Agricultural Biodiversity and Neoliberal Regimes of Agri-Environmental Governance in Australia

Abstract

International agreements highlight the centrality of agricultural biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides to human well-being, but provide little guidance on how to integrate agrobiodiversity within workable national regimes of governance. Complicating this picture further, it is not species richness per se that underwrites the resilience and productivity of agroecosystems but the functional relationships between organisms and ecosystem components at a variety of scales. Like many others, Australia's national strategy for biodiversity conservation acknowledges the importance of functional biodiversity but, in reality, focuses most attention on the protection of `wild' biodiversity from unsympathetic land use. In constructing a workable regime of governance for agricultural biodiversity, Australian governments have been particularly concerned to maintain and extend the neoliberal project of market rule. Biodiversity loss is defined as an outcome of market failure best addressed through various types of market reform. However, new tensions have been created between the totalizing logic of market rule and the spatio-temporal variability and specificity of biodiversity management. Despite the positive emphasis of Australian agri-environmental policy on planning and capacity building, declining terms of trade for agricultural produce are likely to make it very difficult for the majority of landholders to actively manage biological resources for which there are no direct and immediate productivity benefits.