Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to emphasise that the latter is also possible because, as already mentioned in the
introduction of the chapter, multifunctionality comprises not only public goods, but
also public bads. Such a system could be used in either an ex-post or ex-ante context
i.e. based on available data or forecasting potential implications of a given policy
intervention (such as liberalization of European agricultural markets). Of course,
assessment here relies still only on expertise.
Jointness at the Regional Level
Preliminary experiments in five zones of the Rhône-Alpes region (France) emphasized
that aggregating individual data concerning multifunctionality from the farm level
to a larger area is far from being evident (Gillette et al.
2005a)
. Aggregating individual
information about jointness enabled the authors to design a representation of the
multifunctionality of agriculture in a larger zone (groups of municipalities or a
small region). This representation was consistent with the common knowledge of
the history of the different areas but when compared with local surveys of the relevant
areas, it was incomplete because synergies between various farms enhanced the
regional multifunctionality (Gillette et al.
2005b)
.
At the regional level, multifunctionality of agriculture relies on two different
concepts: the variety of combinations of commodity and non-commodity outputs
in the farms and the synergies and antagonisms between these combinations. As such,
the farms can combine the provision of commodity and non-commodity outputs in
very different ways. For example, some farms can breed sheep and maintain pastures
that contribute to the local cultural heritage but other farms in the same area can
choose to restore traditional buildings for hosting tourists and contribute in a
different manner to this local cultural heritage. Other examples involve the provi-
sion of specific landscape patterns that favour the persistence of particular animals
or plants; these specific patterns may be the consequence of maintenance of some
hedges by small cattle farms that need trees for their animals, along with mosaics
of pastures and cereals fields by mixed farms and specific phytosanitary protection
practices in large intensive farms. Moreover, identifying the various ways of com-
bining commodity and non-commodity outputs in a population of farms is of
importance when the ecological or social processes exhibit threshold effects,
5
because there is a need to determine whether the farms that produce them jointly
are numerous enough for the global provision of the ecological (or social service)
or whether their efforts are lost because they are too few to do so.
The second concept is related to the fact that the various ways of combining
commodity and non-commodity outputs in a given region can exhibit synergies or
be competitors. Intensive farms selling high quality products at the farm-gate along
with improvement of the surrounding scenery may benefit from the preservation
of hedges by neighbouring low-intensity dairy farms and at the same time compete
5
Threshold effects on ecological discontinuities have been defined by Muradian
(2001)
as sudden
modifications of a given system property, resulting from the soft and continuous variation of an
independent variable.
