Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
public money; and if anything the productivist discourse has been strengthened by the
prospect of what John Beddington has termed a 'perfect storm' of growing population,
increased natural resource scarcity and climate change. New forms of regulation may have
softened the harshest components of support for production, but a resurgent set of
productivist values is now actively promoted under the guise of sustainable intensification.
There remain many parts of Europe where the idea of agricultural intensification is
highly challenging, if not inconceivable. Here, there may be some scope for deconstructing
core knowledge and adapting it to local conditions but that process of adaptation often
hinges around new uses of rural spaces and activities that are less driven by ideas from the
technological core and more from retro-innovation and new uses of rural space. It is rarely
intensive in its impact on rural space and environments.
Behind the observable diversity, certain broad trends in rural land use can be discerned.
There is much greater variety in the way that rural land is used and rural places have
become more differentiated, but farming systems have often been simplified in core
farming areas and enterprise size has grown. These areas often have strong agri-businesses
and may be associated with intensification and environmental sustainability challenges. In
non-core areas, different processes have driven change. These processes of differentiation
have been forged both within the dynamics of the farm and in the regional context. Some
farming areas have been heavily infiltrated by hobby farming; other areas are farmed
extensively with a light touch and have been designated for their cultural landscapes and
biodiversity. More marginal areas have tended to become even more marginal in terms of
their contribution to total agricultural output, but as O'Connor
et al.
(2006) have shown,
they can sometimes be transformed through what might be termed the 'Tuscan' model,
where traditional agriculture can combine with new forms of consumption to create an
alternative but nonetheless vibrant rural economy. We should perhaps be cautious of its
applicability on a wide scale, though, for the preconditions for socio-economic revival in
rural Tuscany may have been contingent on many factors not replicable elsewhere.
The Tuscan experience does, however, point towards a need to better understand
innovation and this has been the subject of a great deal of work by Braczyk
et al.
(1998),
Asheim
et al.
(2008) and others within regional economies and by Wiskerke and van der
Ploeg (2004) in a specifically agrarian context. Van der Ploeg and Marsden (2008) move
towards a more integrative approach and use the metaphor of 'unfolding webs' to describe
new rural urban developments. It is clear that the old paradigms used to frame innovation
opportunities need reframing. Innovation in the rural land use sector and the wider rural
economy happens in different ways in different regions.
Since the early 1990s, in a post-Rio world, the issue of sustainability has become ever
more salient, even if the economic crisis of the last decade has offered a distraction to
many. Recently, in the outcome of the 2008 food crisis, new struggles for food sovereignty
and regional autonomy have also created the conditions for the revival of rural communities
and small-scale production associated with short supply chains.
The transition theory approach has endeavoured to capture this need for a
transformation which is not just about business renewal but also about responding to global
imperatives to develop a more sustainable economy. In recent years, the exploration of
transitions towards more sustainable outcomes has given considerable attention to transition
theory as developed by Dutch researchers (Kemp and Martens, 2007). Much of their early
work explored large-scale industries rather than farming, but lately a number of projects
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