Development Of Multifunctional Agriculture Research Articles

The development of multifunctional agriculture in farming regions of China: Convergence or divergence?

The multifunctionality paradigm, in particular, represented a facilitator of sustainable agricultural development. There arises a question of whether or not the different areas would evolve in a common direction. This study attempts to examine the dynamics and performances of multifunctional agriculture (MFA) in farming regions of China by using the multi-criteria comprehensive appraisal method and convergence analysis. The integrated function and multifunctionality of agriculture in the Huang-Huai-Hai Plain are assessed, based on which the evolving trend is investigated. The findings reveal that from 1990 to 2015, the multifunctionality of agriculture in the Huang-Huai-Hai Plain was strengthened, displaying clear agglomeration in larger metropolitan regions, which has been a characteristic of MFA in regions with a thriving economy. The supply function for agricultural products arose during 1990–2000, then maintained steady, while suffering a recession in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration and Jiaodong Peninsula. The function of social security generally continued to increase, presenting a spatially surging trend from north to south and from east to west. The function of facilitating agricultural economic development was also enhanced, especially in the clusters including the Beijing-Tianjin urban agglomeration, the Jiaodong Peninsula, and the northern Jiangsu Province. The function of ecological conservation displayed obvious spatial heterogeneity, and the functional index manifests no apparent variation. The σ coefficients of each functional index indicate that path dependence, which excludes the function of social security when there are regional disparities, is a crucial characteristic of the evolution process of the MFA subdimensions. Areas with low multifunctionality do not grow faster than areas with high multifunctionality, and they are differentiated in terms of their performance. The “catch-up effect” is clearly apparent when external forces intervene, as evidenced by the absolute and conditional β convergence. These findings have important ramifications for the creation of policies that, in line with the market rationality of territorial division, encouraging MFA in peri-urban and economically developed areas while fostering large-scale and industrialized farming in distant areas.

Analysis and prospect of research hotspots on international rural settlements

With the development of multi-functional agriculture, rural space has been given new connotations, and the space management model of rural settlements has changed. Based on the analysis of the international background, this paper sorts out the development process of rural settlements and extracts the research topics related to rural housing. The results show that: (1) With the development of social economy, rural ecology and consumption value are increasing day by day, and the population shows the preference for migration to rural areas. The rural real estate market also has been developed in large quantities. National history and culture is one of the important factors affecting the migration of urban residents to rural areas. (2) Relying on the diversity of rural landscapes, rural residential space has gradually opened up to leisure and entertainment activities. The function of residential buildings has been separated from agricultural production and changed to capitalization. (3) With the change of owning the main body of housing, the value of housing derives diversified values such as entertainment value, cultural value, emotional value, etc. With the migration of the middle-class population, it has triggered the separation of housing value between regions.

The dynamic changes in peri-urban agricultural area and typology of multi-function agriculture in Batu City, Indonesia

Urbanization and population growth are logical consequences for economic growth and regional development. In the face of the pressure of urbanization, both in the form of competition for land use and increasing food needs, an adaptation effort of the agricultural system is needed. This study analyzes the patterns of in-situ urbanization that occurred in Batu City, East Java, and the dynamics of the development of agricultural areas in Batu City. This study used land use change analysis, descriptive statistics on socio-economic data, and spatial clustering analysis to map and obtain a relationship between in-situ urbanization processes that occur with the development of agricultural areas in Batu City. The results of this study indicate that there was a strong relationship between the process of in-situ urbanization that occurred in Batu City towards changes in agricultural land use and resulted in the adaptation of a multifunctional farming system in Batu City. There are three types of multifunction agriculture in the Batu City, with focused on incorporating the tourism and agriculture, and create a strong social-environmental awareness of the sustainability development. The development of multifunctional agriculture in Batu City is one of the main strategies to face of current in-situ urbanization.

Increasing China's Agricultural Labor Productivity: Comparison and Policy Implications from Major Agrarian Countries

China's low agricultural labor productivity has become the key weakness of its agricultural competitiveness and sustainable development, and strategies for improving China's agricultural labor productivity lack clear and consistent theory and empirical support. To address this issue, the current study uses the methods of convergence index, correlation coefficient, and nonparametric test, to analyze the characteristics and influencing factors of agricultural labor productivity among 32 major agrarian countries during 1961–2013. This analysis shows that the development gap among countries has been narrowing. The USA takes the leading position among all the countries, while some countries with scarce land like Japan have succeeded in achieving transcendence, and other countries like India have experienced relatively slow speed. The agricultural labor productivity is significantly driven by agricultural labor surplus, agricultural product processing, and agricultural industrial structure. The effects of land resource endowment, agricultural mechanization, and biochemical inputs have been declining and in some cases are no longer even significant. It is therefore necessary to shift attention to marketization, diversification, and high quality, instead of the former focus on agricultural intensification, concentration and large-scale operations, and this shift is probably more closely aligned with current practices. There are more people and less land in China, and the agricultural labor force in China still accounts for nearly 30% of the total population. Considering these national conditions, it is very important to simultaneously improve the efficiency of agricultural production of small farmers and promote the successful urbanization of the agricultural labor force. In the medium and long term, it is imperative to improve the competitiveness of Chinese agriculture by adopting related policy arrangements such as induced agricultural technological innovation, production factor substitution, and multifunctional agriculture development.

THE 2007–2013 AGRI-ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAM AS AN INSTRUMENT FOR THE RETARDATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES IN POLAND

This paper describes regional differences in agriculturalmanagement methods, and attempts to present theimplementation scale of the 2007–2013 agri-environmentalprogram as an instrument slowing down the depletion of naturalresources in Poland. Two indicators were used as the basisfor the regional analysis of this Program: the number of applications(as a percentage of the total number of farms) andthe amount of funds received per hectare of agricultural land.The geographic scope of the analysis covered the whole countryand its different voivodeships, with districts being used asbasic units. A synthetic indicator of payment absorption levelsunder the agri-environmental program and spatial autocorrelationmethods were employed. The financial support hada positive impact on the concentration of agricultural landcovered by additional agri-environmental payments, whichwas noticeable in north and north-east Poland. The researchshows that the instruments slowing down the depletion ofnatural resources – such as the agri-environmental program –provide encouragement, above all, for the development ofmultifunctional agriculture. The multifunctionality of agricultureis more accentuated in Pomorskie, Zachodniopomorskie,Lubuskie, Dolnośląskie and Podkarpackie voivodeships, andless so in the south-central part of the country, i.e. in Opolskie,Śląskie, Małopolskie and Łódzkie voivodeships.

Quantifying the multifunctionality of fjord and mountain agriculture by means of sociocultural and economic valuation of ecosystem services

The objective of this study was to define the value of the main market and nonmarket functions of fjord and mountain agroecosystems in Nordic countries by means of the ecosystem services framework. First, we used qualitative methods (interviews of farmers and other stakeholders in the area of study) to identify sociocultural perceptions of multifunctional agriculture. Next, we used survey-based stated-preference methods to rank and value in economic terms the most important functions (corresponding to the four types of ecosystem services) according to the local (residents of the study area) and the general (residents of a nearby area) populations. The sociocultural perceptions of multifunctionality among local stakeholders were similar, but differences in the relative importance of the functions reflected particular interests (agriculture compared with tourism). Both the local and the general populations attached great importance to the production and availability of quality foods. The general population showed very homogeneous preferences among ecosystem services, but local people rated them very differently. Local people ranked a more agricultural landscape very high. The total economic value of fjord and mountain agroecosystem was 850 € per person per year. The willingness to pay for the provision of ecosystem services under a policy scenario of further development of multifunctional agriculture clearly exceeded the current level of public support. The welfare loss that society would experience in a scenario of further abandonment of agriculture was even greater. We discuss the establishment of payments for ecosystem services for addressing the undersupply of nonmarket functions of agriculture.

Agricultural Landscapes and Biodiversity Conservation in Italy

In the last decades, agricultural areas have been acknowledged as important areas forbiodiversity conservation and provision of ecosystem services. Several international and nationalConventions have promoted the development of multifunctional agriculture and the maintenance oftraditional cultural landscapes. In this general context, this paper presents some relevant researchexperiences carried out in Italy at different spatial scales, from national to local (Province andMunicipality of Rome). The results of these studies confirm that traditional agricultural areas supportthe conservation of habitats and species of national and European interest and represent importantelements for environmental quality at the landscape scale. Moreover, they highlight the importance oftaking into account the biophysical environment, together with historical and cultural features, formapping and charactering traditional agricultural landscapes, as well as the need to focus on thedynamics of agricultural land, which is threatened by land cover change.

Spatial Focus of MSc and PhD Agricultural Research in Denmark, U.S., and Canada

ABSTRACT There is a strong focus in agricultural higher education thesis projects on lower levels of spatial scale such as molecular biology, at the expense of broader systems focus at the farm, landscape, and regional levels. We found that MSc and PhD projects over three years in three countries were consistent in this basic research emphasis. A majority of students in agricultural research currently focus on topics at the molecular, basic process, and individual organism levels, as revealed by our evaluation of MSc and PhD thesis topics in Denmark, U.S. and Canada between 1999 and 2002. There are 2.1 times as many MSc topics and 3.5 times as many PhD topics on molecular, basic process, or the organism level compared with research projects that deal with field or whole farm, landscape, or higher levels of aggregation. While there is value in exploring the mechanisms of biological processes in alternative agricultural systems, a relative lack of attention to higher scale questions may cause researchers to immerse in details while losing sight of relevance and applications. We attribute this to the disciplinary tradition that dominates many agricultural universities and the current emphasis on research that can produce patents and commercially realizable results. There is limited attention given to farming and food systems and to such critical questions as development of multifunctional agriculture, as observed from the snapshot of three years' data. The narrow focus of thesis research suggests that major challenges exist in enabling future agricultural researchers to develop new methodologies and achieve practical results useful in solving a large proportion of real-world problems in agriculture.

Marginalisation and Multifunctional Land Use in Hungary

Our study prepared as a brief version of National Report in the frame of EUROLAN Programme. We deal with the interpretation of some definitions (marginalisation of land use, multifunctionality of land use, marginalisation of agriculture, multifunctionality of agriculture), with sorting and reviewing indicators of marginalisation and finally with the analysis of functions of land use. We suggested a dynamic and a static approach of marginalisation. We can explore the dynamic process by time series and the static (regional) one by cross-section analyses.It is very hard to explain the perspective of the future of marginalisation of land and of agriculture in Hungary. The process of marginalisation seems faster in the agriculture in the coming years, but it depends on the utilisation of new possibilities given by the EU financial resources and by the Common Market. At this moment agriculture seems one of the big losers of the accession.In the long term we should face considerable challenges in the land use. It is necessary to take into account that there is a supply market of foods and traditional fibre production world-wide. There are limited possibilities to produce and to market for example biodiesel (fuel), bioethanol, or maybe biogas. Thus the environment and landscape preservation becomes more and more real land use alternatives.The environmental interpretation of the multifunctionality of land use: activities (functions) of environmental preservation and nature conservation in a certain area, which aim to preserve natural resources by the existing socio-economic conditions.Preservation of rural landscapes is the task mainly for land-users, who can be commanded by legal means and can be encouraged by economic measures to carry out the above activity. In the recent past measures of „command and control” type regulation were predominant, however nowadays, especially in the developed countries, the role of economic incentives increases.As a conclusion of our analysis we can state that as long as the main land-dependent activities (agriculture, forestry, housing, tourism, local mining) cease to be viable under an existing socio-economic structure, then it is hardly possible to sustain the rural landscape on an appropriate level by non-commodity products (such as environment preservation, cultural heritage, nature conservation, employment etc.).1 The study was prepared in the frame of EUROLAN (EU-5 Framework Project), QLK5-CT-2002-02346, as a compiled version of the Hungarian National Report, The national project co-ordinator: Prof. Dr. Gabor Szabo.A part of places with high ecological values coincides with the areas with unfavourable agricultural endowments and underdeveloped micro-regions. We think so that the marginalisation preserves the non-environmental-sound activities and hinders the development of multifunctional agriculture and this process can change only by joint utilisation of endogenous and exogenous resources and methods. Thus the successful programmes for agri-environmental protection and multifunctional land use can serve the moderation of negative effects of marginalisation or maybe the marginalisation process itself.

Sustainable development of landscape and village - the criterion of multi-functionality

Description of village and landscape sustainable development: ecosystems in the landscape, types of the territory utilisation, protection of natural resources, way of living. As to the sustainable development of country regions, we can consider these priorities: the renewal and development of villages, the protection and the preservation of the heritage of countryside, the development and the improvement of infrastructure, the support of tourism and crafts, services for country economy and finance. The development of multifunctional agriculture and forestry should be concentrated: in the less favourable regions and the regions with worse natural conditions (LFA), necessary agroenvironmental arrangements for zones with ecological restrictions, afforestation projects, the protection of water resources, the improvement of life environment and its protection, the preservation of landscape, the improvement of the care of animals.