Promoting Multifunctional Agriculture in India

Abstract

Concerns regarding productivity-driven agricultural policies since the 1970s have impacted on the quality of the environment and rural vitality. in the recent decades, researchers have attempted to restructure and enlarge the scope of agricultural policy by including aspects like multifunctionality that include valuable non-commodity outputs in addition to the commodities that generate most of its revenue. In addition, multifunctionality of agriculture may be ideally understood by placing it within the framework of sustainable development. It provides the underlying mechanisms and transition processes required for attaining the sustainability goals. As such, the focus is on gleaning strong elements from different approaches for an integrated perspective that focuses on transition processes towards sustainable agricultural and rural development. Towards this end, new institutional arrangements that go beyond the state-market divide (community supported agriculture, trusts, contracts between tourism sector, consumer and farmers), an optimal level of decentralisation for policy design and matching governance mechanisms is an important strand in policy research that can account for the complementarities and co-production of farming, ecological and socio-cultural systems. Therefore, an ideal policy format for doubling farmers’ income, and a simultaneous endeavour to achieve sustainability in agriculture would be to advance our understanding of the multiple functions of agriculture by creating contextual prototypes of multifunctional farming systems.