Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
er a 'resilient' agricultural system can be one whih destroys the environment upon
whih it depends.
Productivism has been premised upon continued availability of irrigated water.
However, climate hange scenarios for Australia point to a deteriorating and/or
less reliable supply of water for many of the nation's most productive agricultural
regions. Governments have, however, recognized the importance of guaranteeing
long-term environmental flows to save ecosystems that have been placed under
severe pressure through over-allocation of water resources to agriculture. Neoliberal
approahes to water management are expected to see the creation of water markets
to enable water to be used more efficiently and for the highest value farming activit-
ies. Yet the creation and expansion of markets for previously taken-for-granted nat-
ural assets like water may fail to create a more effective system for dealing with
problems of water overuse and poor allocation. After all, there is a growing body of
evidence to suggest that past decades of 'free market' pressures on farmers to pro-
duce more for less has been the cause of, rather than a solution to, the problem of
environmental degradation.
The MDB example presented here is only one of many degraded agricultural en-
vironments in Australia. As noted earlier, Australian agriculture feeds the national
population plus an additional 40 million mouths. A reduction of the amount of vi-
able, environmentally sustainable agricultural land both in Australia and globally -
coupled with the hallenges of climate hange and peak oil - are placing pressures on
the global food supply that cannot be addressed through the productivist paradigm.
Farmers are expected to 'adapt' to climate hange through a variety of incre-
mental steps - suh as altering production times and using more productive (and
more pest-resistant) plants and animals. In this hapter, we argue that suh incre-
mental hange will occur
within
the current productivist regime and will therefore
do very litle to hallenge the unsustainable system that has become entrenhed over
the last ity years. We contend that new options for climate hange mitigation and
adaptation should be considered by both farmers and governments. These options
would be
outside
the system of productivism and would foster a move towards agro-
ecology. Without being unduly pessimistic, we consider that, without strong govern-
ment and industry acceptance of the desirability of moving to agro-ecology, there is
litle hope that Australia will break the hegemony of
productivism, and will therefore be unlikely to escape the straightjaket that pro-
motes higher volumes of production at the continuing expense of the environment.
