Policies and Measures for Multifunctional Agriculture:Experts’ Insight

摘要

Multifunctionality of agriculture is with the growing importance in agriculturalpolicies. The main argument behind multifunctionality is that agriculturalproduction and thus, the whole agricultural sector has multiple roles, not just toproduce food and fiber, but also to provide several non-market commodities.Although agricultural policies in Europe set more and more emphasis on theimportance of these non-commodity outputs it is hard to find policy measuresdesigned directly for multifunctionality. The aim of our study is to find out actualand preferred policy measures in order to improve and/or to maintain themultifunctional role of agriculture. We have interviewed 24 Finnish experts aboutmultifunctional agriculture and agricultural policy related issues, by using appliedpolicy Delphi method. The results show, that a wider role of agriculture is highlyacknowledged among Finnish experts. However, in its broadest definition, noundivided acceptance for the concept of multifunctionality was found. The policymeasures part gives evidence that also the current policy measures included in theEU’s Common Agricultural Policy have elements that improve multifunctionality,especially those in the agri-environmental support scheme. Yet, there is a need fortargeted measures based on different national, regional and local agriculturalconditions. In addition, the implementation of these measures needs morecooperation between different sector policies as well as among the differentoperators in the whole supply chain.