Gender, marital status, farm size and other factors influencing the extent of cash cropping in Kenya: A case study

This article examines the effects of commercialisation of agriculture on land use and work patterns by means of a case study in the Nyeri district in Kenya. The study uses cross sectional data collected from small-scale farmers in this district. We find that good quality land is allocated to non-food cash crops, which may lead to a reduction in non-cash food crops and expose some households to greater risks of possible famine. Also the proportion of land allocated to food crops declines as the farm size increases while the proportion of land allocated to non-food cash crops rises as the size of farm increases. Cash crops are also not bringing in as much revenue commensurate with the amount of land allocated to them. With growing commercialisation, women still work more hours than men. They not only work on non-cash food crops but also on cash crops including non-food cash crops. Evidence indicates that women living with husbands work longer hours than those married but living alone, and also longer than the unmarried women. Married women seem to lose their decision-making ability with growth of commercialisation, as husbands make most decisions to do with cash crops. Furthermore husbands appropriate family cash income. Husbands are less likely to use such income for the welfare of the family compared to wives due to different expenditure patterns. Married women in Kenya also have little or no power to change the way land is allocated between food and non-food cash crops. Due to deteriorating terms of trade for non-food cash crops, men have started cultivation of food cash crops with the potential of crowding out women. It is found that both the area of non-cash crops tends to rise with farm size but also the proportion of the farm area cash cropped rises in Central Kenya.

Marital status, farm size and other influences on the extent of cash cropping in Kenya: A household case study

This article examines the effects of marital status, farm size and other factors on the extent of cash cropping (and allocation of land use) by means of a case study in the Nyeri district in Kenya. It was found that married women are involved in the production of a relatively greater amount of output of cash crops than unmarried women since husbands prefer to have more land under cash crops than food crops. Farmers with better quality land allocate a high proportion of it to non-food cash crops, which may expose some households to greater risks of possible famine. The proportion of land allocated to food crops declines as the farm size increases while the proportion of land allocated to non-food cash crops rises as the size of farm increases. Age is also inversely associated with subsistence. Education, though inversely associated with subsistence farming does not appear to be statistically very significant as an influence on the composition of land use and composition of farm output. With growing commercialisation, married women work more hours than unmarried ones, working not only on non-cash food crops but also on non-food cash crops. Married women seem to lose their decision-making ability with growth of agricultural commercialisation, as husbands make most decisions to do with cash crops. Married women in Kenya also have little or no power to change the way land is allocated between food and non-food cash crops.

Coffee and alcohol consumption and the risk of pancreatic cancer in two prospective United States cohorts

Although most prospective cohort studies do not support an association between coffee consumption and pancreatic cancer, the findings for alcohol are inconsistent. Recently, a large prospective cohort study of women reported statistically significant elevations in risk of pancreatic cancer for both coffee and alcoholic beverage consumption. We obtained data on coffee, alcohol, and other dietary factors using semiquantitative food frequency questionnaires administered at baseline (1986 in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study and 1980 in the Nurses’ Health Study) and in subsequent follow-up questionnaires. Data on other risk factors for pancreatic cancer, including cigarette smoking, were also available. Individuals with a history of cancer at study initiation were excluded from all of the analyses. During the 1,907,222 person-years of follow-up, 288 incident cases of pancreatic cancer were diagnosed. The data were analyzed separately for each cohort, and results were pooled to compute overall relative risks (RR). Neither coffee nor alcohol intakes were associated with an increased risk of pancreatic cancer in either cohort or after pooling the results (pooled RR, 0.62; 95% confidence interval, 0.27–1.43, for >3 cups of coffee/day versus none; and pooled RR, 1.00; 95% confidence interval, 0.57–1.76, for >=30 grams of alcohol/day versus none). The associations did not change with analyses examining different latency periods for coffee and alcohol. Similarly, no statistically significant associations were observed for intakes of tea, decaffeinated coffee, total caffeine, or alcoholic beverages. Data from these two large cohorts do not support any overall association between coffee intake or alcohol intake and risk of pancreatic cancer.

Gene-Environment Interaction Effects on Behavioral Variation and Risk of Complex Disorders: The Example of Alcoholism and Other Psychiatric Disorders

There have been few replicated examples of genotype x environment interaction effects on behavioral variation or risk of psychiatric disorder. We review some of the factors that have made detection of genotype x environment interaction effects difficult, and show how genotype x shared environment interaction (GxSE) effects are commonly confounded with genetic parameters in data from twin pairs reared together. Historic data on twin pairs reared apart can in principle be used to estimate such GxSE effects, but have rarely been used for this purpose. We illustrate this using previously published data from the Swedish Adoption Twin Study of Aging (SATSA), which suggest that GxSE effects could account for as much as 25% of the total variance in risk of becoming a regular smoker. Since few separated twin pairs will be available for study in the future, we also consider methods for modifying variance components linkage analysis to allow for environmental interactions with linked loci.

The validity of publication and citation counts for Sociology and other selected disciplines

The use of bibliometric data is a means of comparing. research productivity and scholarly. impact for individuals, work groups, institutions and nations within and between disciplines. Central to this debate is the notion that disciplines differ in the ways in which,they exchange ideas and disseminate information and therefore have diverse publishing and citation patterns. In this article we use two different approaches to compiling bibliometric data to compare publishing patterns of five different disciplines that encompass Molecular Biology; Administration/Political Science, Psychology,. Philosophy and Sociology/Anthropology. We find that the social sciences differ from each other as well as from the physical sciences in their publication and citation patterns. Further, while the different ways of organizing the data produce somewhat different results, the substantive findings for the general patterning of publications and citations of disciplines are consistent for both data sets. Sociology/Anthropology, when compared with the other disciplines, shows substantial differences across universities.