Strategic Agricultural Commodity Value Chains in Africa for Increased Food: The Regional Approach for Food Security

The challenge Africa faces the most is how to feed the 2.4 billion people in 2050. This will require a transformational agriculture. Africa doesn’t need subsistence agriculture, but rather agriculture linked to the market where market demand and the consuming habits are taken in consideration. Agriculture evolves in an environment where small holders are linked to markets (national and regional), where economies of complementarity and economies of scale are taken advantage of by producers and private sector. In short, Africa will need a paradigm shift to industrialise and commercialise its agriculture sector in order to increase food production, and income and to create jobs in and outside the sector. Africa needs agribusiness and agro-industries to domesticate the benefits of the sector, to create wealth in the sector and retain that wealth in the continent. Agricultural commodities regional value chains for increased food should be the target for Africa. The continent remains the region with the highest prevalence of under-nourishment. Since agriculture remains the mainstay of most African economies except the mineral producers, the sector deserves a close attention from leaders. It accounts for 65% of employment and 40% of Africa’s export earnings and accounts for 17% of the GDP. This shows how important the sector is. Agriculture needs to be seen as a conduit for farmers to get connected to markets, a conduit for revenue, for jobs and for transformation. Africa needs to come back on the international scene as food sufficient continent and even food exporter. This can be achieved only with a stable, productive agricultural resource base. Thus, achieving and sustaining food security and economic prosperity in Africa will require significant efforts to modernize the continent’s agriculture sector through injection of agribusiness and agro-industries and through the application of science and technology in agriculture. In essence, agriculture needs to be viewed as knowledge based entrepreneurial activity. Smart investments in agriculture will have multiplier effects for the whole economy and hence induce prosperity to other sectors. In recent years, a renewed focus on agriculture has been evident in policy and development agendas across the African continent. This paper outlines the status of agriculture, agribusiness and agro-industries in Africa, their role in the agenda of agricultural transformation and economic transformation and the focus on regional value chain to increase food production, transformation and trade. The paper adopts a new thinking in agriculture, which reflects a regional value chain approach. The author covers such issues as: need for agricultural transformation, the role of value chain in agricultural sector, the need for regional value chain for increased income and increased food, the role of markets and the common denominator of all, the regional integration to push forward the African agriculture agenda. Evidence shows that it is agricultural growth, through its leverage effects on the rest of the economy that typically enables poor countries, poor regions and ultimately poor households to take the first steps toward economic transformation. Therefore agricultural productivity, at the small holder’s level, has the potential to lift millions of Africa’s vulnerable out of poverty and provide sustainable jobs. Other factors, namely “the rapid urbanization” and “increased population growth”, are quoted to be of critical importance. Africa population is projected to double, attaining the 2.3 billion people mark over the next 40 years representing half of the globe’s total population. This could trigger competition for resources and can have devastating effects on natural resources if not rightly channelled.

Value and Path for Farmers' Citizenship Cultivation from Agri-ecological Security

Severe situation faced by China's agri-ecological security is elaborated.It is believed that cultivation of farmers' citizenship is the key to solving this problem,because it is favorable to consolidating farmers' independent and equal ideas,enhancing farmers' cooperative community idea,cultivating farmers' concept of rule by law,and strengthening farmers' fair and just moral concept.It is expected to make farmers fully exercise their civil rights and consciously perform their civil responsibilities.Finally,practical paths for cultivation of farmers' citizenship are put forward.These include improving market economy to promote equality of subjects,carrying out democratic practice to stimulate public participation,prospering cultural education to make clear public liability,propagating law in villages to carry forward spirit of rule by law,and making definite government responsibility to encourage social supervision.

The Effects of Job Security, Features, Personal Values, and Recognition on Organizational Involvement

As extrinsic rewards become very limited under organizational retrenchments, organizations should rely heavily on other types of rewards, such as intrinsic rewards, to improve the performance of those employees who have been overwhelmed with a perception of job insecurity. This paper examines the impact of such perception, along with many other positive influencers such as enhancement in job features, recognition, and the personal values of those employees on the organizational involvement. The data analyzed were based on a sample of 34 employee respondents from a project based engineering and service company （identified as ABC Company in this paper） operating in the Middle East. The adopted research approach is basically a quantitative approach. The correlation and regression analysis tools have been used to explore this relationship. The results of this study suggest a generally unnoticed and disregarded resource that has the prime effect on improving and enhancing the organizational involvement, which is the recognition those employees receive from the management. This research suggests that recognition, as the top influencer, has a strong impact on organizational involvement/psychological attachment for the employees. The other factors that have proved to have the second degree influence on organizational involvement are enhancement in job features, increase in the job security level, and personal values.

Analysis of Agricultural Commodities Value Chains and Greenhouse Gas Emission in Rice and Maize in West Africa: Impact on Food Security

This paper analyses the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission along the value chains of two strategic commodities in West Africa (rice and maize) in four pilot countries: Ghana, Senegal Benin and Cote D’Ivoire. The Value Chains Analysis and Greenhouse model used in this study, provides insight into the relationship between output maximization and GHG emissions to help define optimal intervention approaches that minimize emissions while maximizing the potential yield, hence boost food security. It highlights intervention measures for improvement of production and productivity along with the identification of mitigation measures to reduce GHG emissions. It also revealed that the largest GHG emission factor from maize farming in the selected countries is from the application of nitrogen fertilizers (NO2), and for rice farming, depending on the systems, e.g. rain fed, irrigated or multiple aeration, the emission is mostly due to anaerobic decomposition of methane (CH4) which increases with flooding practice.

Analysis on preserving or increasing the value of social security funds under the new normal economy in China

The ＂new normal＂ is the current stage of development of China＇s economy. The ＂new＂ in new normal means different to past; the ＂normal＂ means relatively stable. For a period of time in the future, the decrease of potential growth rate has become an indisputable fact. Social security fund is an important source of funds for the protection of people＇s livelihood, whose every movement often attract much attention. Under the situation of new normal economy, how to ensure the preserving or increasing value of social security funds on the premise of security is the core task in the operations management of social security fund investment. At present, there are some difficulties in the development of the social security funds, such as the management system and operation mechanism are not perfect, some institutional measures have not been fully implemented and the progress of the law and regulations is slow. In this paper, we will put forward some corresponding improvement measures, such as expand the scope of social security fund investment, accelerate the implementation of the nominal account system and strengthen the actuarial management of social security fund.

On the Role of Security in the System of Personal Values:Are Conservatives Prioritizing Security?

Security is a value contained in most theories of personal values.Yet,while the relations among the most basic values are clear and reliable,the role of security in the system of values remains ambiguous.People striving for security are often also striving for tradition and conformity but sometimes they are focusing more on other values(such as health values,for example).Based on eight representative surveys(N=24,000)in several German cities between 1998 and 2022,the author shows that when measuring security without suggesting a particular meaning of this notion,security takes a relatively central position within the system of values and their components(shown by multidimensional scaling,MDS).People striving for security also emphasize the importance of law and order,working hard,and having a good family life as guiding principles in their lives.Conformity is not that important for them,and having an exciting life is even negatively correlated.Age has little impact on the MDS structure of values and their components,even though people exhibit substantial changes in the relative weights they assign to many values as they get older.

The Value of Social Security Fund Research

The social security fund investment operations of the social security system of a country or even the whole economy has a very important role in recent years, although China＇s social security fund management has made great progress, but China＇s social security fund investment operations in increasing the value of the pursuit of this goal, while also facing tremendous pressure. After years of practice of reform, China＇s old-age, unemployment and medical insurance and minimum living focused on the social security system has taken shape, but also the corresponding social security fund was established. Part of the problems of social security funds and other investment operations are increasingly apparent. How to achieve the social security fund is necessary to ensure payment, but also realize the accumulation, it is necessary to increase the value, but also to avoid risks, it has become an urgent task of China＇s reform and development. Social Security Fund Investment Management became the central task of the Social Security System.

Lattice-Based Searchable Encryption Scheme against Inside Keywords Guessing Attack

To save the local storage,users store the data on the cloud server who offers convenient internet services.To guarantee the data privacy,users encrypt the data before uploading them into the cloud server.Since encryption can reduce the data availability,public-key encryption with keyword search(PEKS)is developed to achieve the retrieval of the encrypted data without decrypting them.However,most PEKS schemes cannot resist quantum computing attack,because the corresponding hardness assumptions are some number theory problems that can be solved efficiently under quantum computers.Besides,the traditional PEKS schemes have an inherent security issue that they cannot resist inside keywords guessing attack(KGA).In this attack,a malicious server can guess the keywords encapsulated in the search token by computing the ciphertext of keywords exhaustively and performing the test between the token and the ciphertext of keywords.In the paper,we propose a lattice-based PEKS scheme that can resist quantum computing attacks.To resist inside KGA,this scheme adopts a lattice-based signature technique into the encryption of keywords to prevent the malicious server from forging a valid ciphertext.Finally,some simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme and some comparison results are further shown with respect to other searchable schemes.

Big Data Security and Privacy： A Review

While Big Data gradually become a hot topic of research and business and has been everywhere used in many industries, Big Data security and privacy has been increasingly concerned. However, there is an obvious contradiction between Big Data security and privacy and the widespread use of Big Data. In this paper, we firstly reviewed the enormous benefits and challenges of security and privacy in Big Data. Then, we present some possible methods and techniques to ensure Big Data security and privacy.

A MULTICAST KEY MANAGEMENT SCHEME BASED ON CHARACTERISTIC VALUES OF MEMBERS

A new collusion attack on Pour-like schemes is proposed in this paper. Then, we present a collusion-free centralized multicast key management scheme based on characteristic values of members. The re-keying method that other group members calculate new keys when a member is joining or leaving is also designed. It achieves forward secrecy and backward secrecy. Compared with typical existing centralized schemes, the storage of Group Key Controller (GKC) in our scheme halves the storage overhead of others, and communication overhead of GKC is 2 in case of joining re-keying. Especially, the leaving re-keying overhead is and the overall performance is excellent.

Predictive value of hypo-osmotic swelling test to identifyviable non-motile sperm

Aim: To determine the predictive value of the hypo-osmotic swelling (HOS) test to identify viable, non-motile sperm. Methods: Semen samples from 20 men with severe asthenozoospermia underwent traditional seminal analysis, eosin-nigrosin (EN) staining and the HOS test. A further EN stain was then performed on a HOS pre-treated aliquot and a total of 2000 further sperm examined. Results: The median sperm density was 5.1 million/mL (IQR 4.3-13.1) and the median motility was 3.0 % (IQR 0-7). Seven samples showed complete asthenozoospermia. Initial EN staining showed 59 % viability (range 48-69) despite the poor standard parameters and 47 % (range 33-61) in the complete asthenozoospermia subgroup. The HOS test showed 49.9 % reacted overall (range 40-59) and 41.7 % (range 22-61) in the complete asthenozoospermia subgroup. The combined HOS/EN stain showed the positive predictive value of the HOS test to identify viable sperm was 84.2 % overall and 79.7 % in the complete asthenozoospermia subgroup. Conclusion: The HOS test can effectively predict sperm viability in patients with severe and complete asthenozoospermia.

A Flaw in the Security Proof of BDOP-PEKS and PEKS-STAT

Provable security has been widely used for analyzing the security of cryptosystems. Its main idea is to reduce the security to some well-defined computational assumption. The reduction process is called the security proof. In this paper, we find a flaw in the security proof of BDOP-PEKS and PEKS-STAT, present a new conclusion for the security of BDOP-PEKS, and give a security proof. The flaw in the security proof of PEKS-STAT can be fixed in the same way. Finally we conclude some steps of security proof, and emphasize that the probability is as important as the construction.

Multi-Owner Keyword Search over Shared Data without Secure Channels in the Cloud

Searchable encryption allows cloud users to outsource the massive encrypted data to the remote cloud and to search over the data without revealing the sensitive information. Many schemes have been proposed to support the keyword search in a public cloud. However,they have some potential limitations. First,most of the existing schemes only consider the scenario with the single data owner. Second,they need secure channels to guarantee the secure transmission of secret keys from the data owner to data users. Third,in some schemes,the data owner should be online to help data users when data users intend to perform the search,which is inconvenient.In this paper,we propose a novel searchable scheme which supports the multi-owner keyword search without secure channels. More than that,our scheme is a non-interactive solution,in which all the users only need to communicate with the cloud server. Furthermore,the analysis proves that our scheme can guarantee the security even without secure channels. Unlike most existing public key encryption based searchable schemes,we evaluate the performance of our scheme,which shows that our scheme is practical.

Competiveness of Maize Value Chains for Smallholders in West Africa: Case of Benin, Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire

The paper analyses the entire value chains of the maize food crop in targeted countries. It identifies the maize actors and related business linkages from input supply to product markets, the governance of the chain, mainly the decision making to decrease the transaction costs, the chain performance including efficiency in value-added, gender equity and sustainability and the need for capacity building in various segments along the maize value chains in Benin, Ghana, and Càte d’Ivoire. The main objective of the paper is to contribute to better livelihoods of rural poor through empowerment and gender equitable access to maize value chain opportunities, inputs and product markets through technical backstopping and capacity strengthening so that smallholders understand and participate in the value chains and benefit from it. The following specific objectives are to i) identify the constraints and opportunities and linkages between actors across agro-ecological zones through country and regional level baselines;ii) develop an analytical support toolkit to analyze competitiveness, trends and outlook of maize taking into account climate change and policy shifts at micro, meso and macro level and iii) strengthen the capacity of regional maize value chain actors in the targeted countries. A systematic sampling of one out of every three successive shed was used to select wholesalers whereas snowballing sampling was used to select the assemblers, retailers and processors. The paper informs on the status of technologies application along maize value chains in selected countries and analyzes the economical profitability and/or profit maximization of maize value chains.

Chosen-Ciphertext Attack Secure Public-Key Encryption with Keyword Search

As the use of cloud storage for various services increases,the amount of private personal information along with data stored in the cloud storage is also increasing.To remotely use the data stored on the cloud storage,the data to be stored needs to be encrypted for this reason.Since“searchable encryption”is enable to search on the encrypted data without any decryption,it is one of convenient solutions for secure data management.A public key encryption with keyword search(for short,PEKS)is one of searchable encryptions.Abdalla et al.firstly defined IND-CCA security for PEKS to enhance it’s security and proposed consistent IND-CCA secure PEKS based on the“robust”ANO-CCA secure identity-based encryption(IBE).In this paper,we propose two generic constructions of consistent IND-CCA secure PEKS combining(1)a hierarchical identity based encryption(for short,HIBE)and a signature scheme or(2)a HIBE,an encapsulation,and a message authentication code(for short,MAC)scheme.Our generic constructions identify that HIBE requires the security of a signature or a MAC as well as the weaker“ANO-CPA security(resp.,IND-CPA security)”of HIBE than“ANOCCA security(resp.,IND-CCA security)”of IBE required in for achieving IND-CCA secure(resp.,consistent)PEKS.Finally,we prove that our generic constructions satisfy IND-CCA security and consistency under the security models.

Analysis of the Fruit Value Chain of Two Priority Food Woody Species of Central Southern Niger, West Africa

Non-timber forest products provide important socio-economic services to different village and urban communities in West Africa. However, little is known about the links between the different actors and their contribution to the local or national economy. This study was conducted in central southern Niger and aimed to 1) identify and map the main actors in the value chain of Ziziphus mauritiana and Balanites aegyptiaca fruits;and 2) analyse the silvicultural and socio-economic aspects of fruit exploitation of these two species. Socio-economic surveys were conducted in four big villages in two main agroecological zones. Fruit exploitation of these two species affected 3044 people, with estimated 39 tonnes of Z. mauritiana and 27 tonnes of B. aegyptiaca fruit collected in 2017. The surveys revealed that the main actors were women (62.05%), constituting the primary core of the actors of the value chain. Exploitation was mainly conducted in forests (68.6%) or on farms (15.4%) with no restrictions to access. Marketing of Z. mauritiana concerned fresh fruit (68.8%) and fruit processed into biscuits (82.14%), and that of B. aegyptiaca involved fruit (38.5%) and oil extracted from seeds (38.7%);the net margin was estimated at 71.71% ± 21.59% for the first species and 50.31% ± 47.99% for the second. The income was mainly used for the needs of farmers’ households. Links have been identified where consumers and processors supply seeds, after extracting the fruit pulp, to nurserymen for the production of plants for the villages or farms. This study reveals an important potential and opportunity for job creation and improved food and nutritional status of the vulnerable strata of rural communities in Niger. Improving the links between the various actors will establish a more sustainable promotion of the fruits of these two species.

The Sustainable Development of Social Security Funds

The social security funds is to establish social security system and the solid foundation on which to run, the safety of the social security fund sustainability for play a crucial role in the development of social security system. In the current aging serious today, the social security fund is particularly important. In this paper, through the introduction of the necessity of sustainable development of the social security fund, the comprehensive analysis of the problems existing in the process of sustainable development of the social security fund, tries to put forward countermeasures and Suggestions for the sustainable development of social security fund in our country.

Social security fund operation and managemem research

The national social security fund is the focus on social security strategic reserves of the central government, is mainly used to meet the ageing peak period of the social security need in the future. Since established in 2000, the national social security fund, as of December 31, 2010, the national social security fund council management total scale of 856.8 billion yuan of funds, social security fund investment gains made great achievements. But we can still see a lot of problems in the social security fund investment operation continues to improve we need to carefully study. It is as a breakthrough point, this paper adopts the method of literature research, comparison research and inductive analysis by summing up the national social security fund investment and successful experience, this paper analyzes the reasons of its historical losses, and learn from foreign experience, put forward in the next five to 10 years the social security fund investment direction and investment strategies, ensure the social security fund the value.

The Value Choice for Legal Regulation of Financial Risks in Shadow Banking

It is of vital importance for shadow banking supervision to have correct targets for the curtailment of financial risks.In fact,the process of selecting legal regulation targets for shadow banking financial risks is equivalent to a process of achieving specific goals or objectives by means of legal regulation.The establishment of a regulatory system for shadow banking should consider the objective and practical needs of the sector,prioritize security as the desired value,and reasonably establish a value system for risk control.

A Study on the Sustainable Development of China＇s Social Security Fund

The social security fund is the cornerstone of the establishment and implementation of the social security system. Whether it can achieve sustainable and healthy development directly affects the operation and development of China＇s social security system, which will affect social stability, economic development and even political stability. Therefore, this paper studies the management and operation of the social security fund, from the perspective of sustainable development and the problem of increasing the value, to make recommendations for the sustainable development of the social security fund.