Multifunctional agriculture - From farm diagnosis to farm design and institutional innovation

摘要

Agriculture is intrinsically a source for multiple goods and externalities. For a long time this fact has been acknowledged implicitly, but now a shift can be recognized toward more fundamental questions like 'how can we characterize and strengthen multifunction-ality?' and 'how can it be used in rural development?'. These questions became so important that in the last decade the multi-functionality concept has been adopted as a key notion in the debates on agricultural and rural development (van Huylenbroek and Durand, 2003). Moreover, multifunctionality serves as an important framework for the development of European agricultural policy (CEC, 2001; OECD, 2001). Some argue that this has been done primarily for protectionist reasons (Potter and Burney, 2002; Abler, 2004) in order to provide policy makers with arguments in the World Trade Organisation discussions on free markets, but nonetheless, it has opened a research agenda on multifunctional agriculture (MFA).