P-8/04 Sustaining agricultural in Australia and Norway: A multifunctional approach

Paper presented at Globalisation, Risks and Resistance: XI World Congress of Rural Sociology, Trondheim, Norway, July 25 - 30. Ideals of a productivist agriculture in the western world have faded as the unintended consequences of intensive agriculture and pastoralism have led to environmental problems. In Norway and Australia, there has been an increasing acceptance of the equal importance of social and environmental sustainability as well as economic sustainability. Alongside this shift is a belief that primary production needs to move away from an intensive, productivist-based agriculture to one that may be defined as post-productivist. In this paper, we argue that the dualism of productivism and post-productivism is too simplistic and discuss whether multifunctionalism is a better way of conceptualising rural primary production at two extreme points of the scale, the market-oriented, liberalistic Australian agriculture and the market protected small-scale Norwegian agriculture.