Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
income of farm households. Such an observation also suggests that national figures on farm
incomes are likely to mask total incomes of farm household figures between different types
of farming and different regional economies, as there are known to be underlying
fluctuations in sectors, but these tend to impact on only one part of farm household
wellbeing.
Although farming has a major influence on shaping the rural landscape, it is no longer
as important, economically, as it once was. Only in Portugal and many of the new eastern
European member states does farm workforce exceed 10% of the total workforce; and it
accounts for a markedly smaller proportion of GDP than its share of the workforce. It is not
wholly clear whether the European financial crisis will increase farm employment in a
temporary or more permanent way, as households engage with rural land in new ways.
Both workforce and GDP shares have shown a tendency to decline significantly over time.
Non-farm economic activities are thus likely to be major shapers of rural economic
wellbeing; and regional wellbeing is likely to spill over into the farm sector through
demand for hobby farms and rural recreation, and impacts on land and rural property prices.
There are also major intra-national variations in the extent of dependency on
agriculture. Any region without a major urban hub is likely to have a much greater degree
of primary sector dependency. Unless such areas have experienced a renaissance through
tourism or rural re-population, they are more likely to be characterized by relatively fast
population decline and very frail economies.
Exploring adjustment and pathways of change
Much of the early literature associated with the resurgent interest in farm adjustment from
the 1970s onwards focused on the farm as the object of inquiry. This emphasis still exists in
the work of authors such as Lobley et al. (2002) and remains a fertile research field.
However, if the scale of observation moves from the individual farm to the region, it
becomes necessary to see farm adjustment within a regional setting. As noted earlier,
Marsden et al. (1993) had recognized that different types of countryside were evident but
their four typologies can perhaps be seen more as Weberian ideals than discernible entities
on the ground. More recently, various authors have tried to identify and map different areas
using a range of multivariate techniques.
Studies on changes taking place in European rural areas suggest that there is a spatial,
temporal and structural co-existence of several processes of transition, from increasingly
specialized farm business to multifunctionality at both farm and landscape level ( Woods,
2011; Pinto-Correia and Kristensen, 2013) and more recently to what Marsden (2013) calls
bio-economic productivism, resulting in increasing diversification of rural space (Pinto-
Correia and Breman, 2009; van Berkel and Verburg, 2011). While agriculture and its role
as producer is still at the centre of a maelstrom of issues surrounding food safety,
environmental balance and climate change, there is an increasing expectation from society
that other goods and services will be provided by rural space (Selman, 2009; de Groot,
2010). The transformations at stake are connected partly to restructuring processes in the
agricultural sector, as described in this chapter. They are also related to general trends of
urbanization and regional economic performance. This includes urban sprawl and
infrastructure development as well as changes in broad socio-economic processes. These
 
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