Abstract
In some ways, rural space within Europe has become a ‘battlefield’ of knowledge, authority and regulation fought around different definitions of agrifood. The outcome of this battle will shape not only the ‘quality’ of food, but also the rural space itself – its resource potentialities, its governing and its sustainability. Involved in this struggle are three different social, political, scientific and economic paradigms which combine and, at the same time, compete for primacy in the policy development process (Marsden 2003: 4). First, the agro-industrial paradigm, associated with the globalized production of standardized food commodities and with recent political attempts to ‘deregulate’ international markets. Informed by a neo-liberal ‘virtual’ logic of scale and specialization which ties agri-food into an industrial dynamic, and privileges national and international perspectives, this continues to be by far the most powerful development paradigm governing the production of agri-food in Europe. Second, the post-productivist paradigm, based on a perception of rural areas as consumption spaces to be exploited not by industrial capital but by the urban and ex-urban populations. Emerging in the past decade or so, the post-productivist model challenges the agro-industrial paradigm through an alternative emphasis on the local environment and environmental protection for its own sake. Yet it shares with it the marginalization of nature – which in the agro-industrial model takes place through the production process, but in the post-productivist model it occurs through urban consumption of the countryside and the marginalization of the agricultural economy. Third, the newly emerging (and more contentious) sustainable rural development paradigm, which redefines nature by emphasizing food production and agro-ecology in the context of a more multi-functional rural context. In contrast with the other two dynamics, this model emerges at the regional rather than national or local level, and it stresses the ‘embeddedness’ of food chains – or, more specifically, their association with highly contested notions of ‘place’, ‘nature’ and ‘quality’.