Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
approah has the potential to be particularly beneicial in terms of climate hange as
it would improve absorption and storage of carbon in plants, reduce carbon emis-
sions from crop and livestok systems, and reduce the nitrous oxide emissions asso-
ciated with the application of inorganic fertilizers (Shahczenski and Hill, 2009). It
is imperative that Australian agriculture embraces approahes that use high carbon-
cropping; move away from intensive livestok production; conserve the carbon cur-
rently stored in grasslands and forests; and plant new vegetation in degraded farm-
ing landscapes (Sherr and Sthapit, 2009).
The problem is that agro-ecology threatens the hegemonic position of product-
ivist farming and appears to have litle support from Australia's overwhelmingly
conservative farming organizations. Governments, too, while mouthing statements
about the importance of 'sustainability', 'biodiversity protection' and so forth, put
very litle funding into 'alternative' agro-ecological approahes to farming. Critics
also say that alternative, lower impact forms of farming will not produce the volume
of food to enable Australia to play its part in 'feeding the world' - particularly with
a predicted growth in world population from the present 6.8 billion to 9.2 billion by
2050. For the foreseeable future, it would appear climate hange adaptation in Aus-
tralia will reinforce existing trends towards high-output - but unsustainable - pro-
ductivist agriculture.
Conclusion
In this hapter, we have argued that neoliberal ideology - embracing principles of
individualization and marketization - has helped to generate and reinforce a partic-
ular form of farming system in Australia. It is a system based upon: product special-
ization; operational intensification; returns to scale (and therefore continual pressure
for the expansion in size of operations); and economic concentration, with fewer
farmers producing larger volumes of output. It is a system of productivism , under-
pinned by a rationalizing and legitimating ideology.
Productivist agriculture has provided domestic consumers with abundant and
relatively heap food, and has enabled the nation to export large volumes of food
to overseas consumers. To the extent that it has simultaneously ahieved both these
outcomes, it has been viewed as a highly successful approah to farming. But its
'success' has come at a very high price to the environment, with literally billions of
dollars eah year spent addressing the problems associated with soil depletion, salin-
ization, water pollution and a host of other ecological problems. We question wheth-
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