More than food production
Multifunctional agriculture in policy and practice
Öhlund, Erika
2025
Over the course of the past century, European agriculture has transitioned from small-scale, manual farming to more mechanised, industrial practices. This development has resulted in increased productivity but also in environmental problems, such as greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, and social challenges. The policy response to the changed role of farming in the EU has been to apply a multifunctional approach to agriculture. Multifunctional agriculture (MFA) can be defined as an agriculture that is not solely focused on food production, but contributes to several different functions in the societies and ecosystems of which it is a part.
Although conflicting values and goals are central challenges in agricultural policy, practice, and research in Europe, and the multifunctional approach to agriculture is dominant in EU policy, conflicts have not been studied to any large extent within the MFA research field. This doctoral thesis analyses conflicting values in relation to multifunctional agriculture. Through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with Swedish farmers and an analysis of policy documents at the national, sub-national and EU level, this thesis paints a broad picture of different aspects of multifunctional agriculture.
The thesis contributes a visual conceptualisation of multifunctional agricultural activities to the multifunctional agriculture research field. The findings of this thesis contribute to the body of research that concludes that EU agricultural policy does not contribute enough to multifunctional agriculture. Furthermore, this thesis confirms the existing research finding that Swedish agricultural land is exploited to a larger extent than policymakers intend. There are goal conflicts between different aspects of multifunctional agriculture and it is not possible to solve them all. Practitioners and decision-makers need to decide on the goals they wish to prioritise, even if that decision comes at the expense of other ambitions. One part of the problem is that values are often not commensurable and therefore cannot easily be compared and ranked. Agricultural policy should enable farmers to choose different strategies and encourage diversity, since farmers have different interests and constraints and variable access to agricultural strategies. Such diversity would make EU agriculture better prepared for future environmental and other crises.
Huddinge : Södertörns högskola, 2025. s. 170.
ISBN 9789189504998
Södertörn Doctoral Dissertations, 1652-7399; 236
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