Which social learning of farmers can facilitate multifonctional agriculture?

Which social learning of farmers can facilitate multifunctional agriculture? To develop more multifunctional farming styles, farmers need to organize new collective and institutional arrangements to achieve some purposes : to facilitate access to strategic resource (seeds, water, specific equipment, etc.), to set-up new marketing processes, to improve the building of knowledge useful to promote multifunctionality, etc. (Sabourin, 2007). In Brazil, like in France, this kind of collective arrangements associated with the emergence of new agricultural functions is based on local networks of farmers with resources of social and cultural capital which are suitable, especially to build strategic partnership with other stakeholders : NGO, local authorities, consumers, etc. The scaling-up of these collective initiatives is limited by the difficulty of a part of the farmers to grab opportunities to develop multifunctional farming styles, to cooperate with others, and to find out possibilities of collective or institutional action. This paper aims to better analyse and understand difficulties of these farmers, using a case study in Brazil, and a set of field works in France. It explores the hypothesis that these farmers can hardly change their conceptual system to understand and fulfil the new agricultural contributions expected, and point out their social representations which are barriers to the transition to multifunctional farming. From Gerdal's approach (group of French rural sociologists) (Darre, 1996; Lemery & Ruault, 2009), it suggests some guidelines for rural policies in order to allow social learning and involvement of these farmers in practises and arrangements to promote agriculture multifunctionality.

Bibliographic Details

Main Author:	Lucas, Véronique
Format:	conference_item biblioteca
Language:	eng
Published:	Wageningen UR
Subjects:	E14 - Économie et politique du développement, A01 - Agriculture - Considérations générales,
Online Access:	http://agritrop.cirad.fr/565423/
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