Corporate social and environmental responsibility in relation to the agricultural sector and the food supply chain : a Case Study of Waitrose

Waitrose has a strong commitment to organic farming but also uses products from 'conventional' farms. At the production stage, Waitrose own-label products are fully traceable, GM-free and all suppliers undergo a detailed assessment programme based on current best practice. Crop suppliers to Waitrose operate an authenticity programme to certify that each assignment is GM-free and produce is screened for pesticide residues. Waitrose sources conventional crops grown from 'Integrated Crop Management Systems' (ICMS) using best horticultural practices. The 'Assured Product' scheme regulates all UK produce to ICMS standards and these audits are being extended worldwide. Business is withdrawn from suppliers who fail the audit. In relation to this, Waitrose has increased its Fairtrade range as in its view 'Buying these products provides direct additional benefit to workers in the developing countries where they are produced and assists marginal producers by giving them access to markets they would not otherwise have'. Currently, Waitrose is developing its own sustainable timber assessment criteria. For livestock, protocols are in place to ensure that animals are reared under the 'most natural conditions possible' and free range produce is offered where animals have access to open space although some produce is not from free-range animals. Waitrose also use a 'Hazards Analysis Critical Points' system to identify food safety hazards that occur at any stage from production to point of sale and to ensure that full measures are in place to control them. In addition, mechanisms have been implemented to reduce fuel use and hence reduce CO2 emissions in the transport of products and staff, and to increase the energy use efficiency of refrigeration systems which account for approximately 60% of Waitrose energy use.

Fast fourier analysis of structural organization in decellularized cartilage-on-bone laminates

Denaturation of tissues can provide a unique biological environment for regenerative medicine application only if minimal disruption of their microarchitecture is achieved during the decellularization process. The goal is to keep the structural integrity of such a construct as functional as the tissues from which they were derived. In this work, cartilage-on-bone laminates were decellularized through enzymatic, non-ionic and ionic protocols. This work investigated the effects of decellularization process on the microarchitecture of cartiligous extracellular matrix; determining the extent of how each process deteriorated the structural organization of the network. High resolution microscopy was used to capture cross-sectional images of samples prior to and after treatment. The variation of the microarchitecture was then analysed using a well defined fast Fourier image processing algorithm. Statistical analysis of the results revealed how significant the alternations among aforementioned protocols were (p < 0.05). Ranking the treatments by their effectiveness in disrupting the ECM integrity, they were ordered as: Trypsin> SDS> Triton X-100.

Negative change and job outcomes : the impact of subjective fit in public sector health care organization

There is an ongoing level of organizational-wide change (such as empowerment and downsizing) occurring within the Australian health care sector. However, there is a paucity of empirical evidence on how public and nonprofit sector nurses cope with these organizational-wide change initiatives and their consequences on individual and work outcomes. This will be the primary aim of the current paper. To this end, a path model is developed base on an integration of existing theoretical perspectives on occupational stress, change management, and person-organizational fit. Data were collected from 252 public and not-for-profit sector nurses. The path analysis suggests that public and nonprofit nurses experience positive and negative change initiatives. Negative change initiatives resulted in an increase in the level of administrative-related stressors. Nurses with more congruent values report less experience with administrative stressors. As nurses experienced more administrative stressors, they tend to report more job dissatisfaction. Nurses whose values were more congruent during organizational change reported higher level of psychological wellbeing. Nurses who were had higher level of psychological wellbeing were found to have higher job satisfaction, which subsequently led to a higher level of organizational commitment.

Recombination, decreased host specificity and increased mobility may have driven the emergence of maize streak virus as an agricultural pathogen

Maize streak virus (MSV; family Geminiviridae, genus Mastrevirus), the causal agent of maize streak disease, ranks amongst the most serious biological threats to food security in subSaharan Africa. Although five distinct MSV strains have been currently described, only one of these - MSV-A - causes severe disease in maize. Due primarily to their not being an obvious threat to agriculture, very little is known about the 'grass-adapted' MSV strains, MSV-B, -C, -D and -E. Since comparing the genetic diversities, geographical distributions and natural host ranges of MSV-A with the other MSV strains could provide valuable information on the epidemiology, evolution and emergence of MSV-A, we carried out a phylogeographical analysis of MSVs found in uncultivated indigenous African grasses. Amongst the 83 new MSV genomes presented here, we report the discovery of six new MSV strains (MSV-F to -K). The non-random recombination breakpoint distributions detectable with these and other available mastrevirus sequences partially mirror those seen in begomoviruses, implying that the forces shaping these breakpoint patterns have been largely conserved since the earliest geminivirus ancestors. We present evidence that the ancestor of all MSV-A variants was the recombinant progeny of ancestral MSV-B and MSV-G/-F variants. While it remains unknown whether recombination influenced the emergence of MSV-A in maize, our discovery that MSV-A variants may both move between and become established in different regions of Africa with greater ease, and infect more grass species than other MSV strains, goes some way towards explaining why MSV-A is such a successful maize pathogen. © 2008 SGM.

Assessing eco-environmental performance of agricultural production in OECD countries : combination of soil surface, soil system and farm gate methods of nutrient auditing

Nitrogen balance is increasingly used as an indicator of the environmental performance of agricultural sector in national, international, and global contexts. There are three main methods of accounting the national nitrogen balance: farm gate, soil surface, and soil system. OECD (2008) recently reported the nitrogen and phosphorus balances for member countries for the 1985 - 2004 period using the soil surface method. The farm gate and soil system methods were also used in some international projects. Some studies have provided the comparison among these methods and the conclusion is mixed. The motivation of this present paper was to combine these three methods to provide a more detailed auditing of the nitrogen balance and flows for national agricultural production. In addition, the present paper also provided a new strategy of using reliable international and national data sources to calculate nitrogen balance using the farm gate method. The empirical study focused on the nitrogen balance of OECD countries for the period from 1985 to 2003. The N surplus sent to the total environment of OECD surged dramatically in early 1980s, gradually decreased during 1990s but exhibited an increasing trends in early 2000s. The overall N efficiency however fluctuated without a clear increasing trend. The eco-environmental ranking shows that Australia and Ireland were the worst while Korea and Greece were the best.

Sense-making across space and time : implications for the organization and findability of information

This paper presents the results from a study of information behaviors, with specific focus on information organisation-related behaviours conducted as part of a larger daily diary study with 34 participants. The findings indicate that organization of information in everyday life is a problematic area due to various factors. The self-evident one is the inter-subjectivity between the person who may have organized the information and the person looking for that same information (Berlin et. al., 1993). Increasingly though, we are not just looking for information within collections that have been designed by someone else, but within our own personal collections of information, which frequently include books, electronic files, photos, records, documents, desktops, web bookmarks, and portable devices. The passage of time between when we categorized or classified the information, and the time when we look for the same information, poses several problems of intra-subjectivity, or the difference between our own past and present perceptions of the same information. Information searching, and hence the retrieval of information from one's own collection of information in everyday life involved a spatial and temporal coordination with one's own past selves in a sort of cognitive and affective time travel, just as organizing information is a form of anticipatory coordination with one's future information needs. This has implications for finding information and also on personal information management.

Resources for improving journalists' understanding of the economic and financial parameters of Australia's agricultural and commodity producers

The research addresses how an understanding of the fundamentals of economics will better inform general journalists who report on issues or events affecting rural and regional Australia. The research draws on practice-based experience of the author, formal economics studies, interviews with news editors from Australian television news organisations, and interviews from leading economists. A guidebook has also been written to help journalists apply economic theories to their reporting. The guidebook enables reporters to think strategically and consider the 'big picture' when they inform society about policies, commodity trade, the environment, or any issues involving rural and regional Australia.

Organizational reframing : the commercialization of a public sector organization

The purpose of this study is to elaborate shared schema change theory in the context of the radical restructuring-commercialization of an Australian public infrastructure organization. Commercialization of the case organization imposed high individual and collective cognitive processing and emotional demands as organizational members sought to develop new shared schema. Existing schema change research suggests that radical restructuring renders pre-existing shared schema irrelevant and triggers new schema development through experiential learning (Balogun and Johnson, 2004). Focus groups and semi-structured interviews were conducted at four points over a three-year period. The analysis revealed that shared schema change occurred in three broad phases: (1) radical restructuring and aftermath; (2) new CEO and new change process schema, and: (3) large-group meeting and schema change. Key findings include: (1) radical structural change does not necessarily trigger new shared schema development as indicated in prior research; (2) leadership matters, particularly in framing new means-ends schema; (3) how change leader interventions are sequenced has an important influence on shared schema change, and; (4) the creation of facilitated social processes have an important influence on shared schema change.

Rates of radiologically confirmed pneumonia as defined by the World Health Organization in Northern Territory Indigenous children

Objective To determine the burden of hospitalised, radiologically confirmed pneumonia (World Health Organization protocol) in Northern Territory Indigenous children. Design, setting and participants Historical, observational study of all hospital admissions for any diagnosis of NT resident Indigenous children, aged between >= 29 days and < 5 years, 1 April 1997 to 31 March 2005. Intervention All chest radiographs taken during these admissions, regardless of diagnosis, were assessed for pneumonia in accordance with the WHO protocol. Main outcome measure The primary outcome was endpoint consolidation (dense fluffy consolidation [alveolar infiltrate] of a portion of a lobe or the entire lung) present on a chest radiograph within 3 days of hospitalisation. Results We analysed data on 24 115 hospitalised episodes of care for 9492 children and 13 683 chest radiographs. The average annual cumulative incidence of endpoint consolidation was 26.6 per 1000 population per year (95% Cl, 25.3-27.9); 57.5 per 1000 per year in infants aged 1-11 months, 38.3 per 1000 per year in those aged 12-23 months, and 13.3 per 1000 per year in those aged 24-59 months. In all age groups, rates of endpoint consolidation in children in the arid southern region of NT were about twice that of children in the tropical northern region. Conclusion The rates of severe pneumonia in hospitalised NT Indigenous children are among the highest reported in the world. Reducing this unacceptable burden of disease should be a national health priority.

Sequence and organization of barley yellow dwarf virus genomic RNA

The nucleotide sequence of the genomic RNA of barley yellow dwarf virus, PAV serotype was determined except for the 5′-terminal base, and its genome organization deduced. The 5,677 nucleotide genome contains five large open reading frames (ORFs). The genes for the coat protein (1) and the putative viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerase were identified. The latter shows a striking degree of similarity to that of carnation mottle virus (CarMV). By comparison with corona- and retrovirus RNAs, it is proposed that a translational frameshift is involved in expression of the polymerase. An ORF encoding an Mr 49,797 protein (50K ORF) may be translated by in-frame readthrough of the coat protein stop codon. The coat protein, an overlapping 17K ORF, and a 3′ 6.7K ORF are likely to be expressed via subgenomic mRNAs. © 1988 IRL Press Limited.