Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Guide To The California Fairs Collection, 1856-1997, Karen Lewis, Lynn Bonfield, Nancy Loe

Nancy E. Loe

The Western Fairs Association, the California Joint Committee on Fairs Allocation and Classification, and Louis S. Merrill, former director of the Western Fairs Association gave the California Fairs Collection, one of the major archival collections on fairs and fairs management in the Western United States, to Cal Poly in 1982. In addition to extensive material on the management of fairs in California, the collection also contains information on fairs in other Western states, as well as foreign fairs and world fairs.

The Fairs Collection contains archival and printed material created in three separate offices: Western Fairs Association, a non-profit trade …

Agrarian Scenario In Post-Reform India: A Story Of Distress, Despair And Death, Srijit Mishra

Srijit Mishra

Indian agriculture today is under a large crisis. An average farmer household’s returns from cultivation would be around one thousand rupees per month. The incomes are inadequate and the farmer is not in a position to address the multitude of risks: weather, credit, market and technology among others. Social responsibility of education, healthcare and marriage instead of being normal activities add to the burden. All these would even put the semi-medium farmer under a state of transient poverty. The state of the vast majority of small and marginal farmers and agricultural labourers is worse off. An extreme form of response …

The Prudent Village: Risk Pooling Institutions In Medieval English Agriculture, Gary Richardson

Gary Richardson

The prudent peasant mitigated the risk of crop failures by scattering his arable land throughout his village, Deirdre McCloskey argued, because alternative risksharing institutions did not exist. But, alternatives did exist, this essay concludes. Medieval English peasants formed two types of farmers’ cooperatives. Fraternities protected members from the perils of everyday life. Customary poor laws redistributed resources towards villagers beset by bad luck. In both institutions, the expectation of reciprocation motivated farmers with surpluses to aid neighbors with shortages.

Lessons Of A Drought, Ujjayant N. Chakravorty

Ujjayant Chakravorty

Water will become the most prized and precious commodity in the coming years. Internecine conflicts over the resource are already the order of the day and a global water crisis seems not too far away. But the water-guzzling US state of California is showing a way out of the problem - by allowing farmers to sell their share of water, it is pushing them to become efficient water users.