New rural livelihoods or museums of production? Quality food initiatives in practice

In recent years, the European Union’s stated commitment to the principle of multifunctionality within its Common Agricultural Policy has fostered a resurgence of interest in recovering and protecting the heritage and traditions associated with local agricultural products. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the growing political and economic salience of heritage-based initiatives, however, we argue that it is important to interrogate the meanings and assumptions that underlie notions of heritage and tradition. In this paper, we use case study research from France and Poland to explore the potential contradictions associated with heritage-based food systems. While quality initiatives create essential spaces for maintaining rural livelihoods in the face of the homogenizing trends in the global agro-food system, particularly for regions where traditional agriculture has been economically marginalized, they also have the potential to undermine local specificity and privilege powerful extralocal actors at the expense of local communities. We pay particular attention to how, in practice, these initiatives may (1) reduce the diversity of available products, (2) create static notions of culture and (3) fundamentally change or distort the character of products in promoting the shift from local to extralocal markets. Our analysis suggests that a more careful investigation of heritage-based initiatives’ vulnerabilities is warranted, particularly with respect to the varied nature of local contexts. Initiatives that merely codify cultural products without taking the social-organizational context into account risk becoming little more than “museums of production.”     

大农业:乡村振兴背景下的农业转型

从单纯种植粮食到供给多样化农产品,再到满足近年来逐渐兴起的对农业生态、文化、社会功能的消费,中国农业经历了一个内涵不断扩展、外延不断丰富的过程。 以多功能、开放式、综合性为方向的“大农业“思想赋予农业和乡村的各种功能以经济价值,使过去被隐藏的价值能够显化并得以实现。 由此,大农业可以成为乡村资本积累的源泉和乡村振兴的重要产业基础,并让乡村在功能上的不可替代性和价值上的独一无二性彰显无疑。