Abstract
The agro-food domain in Europe is characterized by the appearance of recurrent unwanted surprises. These events, although causing obvious physical consequences, in essence depart from the expectations of the society. We argue that this unstable situation is best understood as an identity crisis of agriculture rather than as a contingent crisis of a specific economic sector. Thus the present agro-food crisis is in fact a crisis of identity. This is clearly reflected by the cohabitation within the agro-food policy domain of different, often contradictory, policy discourses, namely: free tradism, multifunctionality, and agroecology. All of them try to impose their particular visions. All of them struggle to issue the policy measures they conceive as appropriate.
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Notes
The distinction was made by Ulf Hedetoft (personal communication, March 25, 2003). However, we added a fourth approach to the threefold original version.
For an overview of how the term of discourse has been used in policy analysis, see Bacchi (2000).
The Russian agronomist Basil Bensin (1938) described agroecology as the “basic science of soil conservation.” According to him, agroecology seeks to undertake agricultural practices based on the environment and the particular farm culture of the given region. He traced back the term agroecology back to 1928 in the Czechoslovak Botanical Society.
The most relevant have been in the 1920s, the biodynamic agriculture of Steiner; in the 1940s, the natural agriculture of Fukuoka and the organic agriculture of Howard; and in the 1970s, the permaculture of Mollison and the biological agriculture of Claude Aubert.
This principle argues that since most of the attributes of genetically engineered food are similar to those of non-genetically engineered counterparts, it is the case that genetically modified food is substantially equivalent to its non-genetically counterpart, as regards the features that are relevant to consumers.
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López-i-Gelats, F., David Tàbara, J. A Cultural Journey to the Agro-Food Crisis: Policy Discourses in the EU. J Agric Environ Ethics 23, 331–344 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-009-9214-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-009-9214-1