been slotted for future development. In 2009 Mayor Gavin Newsom and the city’s office of Office of Economic and Workforce Development partnered with gardeners from the Urban Permaculture Institute to determine if an urban farm or garden could succeed on the site . In 2010, with a $52,950 grant from the OEWD, the Hayes Valley Farm was started as an interim use project to last between three and eighteen years . In June 2013, the farm closed its doors and the developers Avalon Bay Communities, a national development company, and Build Inc., a small San Francisco based real estate development company, bought one of the parcels for $9 million and made plans to start construction on a housing project .While the leadership team embraced the interim use quality of the project as an opportunity ,large pot with drainage some garden volunteers and other Bay Area activists did not and questioned why the lot should be sold. A protest was organized, “Liberate the Land”, where organizers claimed, “We are being called to defend the land we grow on. While 36,000 housing units are left empty in San Francisco, property owners and developers plan to build condominiums and high-end housing structures at the cost of displacing urban farms and gardens. We can out-grow the old power structures!” This occurred shortly after the Turkish Taksim Gezi Park mass protests objecting to the development of one of the few green spaces left and open to the public in Istanbul’s Beyoglu district. Protesters in San Francisco drew inspiration from the masses coming out to protest the development and the repression of free speech of original protestors. The Hayes Valley Farm was occupied and named Gezi Garden in solidarity with the Turkish activist efforts. Protestors spoke to the necessity of defending urban green space as open space for people to gather and connect with the soil. They spoke of the value of urban land for something other than development. The value of these parcels lay in their use and the ecological contributions to the city. The occupation lasted two weeks, when the gardeners and three tree sitters were forcibly removed from the site. The occupation sparked a powerful and sometimes quite contentious debate within urban agriculture communities across the bay region.

The debate revolved around whether the occupation benefited urban gardening and its prospects in San Francisco. For those opposed, the occupation represented a naïve and short-sighted action aimed at agitating instead of growing food. One garden advocate argued: “I don’t think the people who squatted Hayes Valley after the actual organizers left had a sense of how we were going to get from where they were and where we are as a society to where they wanted us to be which is a society without private property…Their feeling was the land is for the people but that’s not how we’ve set up society… I don’t think it’s happening anytime soon” . For another, the opposition to private property and idea that urban residents should reclaim control of urban green space was even more problematic: “They took it for granted – felt like it was their right to be there. That can’t happen. It’s a privilege to be able garden. The time that it’s there is a gift. That’s the classic example of why land owners don’t want to do this” . As this quote indicates, a major anxiety for many gardeners after the occupation was if this action, or similar ones like Occupy the Farm outside of Berkeley, would scare landlords or municipal agencies out of wanting to work with gardeners. In an opinion piece in the SF Bay Guardian blog, Erin Dage, echoed a question many gardeners brought up in interviews “might it [the Gezi Garden occupation] actually make property owners less likely to allow community-based temporary uses on land awaiting development?” . Pastor Megan Rohrer of the St. Paulus Lutheran Church, the landlord of the former Free Farm, was the project sponsor of the community garden project, which was demolished less than a year after the Gezi Garden occupation in order to make way for new housing . Rohrer, who was very supportive of both their garden project and the important issues that the occupy protestors were raising, still worried “that what happened with Hayes Valley Farm may happen with my garden. I just want everything to end smoothly and peacefully” . Other gardeners appreciated the work of the occupiers, claiming the conversations about development and the evictions of gardens is something the urban agriculture community needs to face directly. Whether or not urban agriculturalists agree that gardeners have an entitlement to urban space, many see the fast paced development market and politics in the region as a threat to their growing projects. A few garden projects have drawn inspiration from People’s Park as an occupation that lasted decades, eventually gaining significant institutional support and legitimacy. As the result of a multi-year process including a nationally recognized land occupation and protest of the planned development of the property, a university community partnership and participatory research project and garden, Occupy the Farm, Students for Engaged and Active Learning, and the Gill Tract Farm Coalition was born. Starting in the late 1990s, when the University of California Berkeley decided to sell development rights to a tract of land that had previous laid fallow in Albany, adjacent to Berkeley family student housing, UC students, neighbors, and urban garden advocates led by Peter Rosset and others at Food First organized to resist the development and advocate for the creation of a sustainable urban agriculture training center 1997.OTF continues to highlight the UC’s shift towards increasing privatization while little support is given to projects that support local agriculture, food security, or serving the local ecological and human communities. For example, OTF activists protested the December 2013 hiring of Robert Lalanne as the first ever “vice chancellor for real estate” for UC Berkeley. On October 1, 2014 members of OTF, the student group running the new community garden, SEAL, and the Cal Progressive Coalition occupied the office of Capital Projects holding a sit-in until Chancellor Dirks met with the occupiers and provided several important documents about the Gill Tract development, both of which activists were promised in May but never saw materialize . Soon OTF activists have also developed a connection with the MST, organizing events that connect food and land sovereignty work in the global south to the struggle for the Gill Tract Farm. OTF has organized a learning exchange between Gill Tract and MST activists for 2015.

While other scholars have traced these tendencies, like that of localism, to libertarian and neoliberal ideologies, this chapter emphasizes the autonomous Marxist and social anarchists framings of strategies towards justice, many originating out of broader global social movements. Alternative economic analyses are complicated and thickened with the increase in the importance of cultural and racial politics in food movements. Activists have seen alternative food initiatives , and particularly urban gardens as a means to value marginalized cultural and racial identities, bring different communities together, and support cultural place-based resistance to racism and marginalization. For other organizers AFIs have been a space for challenging racial discrimination and marginalization through community struggles for self determination or recognition like the work of food justice organizing in Oakland and Detroit . Many argue AFIs can and do represent spaces that go beyond cultural preservation or the bringing together of different communities; they can be built as places where communities can self-organize and provide mutual-aid when the state and civil society are oppressive.

And yet,square pot food activism in many ways is still dominated by white discourses and faces. Debates within food justice and food sovereignty organizing have highlighted the questions of the future of dominant cultures, spaces of difference and spaces of self determination in food movements. Finally, in response to social-justice blind, bio-centric approaches to the environment common in some parts of the food movement, activists have fought for the importance of socio-ecological justice. sustainability has been a central pillar of alternative food movements since the 1960s, and for many this commitment is bound to one for justice. For food sovereignty activists and many urban agriculture advocates, food politics represent a way to seek a form of justice that values socioecological change for holistic well-being. Socio-ecological justice calls into question the divide often created between humans and nature. Agroecologists offer cultivated landscapes that produce food as an example. Agroeoology is increasingly presented as a field that is concerned with a form of sustainability that values agricultural systems based on just socio-natural practices . What follows is a description of the genesis of three iterations of the US alternative food movement in its search for better relationship to struggles for justice: the community food security movement, the food justice movement, and the food sovereignty movement. Anti-hunger activists in the US have advocated for a variety of approaches to fighting hunger including state entitlement programs, charity emergency food sources, community-based strategies to provide access to healthy foods, and direct action, such as civil-disobedience that demands the right to food.

These different approaches embody the political commitments and engagements with justice of food security activism. In response to the global food crisis in the early 1970s the United Nations organized the first World Food Conference to discuss international action. At the conference the term “food security” was introduced . Many nations adopted food security as a policy goal at the same time that they advocated for a right of freedom from hunger. Food security was conceived as a complementary political strategy to advocate for a nation’s ability to produce sufficient food so that no person experience hunger . The U.S. government first used the term food security in the early 1980s. Policy makers recognized the need to not only address hunger but also the social conditions that gave rise to it . Food security was defined as “a condition in which all people have access at all times to nutritionally adequate food through normal channels” . Unlike many of the nations that adopted the food security framework, the United States did not make a statement of people’s right to food . In response to growing problems with food insecurity and the lack of sufficient government efforts to address these problems, community activists, students and anti-hunger advocates united under the banner of community food security. The catalyst for this coalition was provided by the work of Robert Gottlieb and his students out of University of California Los Angeles .

While conducting interviews on community concerns following the 1992 Rodney King beating, the group uncovered a great deal of concern over food access, affordability, and quality. After developing a report highlighting concerns and strategies for change, several researchers met with other individuals and anti-hunger groups to discuss new directions for food security organizing . In 1995, a coalition of advocates met to develop and promote the Community Food Security Empowerment Act “as the conceptual basis for solving food-system problems” . Together they drafted a food security policy statement included in the1995 Farm Bill, which defined community food security as a condition in which “all persons obtain at all times a culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through local non-emergency sources” . Then in 1996 various community-based initiatives united under the banner of the Community Food Security Coalition. As an alternative to dependence on diminishing classical food entitlements and emergency food, coalition members introduced a variety of community-based solutions, such as urban gardening and local policy-based solutions . The Coalition and other food security organizations aimed “to create community-based ways of providing food in an affordable, sustainable, and ecologically sensitive manner” . This integrative framework is concerned with both production and consumption . It takes a long-term, preventative approach to creating community-based systems that will promote conditions of food security even during times of hardship. Many projects focus on food self-reliance as opposed to an emphasis on entitlements . Part of this shift can be identified with a critique of charity that led community food security activists to seek community-based solutions. Both individuals seeking food and charitable organizations distributing food must comply with a myriad of standards and procedures that make it difficult if not “materially impossible” to be political advocates for structural change . As a result of growing problems with hunger and poverty,drainage collection pot academic and community groups undertook efforts to document and map the lack of access to food. Community food assessments have been used to demonstrate food insecurity and highlight strategies for change. In a 2010 review article, Walker, Keane, and Burke identified thirty-one articles published using CFAs to assess the presence of food deserts. The term “food desert” first appeared in the early 1990s. Short, Guthman, and Raskin stated that food desert has been used to refer to defined geographical areas lacking a large supermarket. Other studies have used the term to describe the type and quality of food available in a given area, as opposed to the characteristics of or simply the lack of food stores . 6 For most community food security activists the essential question focuses on why food distribution is determined by these issues of profitability and not issues of need. The term “food deserts” became an important political tool for activists in highlighting the problems many US residents face in accessing adequate food resources.

While activists focused on inequality of access, some scholars and advocates critiqued the heavy focus on developing solutions like mobile grocery stores or bringing back large retailers to the inner city. Short, Guthman, and Raskin provide an example of this critique. The authors argued excessive emphasis has been placed on the supply side rather than the ability of residence to pay. In their study of small full-service food retailers in the Bay Area, authors found that these stores can provide nutritionally adequate, culturally appropriate and affordable foods. The authors claimed these stores are frequently ignored in CFAs. Many storeowners noted that fresh foods were not large profit items but instead they felt ethically required to carry these items. Small, full-service food stores can contribute to community food security but attention must be paid to both the supply and the economic and social ability of community members to pay for or access fresh foods. Critiques of supply side arguments have helped food movement actors refocus on underlying structural inequalities that create not only food insecurity but also housing insecurity, health inequalities, and other injustices faced by low-income communities. Responding to movement demands, congressional Representative Eligio “Kika” de la Garza worked with 17 bipartisan co-sponsors to introduce and support the Community Food Security Empowerment Act of 1995 . In the 1996 Farm Bill, Congress allocated $16 million for a seven-year period and empowered the USDA to create the Community Food Projects Competitive Grants Program . The program works to develop community leadership among non-profits working towards food system change by granting organizations a one-time infusion of federal funds . In the first ten years of the program over 240 projects were supported to “meet the food needs of low-income people, increase the self-reliance of communities in providing for their own food needs, and promote comprehensive responses to food, farm, and nutrition issues” . Non-profits were funded to create community-based solutions to food insecurity such as rural or urban agriculture training centers. According to the USDA, the CFPCGP differs from many other agency projects in its emphasis on evaluation and technical assistance. In order to ensure that non-profits are using tax payer money wisely, the USDA has sought to ensure projects accurately and sufficiently work to document the progress of their efforts and train other communities in their methods . Much of this work has happened in partnership with the Community Food Security Coalition that developed detailed evaluation tools and trainings for grantees. In 2006, ten years after the start of the CFPCGP, the USDA announced it would eliminate the use of the word ‘hunger’ from its food security assessments . The agency claimed that the move was based on the technical difficulties and inability of the current data collection tools to accurately capture information of hunger. Hunger had been defined in medical terms so that clinicians would presumably be able to measure and provide data that demonstrated physical evidence of the experience of hunger. This medicalized approach was criticized in the 1980s by anti-hunger advocates for waiting until hunger created irreversible damages in individuals to identify a problem, focusing on physical symptoms as opposed to social signs of trouble, and failing to recognize the household and community as important scales of impact . As such, the adoption of data collection on community food security, as a social condition of lack of access to food, provided an important addition to research on the effects of hunger, a physiological state in individuals . The move to eliminate the term hunger from USDA assessments was highly contested by food activists. The issue of concern can be read as what critical political ecologists have called one of framing and problem closure . This political ecology approach challenges the objective explanations of biological and environmental research by exploring social and political contests of such scientific investigation . Scientific research engages with an object of study using “social derived instruments and metrics” and “knowledge of health and environmental problems necessarily reflects the manifold social relations that affect science” . Contexts, interests, and values influence how scientists frame the problem and object of study. This framing impacts the potentials for future research and political work derived from such research . When such framing is limited in specific ways it directs future research of a particular problem’s causes and effects into those limited directions, causing problem closure . Guthman describes the impact of problem closure on obesity research as directly connected to food access and the built environment. Obesity as a problem is automatically connected to a predefined solution of increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables and greater opportunities for physical activity, which are expected to decrease caloric intake and increase expenditure .For anti-hunger and community food security activists, the move to remove hunger from USDA assessments raised questions as to the political consequences of narrowing the scope of scientific research . The manner in which the USDA, as a leading scientific and political body, frames the issues “determines the importance attached to them and how they are addressed; data defines and delimits the problem” . Allen asked: “If hunger is no longer an analytical category, how does one talk about it or advocate for its elimination? How does one make policy claims about something for which there is no data and which, therefore, does not exist in policy science terms?” . The reframing of hunger to very low food security reduced the ability of advocates to use the term as a rhetorical tool, one that once had significant social power.

Harvey claimed, “if the seeds of revolutionary transformation must be found in the present and if no society can launch upon a task of radical reorganization for which it is not at least partially prepared, then those internal contradictions provide raw material for growing an alternative” . To construct a utopian dialectics that engages concerns for both spatial form and social processes of alternatives requires “a dialectics that can operate in relation to both space and time” and requires a commitment to the political importance of closure, deciding on strategy and acting upon it . Harvey described praxis as engaging a dialectic of ‘either/or’ not ‘both/and’, in which actors must recognize that we exercise authority and create or destroy possibilities through the determination of spatial forms . When we decide on an alternative and build it through social processes into material reality, we both open space for potential and make a definitive decision that closes out other options. When a gardener chooses to occupy a vacant lot without landlord approval, this both creates a physical garden and relationship of gardeners and neighbors to this formerly vacant space,vertical tower for strawberries and closes out other possible uses for that lot or for relations to the landlord or neighbors.

This is nothing that should be shunned. It is a moment of seizing power as an agent of change. Gardeners, on the level of an individual organized garden project, make these decisions about closure and direction and articulate their relevance to social movement strategy. Yet when discussing land politics beyond their immediate projects, many gardeners in this study, both of and outside of the anti-authoritarian trend, would prefer a conceptual commitment to openness to using various forms of accessing land. Yet, gardeners’ focuses on their particular circumstances still may contribute to coordination and movement building. Harvey envisioned shifts in both thinking and action occurring in multiple communities, originating out of particular circumstances and struggles, and building to broad-based political movements . He labeled these individual communities’ struggles “militant particularisms.” Out of their work, Harvey theorized that many communities develop universal alternatives that they apply to global manifestations of their particular problems. Universality exists in dialectical relation to particularity. Instead of critiquing universalism, Harvey suggested we focus our attention on the mediating institutions that translate between militant particularisms and universality. It is the creative tension between the two that offers opportunity for utopian architects to “force mediating institutions and spatial structures to be as open as possible” . This moment of translation constitutes a key departure point towards emancipatory or repressive possibilities.

It is through translation, choosing to express a universal as politically necessary, that we commit to a judgment and decision, a ‘material praxis’ in that moment . It is in this moment of political judgment that this dissertation turns to the actor, the gardener engaged in what builds to a broader movement for urban agriculture, for critical analysis. These moments of judgment, choices in practice, discourse, lease agreements or occupations, demonstrate the ‘material praxis’ of the urban utopian imaginary of gardeners. In the coming chapters I describe how gardeners frame and enact politics of possibility. Rather than simply conclude that urban gardening as a regional movement is creating a sweeping break from oppressive social relations, or that gardeners, like other food activists, have accepted a limited ‘politics of the possible’, I document the multiple, sometimes contradictory meanings in the politics and practices of gardeners. In this analysis my argument builds upon a contradiction of seeing gardening as being both emancipatory and continuation of oppressive social relations. I go beyond reiterating this contradiction to argue the constellation of organized garden projects engaged in the Bay Area urban agriculture movement represent a diverse group of interests which have little coordination or communication across the projects on the question of social movement strategy with regards to land politics. Moments of closure, enacting gardens in a place are so particular to garden site or potentially to the network of gardeners in their municipality, that urban agriculturalists are not collectively engaged with the question of universal ideals for land tenure or urban governance.

This dissertation engages a regional analysis of activism in the San Francisco Bay Area, long known for its importance in the alternative agrifood movements of the last half-century and a focal point in the renaissance of urban agriculture since the 1990s. Today, hundreds of organized garden projects populate the landscape of major cities and smaller municipalities throughout the region at the same time investment in the built environment has continued to grow. The region of study includes the five southern Bay region counties including San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Contra Costa counties. I pay particular attention to the policy and legal frameworks developed by gardeners in the three largest municipalities in the region: San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. While the dissertation more uses a regional analysis, Chapter 5 engages a comparative framework drawing out differences from these three municipalities. In this introductory section, I frame the essential history of the region and these three municipalities and then build upon it in the coming chapters. For gardeners a notable element of the Bay Area’s geography is the Mediterranean climate which allows for year round production, something many other US metropolitan areas do not enjoy. The climate has been an important factor in the growth of agricultural industry in the Bay in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . But several other factors have also been important in building the rich social, political, and economic conditions in which organized garden projects in this region grow. Most notably the rise of the Silicon Valley has been a determining force in the economic landscape of the region, fueling the explosion of competitive land markets in three largest municipalities in the Bay. While all experiencing these effects, different histories in each municipality have created particular conditions leading to distinctive articulations and practices of urban agriculture across the region. To understand the struggles of land and property in which gardeners engage, one must frame the contemporary real estate markets and tax policy in the region in context of the economic and social history of the three largest municipalities. Oakland has been a bay area focal point for manufacturing and maritime industries since the early 1900s, and with significant growth in these sectors during WWII, Oakland began attracting many African American migrants from the south. While redevelopment projects in 1950s and 60s displaced many African American and Latino residents, the city’s non-white populations continued to grow in the industrial flat lands of North, West, and East Oakland. Oakland became a minority majority city, peaking with almost 50% of the population of African descent in the 1980s. Today, that progression is reversing as a consequence of socio-economic trends described below. San Francisco also experienced growth as a Naval port city during WWII and began massive redevelopment projects in the 1950s and 60s. Resistance to redevelopment grew quickly and contributed to the development of city politics focused on preservation of city neighborhoods from the violent impacts of capitalist growth politics . Amidst a wash of progressive social movements for environmental protection, gay rights, and civil rights,container vertical farming activists imposed limits on capital, winning many major victories against redevelopment and displacement from the 1950s to early 2000s, and yet the activists were not able politically defeat the growth coalition which has increasingly gained ground since . Investment stemming from growth in the tech industry has had an increasing impact in San Francisco growth politics, a force our southern most bay area municipality has been shaped by for a half century. San Jose’s economic history has been dominated by the development of the technology manufacturing and related industries, and since the 1970s the city and county has looked to tech industry as both the top employer and source of charitable giving.

It is to the genesis of the tech industry that we first turn. Starting in the 1970s in San Jose, Chicanos and other ethnically marginalized communities experienced the social consequences of economic development putting the south bay on map: the rise of the tech industry. By the late 1970s through the leadership of Stanford University and funded by national defense contracts, Santa Clara County was well under way in its transformation to Silicon Valley . Tech’s early promise of economic development and environmental benefits only came true for a segment of the population. For employees and largely Latino, Chinese, Vietnamese and non-white communities in the Valley it resulted in low-wage employment, toxic working conditions, and high environmental costs . In the 1980s a coalition of tech workers, community members, and environmentalists fought a landmark environmental justice battle to contest groundwater contamination caused by leakage of underground tanks holding toxic byproducts from computer chip production. In response the California legislator passed policy to begin cleaning up and regulating Silicon Valley’s environmental impact, as the tech industry continued to grow.As the first tech industry explosion was occurring, in 1979 CA passed proposition 13 severely limiting property tax revenues and causing the state to favor commercial development over residential for potential tax earnings . Simultaneously, regional municipalities embraced the economic promise of Silicon Valley. To attract development cities have offered incentives to tech industries, including low annual business taxes . While in the 1970s- 80s, Florida and Kenney found the Silicon Valley rich with venture capital and tech innovation, by 2013 Florida was asking ‘is San Francisco the new Silicon Valley’. Today, a regional housing crisis is underway as middle class San Franciscans and Silicon Valley tech workers spill into surrounding communities . At the same time tech-centered Peninsula towns have resisted creating large company housing developments, such as Mountain View’s 2012 rejection of including housing developments near Google, refusing the idea of creating or becoming a company town . Extreme housing prices have contributed to a widening wealth gap, which in San Francisco is growing faster than any other city in the nation . Between 2007 and 2012, the 20th percentile of earners in the city lost $4309 of household annual income while the 95th percentile gained $27,815 . The wealth gap is contributing to an uneven landscape of food security with significant problems with food insecurity in communities like East San Jose, Bayview-Hunters Point, West Oakland, East Palo Alto, and other communities.The crisis of affordable housing, the housing market crash, and predatory, race-based lending practices have caused a wave of rapid gentrification in communities in San Francisco and Oakland. Nationally, as a result of the 2008 housing crisis it is estimated that African Americans lost $71 to $93 billion in assets . Oakland lost over 40% of their African American residents between 1990 and 2011, with a drastic speed up since the housing crisis . There were over 10,000 foreclosures between 2007-2011, 93% of which occurred in predominately African American and Latino flat lands communities. These Oakland residents are increasingly moving to surrounding suburbs in search of more affordable housing . At the same time residents were priced out of San Francisco and new tech employees were looking for housing in the increasingly popular flat land communities. In 2014 Google tested ferry services to transport Oakland workers to Silicon Valley, in addition to running an alternative ground transportation infrastructure, the “Google buses”, throughout the region. Lively protests, direct action, and public debate over Airbnb, evictions and tenant rights, and the “Google buses” have gained national attention. On September 25, 2014 a Facebook video went viral of white Dropbox and Airbnb employees repeatedly asking Latino youth to leave a public soccer field in the Mission because they had reserved the site online . When the youth and an African American young adult advocate suggested the white men join their game but that because the field was public they wouldn’t leave, the men were incredulous, insisting they had paid the $27/hour fee for the reservation and should be able to use the field. The video spread quickly with vitriol filled comments about the racism of gentrification in San Francisco, leading to apologies from at least one of the white players involved, and more significantly a reversal of the “Pay to Play” reservation system the Recreation and Parks Department had instituted. The policy still stands at several other San Francisco fields. Today’s debates over urban space have reached electric levels and are reflected in the debates of urban gardeners, as we will see in the coming chapters.

Our estimation strategy follows Angrist and Pischke , who advocate the use of two alternative approaches for dealing with omitted variable bias in panel data. The first employs a lagged dependent variable to account for the possibility that the subsidy was targeted based on pre-treatment trends in party support. The second uses a difference-in-difference model that eliminates possible confounding by time-invariant individual characteristics and controls for a number of time variant factors that might be correlated with the treatment and party preferences. In conjunction, these approaches are useful for bracketing the estimated effect when the potential sources of omitted variable biases are unknown . The two approaches produce estimates of a statistically-significant treatment effect ranging from 6.2% to 7.5%. The first specification, which we refer to as the lagged-dependent variable model, accounts for a large number of potential confounding variables,vertical gardening in greenhouse drawing both on existing studies of electoral preferences in Africa and on the analysis presented in the previous section. We include all variables from the analysis of targeting in the previous section, as well as several other covariates.

We briefly explain the rationale for their inclusion. Unless otherwise specified, we measure these variables using data from the 2008 survey, prior to the distribution of the 2009/10 subsidy. First and foremost, it is important to include the measures of party support from the first survey round. We speculate that those who did not feel close to any party in 2008 might be more responsive to the subsidy, given weaker pre-existing party ties. Likewise, we expect that opposition supporters might be particularly resistant, given their pre-existing attachments. It is also important to account for ethnicity, given that members of some communities might be more likely to become DPP supporters for reasons other than the subsidy program. In particular, members of the president’s own ethnic group might be more likely to follow Mutharika to the DPP than members of other communities. The Chewa, who have long been associated with the Malawi Congress Party , might be particularly disinclined to become DPP supporters. The Yao might also be particularly disinclined to become DPP supporters given the acrimonious split in 2005 between president Mutharika and former president Bakili Muluzi, a Yao. Finally, since the demise of the AFORD party following the 2004 elections , the Tumbuka have been less tied to a particular political party and might therefore be more likely to move toward the DPP. In addition, we include a measure of whether individuals come from minority groups within their villages.

We also include a number of variables found to be associated with subsidy reception based on our analysis of targeting in Figure 1. We account for the possibility that individuals with local political ties might be more likely to become DPP partisans by controlling for membership on district development committees, village development committees, and the chief’s council. We also account for individual economic shocks – loss of crops, loss of income source, and the death or illness of a family member – that might reduce support for the incumbent party, based on research from the United States that shows that voters punish incumbents when their personal well-being is affected by natural disasters and other unforeseen events . We include measures of these shocks in both 2008 and 2009 . We also include variables that track participation in the many other government anti-poverty programs in Malawi to account for possible correlation with subsidy reception. Specifically, we account for participation in the following programs : free food/maize distribution, food-for-work, inputs-for work, scholarships for secondary education; scholarships for tertiary education, and direct cash transfers. We include a measure of subsidy reception in the previous year to account for the possibility that the 2009/10 subsidy may have targeted individuals whose views of Mutharika were in transition due to the prior year’s subsidy.Finally, we account for demographic factors – age, education, farm size, income, and households headed by women – that could affect the strength of pre-existing partisan ties and therefore the likelihood of changing partisan allegiances. In the previous section, our analysis showed minimal evidence of targeting with regard to variables measured in 2008.

However, because multicollinearity between variables could reduce the significance of variables in the targeting model, we test for differences between control and treatment groups on each variable individually and add those that were not included in the analysis of targeting. Following Ho et al. , we test for differences of means and differences in distributions . The balance statistics reveal statistically significant differences on several covariates, indicating the need to control for these factors. We estimate a logit model of DPP support in 2010 that controls for all variables described above and includes village fixed effects to account for possible targeting across villages in our survey area. We cluster standard errors by household. The results, presented in column 1 of Table 3, show an estimated treatment effect that is significant at the p<.05 level. Full logit results are shown in Table A2 in the on-line appendix. As an alternative way to address covariate imbalance, we employ matching before estimating the effect of the subsidy on party preferences using the LDV approach. For this we use the Coarsened Exact Matching approach developed by Iacus, King, and Porro . Matching works by creating matched pairs between those who received the 2009/10 subsidy and those who did not that are similar along observed covariates. Respondents that are not matched are excluded from the analysis, thereby improving overall balance on relevant factors between the treated and untreated groups. The advantage of matching is that one can account for possible confounds through pre-processing rather than controlling for confounds in a parametric model. The parametric approach relies on assumptions about the functional form between confounds and the outcome variables, which if incorrect can bias the estimate. Matching, by contrast, makes no such assumptions . We match on variables that we consider to be most relevant based on theoretical importance and the balance statistics shown in Table A1 in the on-line appendix: region, prior partisanship, membership in the village development committee,greenhouse vertical farming whether respondents experienced an illness or death in the family within the last two years, female-headed household, and age. We limit the matching to this set of variables because including additional variables greatly reduces sample size and because we are able to improve imbalance by matching on this set of variables . We use matching with replacement, which has the advantage of producing better matches and dropping fewer observations than one-to-one matching .We account for remaining imbalance by including all covariates in the estimation of the treatment effect, as recommended by Ho et al. . Column 2 in Table 3 presents the results from a logit model employing the matched data. The model produces a similar estimate of the treatment effect , comparable to the estimate in the pre-matching results, and again the estimated effect is statistically significant. The second estimation strategy uses a difference-in-difference approach designed to account for all time-invariant individual-level factors that could be correlated with both subsidy reception and party preferences. For this, we estimate a pooled OLS model that includes a dummy variable for treatment condition, a dummy for the time period, and the interaction of the two.

Specified in this way, the model is equivalent to a two-way fixed effects model that includes both individual fixed effects and a period dummy. With this specification, the only potential omitted variables of concern are time-varying factors that might be correlated with both treatment status and partisan preferences. As in previous models, we include measures of economic shocks that occurred between the two survey rounds and which might be correlated with both subsidy reception and party preferences. These include measures of whether the respondent’s household experienced a loss of crops or livestock, the loss of an income source, or the death or serious illness of an adult family member. We also include measures of household participation in a host of other government-sponsored anti-poverty programs: food distribution, food-for-work, inputs-for-work, scholarships for secondary and tertiary education, and cash transfers. All time-invariant factors from previous models – such as gender, education, ethnicity, and village – are excluded by design as these factors are accounted for by the specification. The results, shown in column 3 of Table 3, indicate an estimated treatment effect of 6.2% that is again significant at conventional levels .In this section we discuss the limitations of our estimation strategy and relate our findings to relevant literatures. With regard to the methods used to identify the effects of the subsidy on political orientations, the main limitation is that because the program was not randomly distributed, we cannot entirely rule out omitted variable bias with regard to unobserved factors. To address this concern, we use the sensitivity test developed by Rosenbaum to estimate the extent to which our results are potentially driven by one or more omitted factor. This test estimates how large an effect one or more omitted variables would have to be to overturn the estimated treatment effect. For this analysis, we re-estimate the treatment effect using the LDV approach after conducting one-to-one matching on the same set of covariates used above . The results again indicate a statistically significant effect of the subsidy on preferences, with the estimated size of the effect being somewhat larger. The Rosenbaum bounds test shows that one omitted variable would have to increase the likelihood of respondents receiving the subsidy by 16%, after having already accounted for the rich set of covariates we use as controls, in order to overturn the finding. There is no agreed standard for evaluating the results of Rosenbaum bounds. We can, however, compare the results to other known factors that affect assignment. Looking at the marginal effects of factors found to be statistically significant in our analysis of targeting , we find that those who had experienced an illness or death in the household in the last two years were 7.8% less likely to benefit, and households headed by females were 10.4% less likely to receive it. Thus, to overturn the positive finding on the effect of the subsidy on preferences, one or more omitted variables would have to exert a larger effect on assignment than these covariates for which we have measures, after having accounted for these factors and all others included in the estimation. While not impossible, it seems unlikely that our findings are due to omitted variable bias, given that none of the measured covariates exerts an effect of this magnitude. A second limitation relates to the short duration of the period under study. Ideally we would like to know the full extent to which the program affected partisan attachments and electoral behavior. Our data, of course, only allows us to examine the effects of the program across a two-year time span. It is reasonable to believe that the effects we identify likely hold more broadly across the program’s implementation. However, it is also possible that the effects will diminish over time as the program becomes a more routine aspect of Malawian life. It is also possible that the program will have less of an effect during periods when the party system is more stable. It is particularly important to note with regard to the enduring effects of the subsidy that the death in office of president Bingu wa Mutharika in 2012, and the subsequent struggle over succession created a disruption to the political continuity of claiming credit for the AISP , even though the program itself continued. In the 2014 election, two of the main parties promised to continue some version of the AISP going forward. Mutharika’s brother and the DPP presidential candidate Peter Mutharika boasted during the 2014 election campaign that his party had a “good track record” in managing the program and promised not just to continue the AISP, but to abolish the coupon program and expand the subsidy so as to “make the subsidized fertilizer available to every maize subsistence farmer who needs it” . Then-president Joyce Banda and her ruling party proposed during the election campaign that in the next administration the fertilizer program would be scaled back, offering fertilizer loans instead of subsidies . Though covered in major party manifestoes, the AISP was not a central issue in the 2014 election campaign. Instead, voters and politicians alike were pre-occupied with a major corruption scandal implicating the Banda administration .

Wages fall by only 0.5% in El Salvador but nearly 3% in Guatemala, 8.5% in Nicaragua and 26% in Honduras. Because of these wage decreases and an imperfect transmission of output price changes across households, subsistence grain production increases by 1.8% and 2.1% in Guatemala and Nicaragua, respectively, while remaining almost unchanged in El Salvador and Honduras. This finding is reminiscent of what occurred in Mexico after NAFTA: a decrease in the market price of maize was associated with an increase in maize production on rainfed farms . Dyer, Boucher, and Taylor refer to this as a “retreat into subsistence.”In response to decreased profitability in the previously protected importables sectors, rural producers channel their resources into other crop and non-crop activities and migration. The cross-effect of tariff elimination on other activities varies across households and countries. All groups with a significant participation in traditional-crop production prior to reforms increase their production of these goods. In El Salvador, small and medium commercial households increase their production of traditional crops by 3.3% and 0.9%, respectively. In Guatemala,plastic pots 30 liters production of traditional crops increases between 7% and 45% ; in Honduras, between 0.6% and 17% , and in Nicaragua between 31% and 51% .

Output of non-traditional crops increases more, although from a smaller base. Total rural out-migration increases by 7.6% in El Salvador, 1.1% in Guatemala, 0.3% in Honduras and 0.6% in Nicaragua. The major difference between the extreme and intermediate scenarios is that the latter maintains tariffs for maize in Honduras, for rice in Guatemala and Nicaragua, and for milk products in all four countries. As a result, commercial production of grains in Honduras falls less under the intermediate than the extreme scenario. In Nicaragua, grain production now falls by 4.7% in small commercial households and by 9.7% and 3.3%, respectively, in medium and large commercial households . In Guatemala, where maize trade is liberalized under both scenarios, there is little difference between the two. However, there are substantial differences between scenarios in El Salvador, where livestock production is relatively important. Grain output now falls in large commercial households, and it decreases more than under the extreme scenario in medium households. This result illustrates the way in which non-uniform implementation of trade reforms can create new distortions on the production side, as the newly liberalized activity becomes less profitable relative to the protected activity .

A similar result is evident in Honduras, where under the intermediate scenario the tariff on maize imports persists while that on beans is eliminated; maize production increases, while bean production by all commercial households contracts sharply. Rice production by all commercial households in Honduras also decreases more sharply here than under the extreme scenario. Under the low scenario, tariffs are maintained for maize, rice and small livestock but eliminated for beans and large livestock. This mutes the negative production effects in all four countries. Basic grain production is almost unchanged in El Salvador. There is little difference in production effects between the intermediate and low scenarios in Honduras, where maize tariffs are maintained under both. Negative grain production effects become positive for medium commercial households in Guatemala and for subsistence and large commercial households in Nicaragua, once again highlighting the complexity of effects when trade reforms are not uniform.Income effects are summarized in the left-hand panel of table 6. Under the extreme scenario, nominal income falls for all household groups in all four countries. In three of the countries , large commercial producers are hardest hit by agricultural trade reforms. This group’s income falls by 4.9% in Nicaragua, 8% in Guatemala, 8.7% in Honduras and 24.1% in El Salvador. The sharp drop in nominal income for large commercial households in El Salvador reflects these households’ production concentration in livestock and livestock products prior to reforms. 

Medium commercial producers also suffer relatively large nominal income losses in El Salvador, Guatemala y Nicaragua . In Honduras, the biggest losers are landless households, which rely heavily on agricultural employment , followed by medium , small and large commercial farms. Nominal incomes of subsistence households do not change in El Salvador and decrease by only 0.5% in Honduras and 1.0% in Guatemala and Nicaragua. These households lose primarily because of the decrease in rural wages. Lower wages, however, partially counteract a negative income effect on subsistence production. As a result, the supply of basic grains either does not change or else increases slightly . In Honduras, under the intermediate scenario the income of subsistence households changes little and that of commercial households decreases far less than under the extreme scenario. Small commercial households lose 4.6%, compared with 10.1% under the extreme scenario. Medium commercial households lose 2.7% , and large commercial households lose only 1% . Clearly, the maintenance of tariffs on maize imports protects Honduran commercial household incomes but has little effect on subsistence households. In the other countries, where the intermediate scenario includes liberalization of maize trade, the income effects are similar to those under the extreme scenario. Minimal impacts of trade reforms on production are mirrored in the household income results under the low scenario. Decreases in nominal incomes do not exceed 1% for any rural Salvadoran household group or any subsistence household group in the four countries.

Among commercial producers, decreases in nominal income under the low scenario range from 0.5% to 2.5% in Guatemala, from 0.9% to 4.4% in Honduras, and from 1.1% to 3.6% in Nicaragua.A decrease in food prices has an ambiguous effect on welfare in an agricultural household model, as positive effects of decreases in consumption prices may counteract the negative income effects described above. Which effect dominates is an empirical question. Assessing rural welfare effects of agricultural trade reforms is particularly complex in a general equilibrium setting, because both quantities and prices are changing. We employ a general-equilibrium version of the compensating variation to estimate the rural welfare effects of CAFTA’s agricultural provisions. By introducing a GEVC slack variable into each household’s budget constraint and holding utility constant before and after the simulated reforms, one obtains the transfer required to compensate households taking into account all quantity and price adjustments captured by the DREM. A positive value of the GECV implies that welfare decreases as a result of the reforms—that is, the negative income effect dominates the positive consumption-price effect. A negative GECV implies the opposite. Estimated GECVs are reported in the right-hand panel of table 6. Despite a decrease in nominal income for all rural groups under the extreme scenario,round plastic pots in the majority of cases the GECV is negative, implying that rural household welfare increases. This reflects the fact that income decreases are much smaller in percentage terms than the decreases in prices that result from tariff removal. For example, in El Salvador small commercial households reap a benefit from agricultural trade reforms equivalent to 10.3% of their income prior to the reform. Effects on medium and large commercial households and on landless laborer households are smaller but nonetheless positive. In all countries except Honduras, the total GECV is negative under the extreme scenario, ranging from 1.5% to 5.7% of base income. In Honduras, lower consumption prices are not sufficient to compensate for a sharp decrease in wages for rural worker households, and the GECV is positive .The compensating transfer is small and positive for large commercial producers in Guatemala, nil for subsistence households in El Salvador, but negative for all other rural household groups. Under the intermediate scenario, the GECV is negative for all groups except small and medium commercial households in Honduras and large commercial households in Guatemala. Under the low scenario, GECVs are zero or negative for all groups. In some cases the estimated transfer is negative and largest in absolute value under the extreme scenario, due to the decrease in consumption costs that result from immediate tariff removal. These results might appear surprising in the light of the negative effects of agricultural trade liberalization on agricultural production. However, they are not surprising when viewed from the consumption side of the rural household, which typically spends a significant share of its budget on food items protected by pre-CAFTA tariffs ranging from 10-154%.

The results of our welfare simulations suggest that the majority of rural households, in particular smaller producers, do not benefit from pre-CAFTA agricultural import tariffs.As in any simulation model, modeling assumptions and data limitations influence the results of our simulations and welfare analysis. The model assumes that rural households can reallocate resources among activities in which they participate prior to the reform. Constraints on rural households’ capacity to adjust, due for example to rural credit market imperfections, would tend to magnify the negative effects of trade reforms. Indeed, in the majority of cases, positive cross-sector effects presented in table 5 are smaller in subsistence and small-commercial households than in larger commercial households, even though liquidity constraints are not explicitly incorporated into the model. For example,in Honduras, small commercial households change their production of traditional and nontraditional agricultural goods only slightly in response to the removal of import tariffs on grains and other sensitive items, and the nontraditional agricultural supply response is more than six times greater for large than small commercial households. These considerations highlight the need for transition policies to facilitate rural adjustments to trade reforms, particularly for small-producer households in which adjustment constraints are likely to be most severe. Long-term exposure to ambient fine particulate matter is associated with elevated health risks such as respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, resulting in more than four million premature deaths globally each year . Of these, 10–25% are estimated to occur in India . One source of direct PM2.5 emissions responsible for Indian public health impacts is crop residue burning. As the second largest worldwide crop producer , India generates ~500 million metric tonnes of crop residue annually, of which 100 MT is burned . The practice of residue burning primarily occurs following the wheat harvest in April-May and the rice harvest in October–November , and mostly in northwestern India . Densely populated areas located downwind of agricultural fires in the Indo-Gangetic Plain , such as New Delhi, typically experience an annual mean of ambient PM2.5 concentration of 50–200 μg m−3 and episodic spikes reaching 200–1200 μg m−3 during burning seasons, exceeding the World Health Organization PM2.5 guidelines by an order of magnitude. Ambient PM2.5 exposure due to crop residue burning is specifically associated with a three-fold greater risk of acute respiratory infection in the general Indian population. Recent studies at local, urban and regional scales have shown that PM2.5 emitted from crop residue burning affects air quality not only in India but also across South Asia, including Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, due to the transport by the predominantly northwesterly winds. Current regulations by the Indian government intended to reduce agricultural fires, including crop residue management, burning bans, and fines, have had limited efficacy. Unlike other crop residue, the low protein content and poor digestibility of rice and wheat residue have limited their potential for use in bio-fuel, animal fodder, fertilizer and paper production . In addition, the tight schedule of the harvest-to-sowing transition under the predominant rice-wheat rotation cropping system in northwestern India have limited the rate of adoption of alternatives. Crop residue burning allows cheap and fast disposal of crop residue and therefore remains a recurring issue, as revealed by a ~60% increase in the number of agricultural fires detected by NASA’s Aqua satellite from 2002 to 2016. Studies which can attribute air quality impacts to specific burning instances therefore help to inform targeted mitigation strategies and optimize resources for effective action on burning with minimal disruption to farmers. Substantial work has been done on air pollution from fire emissions in individual, heavily polluted locations such as Delhi. However, no work to date has related burning in each individual district to the eventual premature mortality risk and associated cost across India, where a large population experiences increased levels of pollution from fires. In addition, efforts to identify alternatives to burning have typically been qualitative or focused on national or regional measures such as adopting mechanized approaches and alternative crops. This neglects the possibility that targeted changes in the timing and location of residue burning may be able to yield significant improvements, and that there might be large differences in the downwind health impacts resulting from the same amount of residue burning from specific locations.

Consistent with scientific theory, empirical research suggests that warmer climates, such as those projected for the Southwest, will lead to more extreme precipitation intensity and frequency , particularly during the winter season . Since annual precipitation is projected to decline , more extreme events do not translate into higher total rainfall for a given year. Instead, it is projected that light precipitation — an important source for soil moisture and groundwater recharge — will concomitantly decline. Between 1901 and 2010, the areal extent of drought increased in the southwestern United State . Some have attributed the increasing expanse of drought, particularly in the previous decade, to warmer temperatures . Others have suggested that it is due to changes in atmospheric circulation . In addition to temperature and precipitation, CO2 fertilization is another climate change pathway affecting agriculture. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide stimulates photosynthesis, leading to increased plant productivity and decreased water and nutrient use . C3 photosynthetic plants will benefit more than C4 plants ,fodder systems for cattle and dryland cropping systems will benefit more than irrigated systems .

The extent to which CO2 fertilization mitigates climate-induced water scarcity in the field still lacks scientific consensus, and there is debate on the extent to which simulating CO2 effects actually reproduces the results in free air carbon dioxide enrichment experiments . Agricultural impacts from climate change are rooted in complex pathways. Assessments of crop impacts due to climatic change fall under two, broad categories: process-based and statistical models. Process-based models simulate physiological development, growth and yield of a crop on the basis of interaction between environmental variables and plant physiological processes . Statistical crop models impute a relationship between historic crop yield and climate variables, often in order to project the impact on yield under future climate scenarios. Process-based models remain the gold standard in crop modeling as one is able to study the relationship between weather and all phases of crop growth in a range of weather possibilities, even those lying outside the historical record . California field crops have been modeled using DAYCENT . Both studies highlight resilience of alfalfa yield under A2 scenario by end of the century, whereas 5 other crops exhibit a decline. Jackson et al. also find alfalfa yield to be particularly resilient to early and repeated heat waves during May–July. Lee et al. also run climate projections with and without a CO2 fertilization effect on seven field crops in the Central Valley of California.

They assume a CO2 increase of 350 ppmv from 1990 levels enhances net primary production by 10% for all crops except alfalfa and maize. They find that CO2 fertilization increases crop yields 2–16% above the model without CO2 effects under the high-emissions scenario by the end of the 21st century. There is a much smaller yield increase under the low-emissions scenario. Lobell and Field use two estimation methods in studying the effects of temperature and precipitation on perennial crop yields. Their model includes 72 potential weather predictor variables for each crop, such as monthly averages for max and min temperature and their corresponding squares. They find that cherries and almonds are harmed by future warming out of a set of 20 perennial crops in their analysis. Crop-level adaptations — such as adjusting the planting and harvesting date , and substituting between different crop varieties — have been included to a limited extent in crop models. However, these cannot account for the broad range of decision making at the farm-level under which many of the negative effects of climate change could be partially offset with input and output substitutions, improving information, and effective water institutions. Thus, economic models are necessary to capture a broader range of responsive decision-making as the climate changes.Recently, adaptations specific to California agriculture have been studied using three economic programming models: the Statewide Agricultural Production model, Central Valley Production Model , and the US Agricultural Resources Model . Capturing the decision-making process is an important part of modeling. In programming models, the farmer’s decision is captured by the objective function.

The main decision variable in these models is acres of land allocated to a region-specific crop mix. The farmer responds to reductions in water availability and yield by adjusting crop acreage. Exogenous adaptations include institutional , socioeconomic , and technological change . Calibration through positive mathematical programming also captures decision-making by preserving observed crop mix allocation decisions . SWAP employs a PMP cost function to the capture the decision of bringing an additional unit of land into production . Both CVPM and USARM have also been calibrated using PMP . CVPM studies have also generated synthetic crop share data from Monte Carlo runs using a base water supply and groundwater depth with random perturbations. Crop adaptation equations are then derived from a multinomial logit regression of this CVPM-generated synthetic crop share data . In order to represent climate-induced changes in water supply, many mathematical programming models are linked to hydrological management models, such as theCalifornia Value Integrated Network , Water Evaluation and Planning , CalSim-II, and C2VSim. CALVIN is a generalized network flow-based optimization model that minimizes economic operating and scarcity costs of water supply, subject to water balance, capacity, and environmental constraints for a range of operational and hydrologic conditions . CALVIN has the potential to incorporate several basin-level adaptations to water allocation rules such as contract changes, markets and exchanges, water rights, pricing, and water scarcity levels. However, it has limited ability to represent important physical phenomena, such as stream-aquifer interactions and groundwater flow dynamics under different climate and water management scenarios . WEAP has many of the same water management features as CALVIN and CalSim-II. WEAP includes demand priorities and supply preferences in a linear programming framework to solve the water allocation problem as an alternative to multi-criteria weighting or rule-based logic. It is different because analysis in the WEAP framework comes directly from the future climate scenarios and not from a perturbation of historical hydrology as with the other models. Unlike CALVIN and CalSim-II, WEAP only has a simplified representation of the rules guiding the State Water Project and Central Valley Project systems . CalSim-II is also very similar to CALVIN and WEAP . C2VSim is a multi-layer,fodder sprouting system distributed integrated hydrologic model that could represent pumping from multiple aquifer layers, effects on groundwater flow dynamics, and stream-aquifer interaction . Recent programming studies focus on how certain adaptations may affect costs under relatively extreme cases of water scarcity. These studies thus assess how these adaptations may offset costs under worst-case-scenarios of water supply reductions. Given that reduction in statewide agricultural water use due to the current drought is estimated at 6% , studies on 40–70% flow reduction should be interpreted with caution. The subsequent studies are organized according to magnitude of water supply/flow reduction. Studies on 5–6% reduction in water supply reveal the heavy fallowing and groundwater use .

Howitt et al. find that a 6.6 maf deficit in surface water caused by the current drought is largely substituted by 5.1 maf of additional groundwater. This is estimated to cost an additional $454 million in pumping. In addition to over-pumping groundwater, farmers adjust by fallowing crop land. The overwhelming majority of the 428,000 acres estimated fallowed in 2014 are in the Central Valley, where the majority of fallowed acres belong to field crops. However, they project that fallowing will decrease by 43% by 2016, suggesting a trend toward stabilization. Frisvold and Konyar use USARM to examine the effects of a 5% reduction in irrigation water supply from the Colorado River on agricultural production in southern California. In particular, they are able to compare the potential value-added of additional adaptations that include changing the crop mix, deficit irrigation, and input substitution to a “fallowing only” model. They find that these additional adaptations have the potential to reduce costs of water shortages to producers by 66% compared to the “fallowing only” model.1 Medellin-Azuara et al. examine the extent to which more flexible2 versions of California water markets could reduce water scarcity costs under a 27% statewide reduction in annual stream flow. They compare agricultural water scarcity in the year 2050 under two scenarios: 1. Baseline: population growth and resulting levels of agriculture to urban land transfer.Warm-dry: includes population pressure and climatic changes under GFDL CM2.1 A2. Under the warm-dry scenario, even with optimized operations, water scarcity and total operational costs increase by $490 million/year, and statewide agricultural water scarcity increases by 22%. If water markets are restricted to operate only within the four CALVIN sub-regions, statewide water scarcity costs increase by 45% and 70% for the baseline and warm-dry scenarios, respectively. Marginal opportunity costs of environmental flows increase under the warm-dry scenario, with particularly large percentage increases for the Delta Outflow and American River. Medellin-Azuara et al. conduct a similar analysis, adding the comparison with a warm-only 2050 scenario. The agricultural sector water scarcity costs rise by 3% from the baseline to warm-only scenario, versus an increase of 302% from the baseline to the warm-dry scenario.Indeed the greater hydrological impact of the warm-dry scenario results in significantly greater scarcity costs than the warm-only scenario. Using the CALVIN model runs from Medellin-Azuara et al. , MedellinAzuara et al. analyze adaptations at the farm-level, including adjustments in crop acreage , and to a more limited extent, yield-enhancing technology . Similar to the 2008 paper, the model compares economic losses between a baseline scenario and a warm-dry scenario . Results reveal an anticipated decline in acreage of low-value crops , which is particularly severe due to the large reduction in water availability. For example, pasture acreage is reduced by 90% across 3 out of 4 agricultural regions. The results also suggest that statewide agricultural revenues decline at a proportionately lower level than the reduction in water availability . Their model also captures the complexity between crop demand and climate-induced supply reduction. Although the demand for high-valued orchard crop increases, production decreases due to the negative impact on yield from temperature increases.The resulting price increase cannot compensate for the decrease in supply, and gross revenue still declines. Two studies examine the impacts of more extreme reductions in water supply . Harou et al. construct a synthetic drought in 2020 based on the paleo-record, rather than GCM projections. Their results regarding agricultural water scarcity and environmental flows are consistent with other CALVIN-SWAP studies. Environmental flows are also extremely restricted. Marginal opportunity costs of environmental flows rise by one or more orders of magnitude with extreme drought as compared to the historic baseline, with the Trinity, Clear Creek, and Sacramento Rivers experiencing the highest increase. Average agricultural water scarcity increases 3900% across the entire state under extreme drought even under well-functioning water markets, which seems somewhat implausible and may result from an overly restrictive model. Although Dale et al. do not calculate scarcity costs, they find that a 60-year drought with 70% reduction in surface flows only moderately impacts the total amount of irrigated acreage in the Central Valley, which declines from 2.4 million hectares to 2.1 million. This suggests that Central Valley farmers tend to have a relatively inelastic groundwater demand, compensating for the loss in surface water with groundwater rather than fallowing. Within the Valley, they find that Tulare Basin has a greater increase in fallowing than the San Joaquin Basin since the former is historically more dependent on groundwater. Dale et al. are also able to capture the increase in aquifer subsidence due to increased withdrawals during the prolonged drought, suggesting that the quality of the aquifer will decline through time with excessive pumping. Joyce et al. use WEAP-CVPM to model climatic changes with 6 GCMs under B1 and A2 scenarios for 2006–2099. Unlike the CALVIN-SWAP studies, they model irrigation efficiency by assuming that vegetable and fruit and nut crops in the Central Valley will be entirely converted to drip irrigation, and half of field crops will be converted by mid-century. They find that these adaptations tend to offset increasing water demands caused by increasing temperatures and periods of drought. The model even projects a reduction in annual groundwater pumping compared to the historical period until mid-century under some scenarios.

Smallholders cannot compete. Under these conditions, they struggle to recoup the expenses of producing crops that require intensive agriculture. It is, therefore, vital that the rural poor continue to participate in self-sufficient agriculture, at least in part, given the precariousness of their ability to secure buyers at prices that will benefit them, even domestically. Risks can be reduced by continued participation in the domestic food producing sector and limited participation in the export sector. Maximizing the efficiency of domestic food production is the most direct route to ensuring food security in the region. Without demand, export-driven initiatives, such as AGRA’s pigeon pea program, simply result in net losses for smallholders and governments. Entities tied directly to profits from the sale of seed and inputs are the only beneficiaries. Some view the agricultural export model as an obvious path to success due to Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage and recent export-led successes in Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, sometimes referred to as the Asian Tigers. African nations are markedly different from the Asian Tigers in terms of history, politics, infrastructural capacity, and financial standing. The assumption that strategies which have worked in the Asian nations are applicable in African contexts is simplistic.

Brigham demonstrates that some nations are, in fact,hydroponic nft designed in such a manner that export-led initiatives are more likely to increase hunger, especially as it relates to the ways an export focus can impact farmer incomes and food availability. Exports, the author argues, improve food security under certain terms. These terms include that a nation has high food availability and that the agriculture sector is a non-substantial portion of the national economy. Such is the case for the Asian Tigers, which have economies reliant upon exports in integrated circuits for electronics, oil, and gold . Export driven initiatives are explicitly not beneficial in nations where the opposite is true . In Malawi and Tanzania, agriculture represents greater than a fifth of national GDP and populations have not yet achieved food security, so they do not meet the criteria for export-led success. Wealthy nations such as the United States are net food importers, while many poor nations are net food exporters, demonstrating little correlation between export quantity and success, and rather, pointing to a relationship between success and purchasing power. Surveys and focus groups of Tanzanian farmers demonstrated that among the challenges associated with participation in AGRA initiatives- including poor storage for surpluses, quality control, water supply, transportation, competing commercial producers with larger surpluses, and the purchase of inputs and fertilizers- market access was reported as the most difficult by nearly 68% of participants . Poorer smallholders command low prices for their outputs while spending significantly higher percentages of their incomes on inputs and fertilizers than large estate owners.

Such estates more consistently meet market requirements and produce volumes that are friendly to export purchasers, leading to profits that can be reinvested to buy and consolidate more land. This displaces smallholders and funnels them into wage labor on the estates or elsewhere, just as the first Green Revolution, and further diminishes their power. Researchers in Tanzania observe that “here are many beneficiaries of such GR interventions: input suppliers get guaranteed markets; service providers make a comfortable living; banks and financial institutions receive interest on loans…ut we have yet to understand what benefits farmers derive from these billions of dollars being spent” . Hopeful upfront investments made by smallholders have not proved lucrative; the promise of buyers for surpluses undelivered. As before, studies find that the most vulnerable populations have not staved off poverty and hunger through these approaches. Economic setbacks for small landholding farmers is no minor issue, as 80% of the land in Sub-Saharan Africa is cultivated by smallholders . The farming economies of SADC nations are unlike those of the United States and European Union, where agriculture consists of merely 0.9% and 1.6% percent of the GDP, respectively. Soft commodities make up 23.4%, 24.3%, 23.7%, and 28.6% of the total GDP of the SADC nations of Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, and Malawi, for example . Farmers represent 78% of the workforce in Tanzania , where on just 0.5 to 2.0 hectares of land each, they produce 90% of the nation’s rice and maize . Matters which threaten smallholders carry dire implications for the entire structure of the economy, national stability, and the livelihoods of all citizens in these nations. Since new programs necessarily disrupt norms, they carry consequences, both foreseen and unforeseen.

It is therefore the duty of planners to reflect on a range of potential outcomes and discern which courses of action will likely accomplish the stated goals. It is understood that risks are associated with every innovation, but thorough considerations for history and context help minimize risks and avoid catastrophe. The failures in Malawi and Tanzania are the results of trial runs. Should the outcomes of the new Green Revolution in Africa continue to mimic those of its predecessor and become more widely adopted in fragile Southern and East African economies, the interventions could have deleterious effects, as the current agenda exacerbates hunger rather than neutralizes it and increases the financial burden on strained governments that are left to manage the purchase and dissemination of seed and technologies. Governments may also be forced to procure additional debt in the form of disaster relief loans if large percentages of arable land were to become allocated to a few cash crops that cannot secure profitable markets. As is documented in the overview of programs from 1940s-1980s, hunger relief campaigns historically centered on growing plantations of singular starches or legumes, and modern Monsanto and AGRA initiatives have followed suit. This has been the case without exception. Seed sold by distributers to smallholders consist of merely a few varietals which have, in many instances,hydroponic channel produced increased yields in the first generation. Starches include cassava, maize, or rice; and legumes include pigeon peas and soybeans. While techniques involving alternating harvests every few seasons to help fortify soils- rotating crops that fix nitrogen to the soil with crops that are nitrogen expensive – is sometimes encouraged by AGRA facilitators, enhancing yields through intercropping or alley cropping mutually-benefiting species on a shared plot cannot be practiced because heirloom crops and modified crops do not use the same inputs and pesticides. This means that farmers must approach adoption with an an ‘all or nothing’ principle. Therefore, smallholders who have converted all of their land for modified monocrops are left to manage a surplus for distribution, as opposed to an assortment of foodstuffs that includes crops for direct, familial or communal consumption. Plots that once produced groundnuts, cashews, sorghum, bananas, and preferred cassava and sweet potato varieties, for example, come to feature a modified starch or legume species in excess. In this arrangement, the aim is to unload one’s surplus in exchange for capital that can be used to purchase imports of supplementary food items that help achieve complete nutrition. This process is an exhaustively indirect solution to hunger, requires many risks of smallholders, and, in poor rural environments, is perhaps altogether inappropriate. Successful hunger alleviation using this method requires that each step be expertly executed and conditions ideal; for each is dependent upon climate conditions and power dynamics related to access, demand, and relative leverage in the global market. Each is unpredictable.

Alternatively, a modest surplus of local varietals can be more expediently sold in local markets, freeing smallholders of the burden of managing overproduced harvests and from reliance on dubious brokers over which they have limited influence. Importantly, dedicating only a small portion of one’s land to cash crops leaves space for subsistence agriculture, for which it would be premature to wholly abandon. Monocultural estates are claiming large swaths of fertile land that could otherwise be used for supplementary crops or grazing animals. It is obvious that a population cannot be satisfactorily feed on a diet consisting solely of modified maize or cassava. In the past, when populations have been forced into such diets due to prolonged extreme weather events or limited mobility and economic strife related to war, it has led to debilitating outbreaks of non-communicative dietary illnesses such as pellagra, kwashiorkor, and konzo, as well as death. Consuming a diet of high-yielding monocrops such as maize, which is among the most common genetically-modified species, cannot be legitimately argued to alleviate malnutrition. An effective food security campaign would include considerations for adequate dietary needs. Another implication of the adoption of modified seed is industrial agriculture. Fertilizers and pesticides used in industrial agriculture practices raise concerns regarding hazardous waste, namely polluted runoff in wells and municipal water systems near high-input farms. To manage this, wealthy and developed nations have tightly-operated structures and financial resources in place to mitigate harmful waste. Health and public safety issues caused by agrochemical seepage in public drinking water- which occurs frequently in GM maize and soybean-producing regions of the United States, such as Iowa and Missouri- are managed through filtration technologies to purify contaminated water and coordinated warning systems to notify the public and prevent consumption. Because consumption of nitrates inhibits the blood’s capacity to carry oxygen, results in birth defects, and can cause cancers and thyroid dysfunction, “he U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires utilities to deliver tap water with no more than 10 milligrams of nitrates per liter” . The following examples will illustrate the enormity of the task of providing safe drinking water in intensive agricultural landscapes, and the substantial financial costs required to execute the task. The state of Iowa produces more corn than any other territory in the United States. Correspondingly, it is the second largest contributor of nitrate pollution in the Mississippi River Basin, and home to more than 200 communities routinely issued ‘Do Not Drink’ orders. Water in agricultural communities that use these approaches must be consistently monitored. On treating rivers and other freshwater sources from which people derive drinking water, Bill Stowe, general manager of Des Moines Water Works reports that “between 1995 and 2014, nitrate concentrations at his utility’s intakes on the Raccoon River exceeded the federal drinking-water standard on 1,635 days, or 24 percent of the time” . In 2015, local utility service spent $1.5 million to strip nitrates from the water, which required denitrification equipment such as ion exchange vessels priced at around $15 million USD . Wells are equally susceptible and harder to service. Nitrate levels as high as 168 ppm were found in private wells in rural Iowa and unsafe levels of nitrates were discovered in one-fifth of the 1,700 wells recently tested by the Iowa Department of Public Health . 1.5 billion gallons of contaminated water is treated annually in northeastern Missouri , where activated carbon powder is used to remove the atrazine, an herbicide used on GM maize fields that can hinder immune function . The district spends $130,000 USD per year removing atrazine alone . Utility services in the United States, which is almost completely converted to industrial agriculture techniques, spent $4.8 billion removing nitrates from public drinking water supplies in 2011 . This financial burden is often absorbed by those living in rural communities, who receive higher utility bills to offset the costs of sophisticated purification services . Unlike bacterial contamination, water polluted by industrial contaminates cannot be treated by boiling at home. Rural populations in the US rely on regular monitoring, action plans, and early warning systems to avoid illness. Warning systems include sensors and “automated event detection software” . Then contamination is confirmed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and other methods. Analysts alert agencies to issue ‘Do Not Drink’ orders that are relayed through wireless emergency text messaging, updates on utility and government websites, and news and media outlets. These protocols inform and empower populations so that they may make healthy choices and, despite the inconvenience, seek drinking water elsewhere. SADC nations, however, do not have the capacity to fund these types of purification utilities nor are rural areas equipped with qualified administrators and testing equipment to routinely monitor water sources, particularly following the defunding and dismantling of public service departments under structural adjustment.

Often, PGPR must be repeatedly added to a soil to maintain high population densities. One of the greatest research gaps limiting this field is inconsistent results when cultures are taken from lab to field. To better manage the ecosystem function of PGPR it is critical to study the survival and activity of both inoculated and native soil microorganisms in non-sterile soil.Carrier materials can influence inoculum success by providing protective habitats and also by affecting soil aggregate formation, which provide protection from predation . Soil inoculants are commonly prepared in formulations of powders, granules, and liquids . Previous research has evaluated the use of carrier materials to improve survival and distribution of inocula, much of which was conducted for soil inoculation with rhizobia . Peat moss is commonly used a microbial carrier and its benefits increase markedly if sterilized prior to inoculation . Vermiculite, lignite, and sodium alginate encapsulation have all been studied as alternative carriers to peat. Also,hydroponic gutter charcoal maintains high populations of inoculum suitable for use after 280 days of storage .

While this information has existed for years, very little work has been continued to examine the suitability of charcoal as a carrier for microorganisms.There is a variety of well-studied carrier materials, all of which have limitations that restrict their widespread use. For example, peat has had success in the rhizobia industry, but it is a highly variable material and the extraction of peat from bogs is unsustainable . The process of obtaining vermiculite also requires mining, which is associated with negative environmental impacts. As a result of limited sources, both peat and vermiculite are sometimes unavailable in regions where they are not naturally present . Alginate encapsulation of inoculum preparations offers a promising alternative to liquid inoculum, clay, and peat formulations. However, production of alginate beads is more expensive than the alternatives . Although the technology behind bioencapsulation has been reported since the 1980’s, the c rrent devices that prod ce the beads are still predominantly limited to lab-scale .Although countless studies have been performed on plant responses to soil inoculants, far less research has focused on inoculum preparation. A literature survey by Xavier et al.found that less than 0.5% of publications that cover rhizobia research discuss inoculum formulation. Many factors will differentially influence the survival of inoculum when applied to soils with diverse physical and chemical characteristics. For example, several abiotic soil parameters affected the survival of Azospirillum brasilense in bulk soil, including soil texture, water holding capacity, soil nitrogen, and organic matter . Accordingly, for PGPR to be considered a successful means to address major agricultural challenges, several things must be considered.

Carrier materials must be affordable, sustainable, and widely available. Also, the formulation of the inoculum must ensure that high PGPR populations can be stored and distributed into soils, and that once applied to soil, the PGPR can thrive, colonize roots, and commence plant-beneficial activities.Although biochar is a relatively new term to the scientific community, it is rooted in an ancient tradition of native Amazonians. Their method for disposing organic wastes involved heating it in deep earth pits, under low levels of oxygen. This left behind carbon rich “Terra Preta”, or black earth, which is still stable hundreds of years later and has proven to be an excellent soil amendment . Terra Preta soils contain high concentrations of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and stable organic matter . These highly fertile pockets of soil are a stark contrast to the acidic indigenous soils, which are low in nutrients and organic matter and considered to be incapable of supporting agriculture . Interestingly, similar soil patches can be found throughout the world, and their high fertility is consistently associated with an abundance of black carbon . The use of charcoal also has a long history in agriculture and has been used to promote agronomic productivity for centuries . This tradition can be modernized by way of pyrolysis machinery specially engineered to heat solid or liquid biomass at designated temperatures in zero to low levels of oxygen. The resulting product has been termed biochar and biochar materials are receiving a lot of attention from scientists, engineers, farmers, and entrepreneurs .Given the current annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide of 4.1 tons year-1 , reduction of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is critical .

Products of pyrolysis are carbonaceous and recalcitrant and can be incorporated into soils thereby serving as a stable carbon sink and climate change mitigation strategy . Biochars have been estimated to have mean residence times in soils of temperate climates of about 2000 years whereas fresh organic matter may be degraded in less than a decade . Pyrolyzing waste materials typically sequesters 50% of the source carbon as compared to traditional slash-and-burn techniques, which sequester only 3%, and natural decomposition, which retains 10– 15% . Biochar production has been credited as a tool that could offset 12% of anthropogenic carbon dioxide carbon equivalents annually if implemented on a global scale . Therefore, biochar production from all bio-wastes offers a sustainable mechanism for land and waste management while providing a carbon negative system.The process of pyrolysis generates porous, charred particles that structurally resemble the parent material but have carboxylated aromatic cores with slight negative charge . During pyrolysis a lack of oxygen available to the system results in a residual material rich in carbon. As pyrolysis temperatures are increased the resulting biochars become increasingly aromatic as oxygen-bound functional groups escape. NMR- based diagrams of slow and fast pyrolysis chars prepared with pyrolysis temperatures of 500°C, and gasification produced char generated at 750°C, display typical aromatic clusters that comprise biochar materials . Chen et al.used elemental analysis and FTIR to examine the sorption behavior of eight pine needle biochars produced at pyrolysis temperatures ranging from 100°C to 700°C. Pyrolysis temperatures up to 300°C mark the initial removal of OH, aliphatic C-O, and ester C=O groups from outer surfaces of such structures. At 400 ° C there is complete destruction of aliphatic alkyl and ester C=O groups that shield the aromatic core. At temperatures above 500 °C, there is further removal of aromatic COand phenolic –OH groups. The removal of these outer groups and exposure of the aromatic core is a key determinant of the sorption behavior and cation exchange capacity of the biochar . In general,u planting gutter for lignocellulosic materials, carbonization increases as combustion temperatures rise to 500°C and the materials approach full carbonization as temperatures reach 1000°C .The exposure of aromatic structures lends these biochars the property of having many fine pores. The abundance of nano to meso-sized pores contributes to the large surface areas associated with higher-temperature chars as well as to their enhanced ability to adsorb non-polar compounds . Biochar materials often retain the cellular structure of the feedstock, which can provide and intricate network of pores on the order of tens of micrometers in diameter . Hence, factors such as feedstock and pyrolysis conditions, the highest treatment temperature achieved during pyrolysis in particular, will affect the porosity, specific surface area, cation exchange capacity , and adsorptivity of the resulting biochar. This allows the opportunity to derive biochar materials with optimized properties for specific uses, such as agronomy, soil remediation, water filtration, or soil inoculum delivery. Meta-analyses of publications containing biochar field trials and greenhouse studies reveal that biochar application resulted in average increased above ground biomass ranging from a conservative 10% to 30% and a recent meta-analysis, which incorporated publications up to April, 2013 demonstrated an overall mean increase in crop productivity of approximately 11% with biochar application . From each of these meta-analyses it becomes apparent that biochar will have different effects on plant biomass and yield that is influenced by soil and biochar characteristics, application rate, crop variety, and time post amendment.

These reviews concur that biochar had the greatest positive influence on crop productivity when incorporated into acidic, clay, or sandy soils with low water holding capacity or low organic matter . The economic cost associated with biochar production and application has become a major limiting factor to its wide-spread use . Estimates by Brown et al.projected that current biochar production will only be profitable if bio-oil is simultaneously generated and carbon offsets have values in the range of 20 USD or more per metric ton. Shackley et al.provided a total assessment of the costs and benefits associated with biochar deployment and determined that biochar production costs are best reduced when feedstocks are waste feedstocks that would otherwise have a gate fee or landfill charge associated with their disposal. The greatest economic benefits associated with biochar use were related to energy production, as agronomic cost benefits can be highly inconsistent . Hence, adjustment to biochar products to ensure greater agronomic benefits could transition biochar use into a profitable sector. It is important to gain a fundamental understanding of how biochar application will affect soil biota before its use can be recommended on a broad scale. When applied to soils, biochar has many effects on soil physical and chemical properties that, in turn,affect the properties of the soil as a habitat for microbial growth. To date several exploratory studies have assessed the response of bacteria, fungi, and enzymes to biochar incorporation in a soil. In Figure 1.5, scanning electron micrographs depict clear images of fungal hyphae extending into biochar pores and bacterial cells located on char surfaces . Furthermore, microscopic, chromatographic, and spectroscopic studies have shown root hairs entering water-filled macropores or bonding to biochar surfaces . At this interface the biochar particles can adsorb organic compounds released from growing roots. Thus, biochar pores may serve as an ideal microenvironment for biological activity. However, contrary to these findings Quilliam et al.report minimal colonization of biochar by native soil microorganisms 3 years post 2– 4% amendment with a wood-derived biochar. In examining the influence of biochar on native soil bacteria many investigations have focused on diversity profiles. In a pioneering study, Kim et al.compared Terra Preta soils to adjacent pristine soils and found the Terra Preta to contain 25% greater bacterial species richness and hundreds of novel bacteria taxa . Also, Kolton et al.found that changes in bacterial community structures were observed after soils were amended with a fresh, citrus wood-derived biochar. Pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA genetic markers revealed a decrease in the total numbers of proteobacteria when biochar was added to a soil and an increase in bacteroidetes, and particularly flavobacteria . These are noted chitin degraders that secrete antifungal compounds. Nielsen et al.utilized an ultra high-throughput sequencing platform to obtain 16S rRNA gene sequences of bacteria with low abundance, as low as 0.01% of the total population. Their results agreed with previous findings, that biochar applications resulted in shifts in abundances of various taxonomic groups and also indicated that taxa correlation patterns are altered with biochar application . A phospholipid fatty acid analysis by Steinbeiss et al.revealed that once incorporated into soils, biochar prepared from a protein rich feedstock selected for fungi while biochar derived from a cellulose-based feedstock selected for bacteria. In agreement with this finding, another recent study demonstrated a positive correlation between the C:N ratio of biochar-amended soils and soil total PL A’s and bacterial PL A’s, in particular . However, Jindo et al.report a negative correlation between C:N ratio and bacterial biomass in biochar-compost mixtures. Additionally, biochar products, particularly those prepared at low pyrolysis temperatures, commonly contain a large number of adsorbed volatile organic compounds that may affect microbial growth and plant responses to biochar . Soil enzyme activities are differentially affected by biochar application . Most notably enzymes with enhanced activities in alkaline conditions showed higher activity post biochar amendment . This is reasonable, as pH’s of many biochars tend to be alkaline, a property that is dependent on pyrolysis temperature. Furthermore, Harter et al.used molecular techniques to assay abundance and expression of bacterial genes involved in nitrogen cycling as affected by biochar application. They found that N2O reductase transcript numbers were increased when soils were amended with 10% biochar . This altered microbial activity is especially important when considering greenhouse gas emissions and reduced N2O emissions from soil, a common phenomenon reported with biochar application .

The F3 peptide is a 31-amino acid fragment of the high mobility group protein HMG2N. F3 preferentially binds to nucleolin, a shuttle protein that is highly expressed on the plasma membranes of tumor cells.Nucleolin- targeted delivery of drug-loaded nanoparticles using F3 peptide or nucleolin-specific aptamers has been previously demonstrated.For example, F3-functionalized PEG-PLA nanoparticles led to deeper tumor penetration into 3D glioma spheroids and prolonged the survival of mouse bearing intracranial C6 glioma when loaded with paclitaxel.In this work, we conjugated F3 to TMVlys following an established protocol .In brief, TMVlys was mixed with a maleimidePEG4-NHS bifunctional linker using 10 equivalents linker per TMVlys coat protein in 10 mM KP buffer for 2 hrs. The mixture was then purified by ultra centrifugation at 112,000 g for 1 h on a 40% sucrose cushion. The F3 peptide synthesized with a C-terminal Cys was then added to the mixture at 0.5 equivalents peptide per TMVlys coat protein and reacted for 2 hrs. The final TMVlys-F3 was purified with 10,000 MW cut-off Slide-A-Lyzer MINI dialysis units. A higher excess of the F3 peptides led to aggregation and a lower excess did not show sufficient conjugation yields.

Cy5-labelled TMVlys-F3 was also prepared for cell uptake studies. Using the aforementioned protocol, SDS-NuPAGE gel electrophoresis confirmed covalent attachment of F3 peptides,bato bucket as indicated by higher molecular-weight bands The TMV coat protein has a molecular weight of ~17.5 kDa; a slightly higher molecular weight indicates the addition of F3 peptide . ImageJ software was used to quantify the degree of F3 conjugation, and data indicate that over 20% of the TMVlys coat proteins was modified with F3 peptide. The A260:A280 ratios of Cy5-TMVlys-F3 and Zn-Por:TMVlys-F3 were 1.21 and 1.29, respectively, which are indicative of intact TMV preparations . Furthermore, transmission electron microscopy indicated that TMVlys maintained its structural integrity post chemical modifications .To assess the targeting efficacy, we compared the cellular uptake of Cy5-labeled TMVlys and TMVlys-F3 particles using HeLa cells. HeLa cells were chosen because this cervical cancer cell line is known to express high levels of nucleolin.For cell targeting studies, HeLa cells were incubated with 150,000, 300,000, or 750,000 particles per cell at 37°C and 5% CO2 for 3 h in DMEM supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum and 1% penicillin-streptomycin. Flow cytometry was performed as described above.

Flow cytometry showed an over 50% increase in cell uptake of conjugated Cy5-TMVlys-F3 particles . Compared to cells incubated with native TMV particles, the mean fluorescence intensity increased by 40-fold in the presence of nucleolin-targeted Cy5-TMVlys-F3 particles . Because flow cytometry does not provide insights into the fates of the nanoparticles, we also used confocal microscopy to study where the particles localized within the cells. HeLa cells were incubated with 6,000,000 particles per cell for 6 h in culture medium. Then cell membranes were stained with Alexa Fluor 555- conjugated wheat germ agglutinin and mounted with Fluoroshield™ with DAPI. Slides were imaged using a Leica TCS SPE confocal laser scanning microscope and the data was analyzed using ImageJ software. The confocal images were in agreement with flow cytometry, showing high cell interactions of the F3-targeted TMV formulation. The Cy5-TMVlys-F3 partiles appear bundled up at the surface of HeLa cells, where nucleolin is over expressed . Although others have shown intracellular trafficking of F3-functionalized polymeric nanoparticles,cellular uptake of Cy5-TMVlys-F3 was not observed in our study. This possibly indicates that the TMV’s high aspect ratio shape may not be suitable to be shuttled by nucleolin. Nevertheless, the accumulation of Cy5-TMVlys-F3 particles on the cell membrane may be advantageous for PDT as cell membrane targeting may prevent trapping of zinc porphyrin in endolysosomes and therefore enhance its cytotoxic efficacy. We moved on to explore the therapeutic efficacy of the F3-targeted Zn-Por drug delivery system. The enhanced cytotoxic efficacy of Zn-Por3+ loaded in TMVlys-F3 was reflected in the decreased survival of HeLa cells after white light treatment . TMVlys particles were loaded with 2,000:1 molar excess of Zn-Por3+ as described above prior to the conjugation of F3 peptides. From the MTT cell proliferation assay, the IC50 values for Zn-Por3+ in HeLa cells were equal to 0.034, 0.38 and 0.19 μM for Zn-Por3+ -TMVlys-F3, Zn-Por3+ -TMVlys and free Zn-Por3+ respectively. No cell killing was observed with drug-free TMVlys-F3 particles at maximum concentration.

Without light treatment, data indicated that Zn-Por3+ -TMVlys-F3 is non-toxic to HeLa cells . Compared to the data reported above, the efficacy of free Zn-Por3+ drug with white light treatment was 6-fold higher in B16F10 cells than in HeLa cells. This may be attributed to the biochemical differences between a mouse cell line and a human cell line. The drug activity decreased by half after loading into TMVlys-F3. This level of activity decrease after loading was not as significant as our previous data with TMV and TMGMV particles in B16F10 cells, yet the trend of decreased activity after loading into VNP did agree. Meanwhile, the targeted Zn-Por3+ -TMVlys-F3 particles showed a 5-fold increase in cell killing efficacy compared to the free drug. The increase PDT activity of Zn-Por3+ -TMVlys-F3 vs. Zn-Por3+ -TMVlys may be explained as follows: i) a significantly larger amount of particles targets cancer cells when using TMVlys-F3 vs. its native counterpart; and ii) TMVlys-F3 targets the cell membrane, light activation may lead to cell toxicity through cell membrane disruption, and iii) it is also possible that the PS cargo is released at the cell surface, and since the Zn-Por molecule is cell permeable and positive charged, cell uptake maybe favored – in contrast TMV without the F3 ligand accumulates in the endolysosomal compartment. In recent years, plant virus-based nanoparticles have been investigated for vaccine and immunotherapy applications to combat infectious diseases, cancers, and autoimmune diseases.Plant viruses are noninfectious to mammals and therefore are safter than their mammalian counterparts that are often used in oncolytic therapies.They can be manufactured in a cost effective manner and in large scales as viral nanoparticles as well as non-replicative viruslike particles devoid of their genomic payload.Cowpea mosaic virus VNPs and VLPs thereof have been proposed as in situ vaccine for cancer immunotherapy. The native form of CPMV consists of a bipartite ssRNA virus forming a 31 nm icosahedron with pseudo T = 3 symmetry. CPMV is made of 60 identical copies of a large and small coat proteins encapsidating RNA-1 and RNA-2 in separate but identical CPMV particles. When applied as in situ vaccine, the CPMV or eCPMV formulation is administered directly into a tumor to reprogram the tumor micro-environment and launch systemic anti-tumor immunity. While both CPMV and eCPMV demonstrated potent antitumor response in mouse models and canine patients,the RNA containing CPMV formulations demonstrated higher efficacy than eCPMV through the activation of additional cytokines and immune cells, which ultimately led to an extended survival rate of tumor-bearing mice.The proteinaceous nanoparticle presents danger signals that activate the immune system through pattern recognition receptors ,dutch bucket hydroponic and the presence of the RNA provides an additional danger signal.RNA activates TLR7/8, and induces type I IFN secretion, which increases the potency of the CPMV- based vaccines.This phenomenon was also reported using papaya mosaic virus as an in situ vaccine.While CPMV is not infectious to mammals, it remains infectious to legumes including Vigna unguiculataplants. From a translational point of view, it is thus important to develop RNA laden but non-infectious CPMV that is safe from to the environment and plants.

CPMV is stable in a variety of environmental conditions, such as temperature , pH , and in the presence of harsh chemicals, such as dimethyl sulfoxide.CPMV particles are not sensitive to certain standard methods of virus inactivation, including peptidase or hypochlorite treatment,but showed good response to ultra-violet light.Here we investigated UV treatment vs. chemical treatment of CPMV to render it non-infectious while maintaining its potent efficacy as a cancer immunotherapy. We compared β-propiolactone or formalin treatment with the previously reported UV inactivation method. These chemical treatment modalities are commonly used to produce non-virulent vaccines such as polio, hepatitis A, enterovirus, and influenza viruses vaccines.Of particular interests, these methods do not remove the RNA from the VNP, but rather create RNA damage preventing its transcription and translation, and therefore viral replication. UV light promotes RNA-protein crosslinking and dimerization of adjacent urcacils.βPL promotes the alkylation or acylation of cytidine, deoxyadenosine, and deoxyguanosine. βPL treatment also leads to a large extend of protein modifications; for example poliovirus proteins are more extensively modified by βPL than nucleic acid during viral inactivation.Specifically, βPL acylates and alkylates to a great extent cysteine, histidine, and methionine, and to a lesser extent with aspartic acid, glutamic acid, lysine, serine, threonine, and tyrosine.Lastly, formalin causes protein-protein and RNA-protein covalent crosslinking.To gain further insights into whether and to what degree RNA-protein crosslinking occurred, intact and denatured CPMV particles pre- and post-inactivation were analyzed by native gel electrophoresis and denatured samples were analyzed by SDS-PAGE. All gels were imaged after staining for proteins and nucleic acid under white light and UV light, respectively. In the native agarose GE, two distinctive protein bands were observed due to the presence of two electrophoretic forms of CPMV particles ; the fast form of CPMV is the result of a 24 amino acid loss at the C-terminus of the small coat protein due to proteolysis in plant cells.In all samples, nucleic acids and proteins traveled through the agarose gel together, confirming the entrapment of the RNA within the CPMV particles. CPMV treated with doses of 5, 7.5, 10 and 15 J cm-2 of UV showed signs of particle aggregation, as indicated by the presence of a smear instead of two distinct bands. Compared to CPMV, βPL-CPMV and Form-CPMV traveled farther through the gel proportionally to the concentration of βPL and formalin employed to inactivate CPMV. These results could reflect a change in overall particle charge due to the action of βPL and formalin on proteins and RNA. Samples were denatured by SDS-PAGE to separate the L and S coat protein subunits, visualized as single bands at 42 kDa and 24 kDa, respectively . The band intensity of UV-CPMV coat proteins decreased with increasing dose of UVradiation, indicative of the presence of particle aggregates. βPL-CPMV showed no sign of protein breakage or aggregation regardless of the dose of βPL used during treatment. In contrast, the higher the dose of formalin, the more inter-CP cross linking was observed at doses as low as 0.5 mM . GelRed staining was added to SDS-PAGE gels to assess the integrity of the RNA content of particles. RNA from UV-CPMV and Form-CPMV particles did not travel through the gel, most likely due to intra-RNA and RNA-coat protein cross linking; the samples remained stuck in the wells. RNA from βPL-CPMV matched the profile of that released from CPMV; however, at high βPL concentrations RNA breakage was observed – this is also consistent with UV/visible spectroscopy and SEC data as described above. Therefore, data indicate that at doses higher than 1 J cm-2 UV light or 1 mM βPL or formalin RNA and protein modifications and crosslinking occur; at high concentration of UV light, CPMV particle aggregation is observed; and at high βPL concentrations, RNA breakage is indicated. Agarose gel electrophoresis confirmed that leaves infected with CPMV inactivated through UV treatment at doses of 7.5 J cm- 2 or higher were indeed effectively inactivated and CPMV infection was not detectable by RTPCR . Similarly, formulations treated with 50 mM βPL-CPMV and 1 mM FormCPMV were confirmed to be fully inactivated. It is worth mentioning that leaves inoculated with 10 mM βPL-CPMV showed no visual symptoms of infection, yet these leaves tested positive by RT-PCR – the latter is a more sensitive assay. Based on the inactivation studies and infection assays in plants, for all subsequent experiments, we used the inactivated CPMV formulation obtained from 7.5 J cm-2 UV, 50 mM βPL, and 1 mM formalin. At these doses UV-CPMV was structurally intact but to some degree aggregated, and there was evidence of RNA-RNA and RNA-protein crosslinking. βPL-CPMV remained structurally sound and monodisperse but its RNA was severely damaged. FormCPMV also retained its size and monodispersity even though protein-protein, protein-RNA, and RNA-RNA cross linking occurred.