Fossil fuel resources are decreasing daily. As a renewable energy, biodiesel has been receiving increasing attention because of the relevance it gains from the rising petroleum price and its environmental advantages. This review highlights some of the perspectives for the biodiesel industry to thrive as an alternative fuel, while discussing opportunities and challenges of biodiesel. This review is divided in three parts. First overview is given on developments of biodiesel in past and present, especially for the different feedstocks and the conversion technologies of biodiesel industry.

Efficient plant nutrition and good agronomical practices are essential to meet future challenges in agriculture, while high land productivity is an obvious measure to integrate food security and environment protection. However, nutrient management in agriculture, including fertilizer applications and issues linked to nutrient losses, are highly complex due to multidimensional variability. Thus, robust systems of measurements and documentation, including planning, are required in order to support decision-making.

The northeastern China is an important commodity grain region in China, as well as a notable corn belt and major soybean producing area. It thus plays a significant role in the national food security system. However, large-scale land reclamation and non-optimum farming practices give rise to soil degradation in the region. This study analyzed the food security issues coupled with global climate change in the northeastern China during 1980–2000, which is the period of modern agriculture.

The failures of food security and other policies to guarantee the right to food motivate the calls for the radical reforms to the food system called for by food sovereignty. Food sovereignty narratives identify neoliberal state policies and global capital as the source of the food insecurity, and seek new rights for producers and consumers. However, the nature of territorial state power and the juridical structures of the (neo)liberal state may mute the more radical aims of food sovereignty.

Global land use structure is changing rapidly due to unceasing population growth and accelerated urbanization, which leads to fierce competition between the rigid demand for built-up area and the protection of cultivated land, forest, and grassland. It has been a great challenge to realize the sustainable development of land resources.

Detailed comparative analysis of basic lines of agrarian transformations in China and Russia has been done, its results have been analysed. Not only conceptual differences of the agrarian policy in those countries are demonstrated, but also consequences of concrete political decisions for the development of the branch. The differences are stipulated mainly by two groups of factors. The first of them is the opposite approaches to transforming land relations and the entire system of agrarian relations.

The view that widows and their dependents face greater livelihood risks in the era of HIV/AIDS is indeed supported by nationally-representative survey results from Zambia. Efforts to safeguard widows’ rights to land through land tenure innovations involving community authorities may be an important component of social protection, poverty alleviation, and HIV/AIDS mitigation strategies. Several of the findings reported show the influence of local traditional authorities in affecting the extent to which widows are able to retain land.

The serious food crisis in 2007 has reinstated the issue of food security. In particular, it evokes an old set of questions associated with the sustainability of an adequate food supply: are we facing a systemic shortage of arable land for food production? How serious is the oil dependence of food security in relation to peak oil (the point in time when the maximum rate of global oil extraction is reached)? To answer these questions one has to study the role of technical inputs in agricultural production, especially those inputs generated from fossil energy (how much fossil energy is used?

Internationally, there is interest in increasing the trade in ‘green’ market products, such as organic, fair trade, reduction of deforestation and forest degradation/reduction of deforestation and forest degradation+ for reduced deforestation and mitigation of climate change, and environmental goods and services. This crucially needs to be extended to the many poor, hungry and marginalized smallholder farmers in developing countries.

The present e-collection of scientific works deals with results of research on issues of economy, agrarian and engineering sciences studied by researchers, post-graduate students, magisters and students of Mykolayiv State Agrarian Univ. and other educational establishments of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy of Ukraine are elucidated. The issue comprises 32 scientific papers, distributed by three sections, in particular Economic sciences (23 papers), Agricultural sciences (7) and Engineering sciences (2 papers), and, what is important, except the Ukrainian-language contents (pp.

The present e-collection of scientific works deals with results of research on issues of economy, agrarian and engineering sciences studied by researchers, post-graduate students, magisters and students of Mykolayiv State Agrarian Univ. and other educational establishments of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy of Ukraine.

Rehabilitating degraded rangelands using enclosures offers various benefits to agro‐pastoral households. However, enclosure benefits cannot be generalized as there are variations across dryland ecosystems and societies. This study assessed the qualitative and quantitative benefits derived from rehabilitating degraded rangelands using private enclosures in Chepareria, West Pokot County, Kenya.