Food and Rurality in Europe Economy, Environment and Institutions in Contemporary Rural Europe Editor Paulina Rytkönen COMREC Studies in Environment and Development 10 Södertörns högskola SE-141 89 Huddinge www.sh.se/publikationer Printed by Elanders Tryckeri AB, Vällingby 2014 Cover: Anders Bäckström Cover Photo: Marie Lönneskog Hogstadius ©The authors COMREC Studies in Environment and Development No. 10 ISBN978-91-975017-9-8 ISSN 1652-2877 Contents 1. Food and rurality - Economy, environment and institutions in contemporary rural Europe ........................................................................... 1 Paulina Rytkönen 2. Indigenous species, traditional and local knowledge and intellectual property rights............................................................................................. 29 Alexander Wirsig, Adriano Profeta, Anna Häring, Roman Lenz, and Wolfgang Heisrath 3. Place based branding and localized agri-food systems in Cantabria and Gotland ....................................................................................................... 65 Paulina Rytkönen 4. Direct selling in Italy: a marketing strategy to promote localized agro- food systems. ............................................................................................ 105 Laura Aguglia and Christina Salvioni 5. Strategies to promote local food production and rural development: The case of Jämtland cheese ............................................................................ 129 Madeleine Bonow 6. Local agri-food products of women’s cooperatives - The ‘feminine side’ of quality (Greece) .................................................................................... 159 Theodosia Anthopoulou and Kousou Stavriani 7. Towards Sustainable Rural Development from a Localized Agrifood System Perspective ................................................................................... 181 Carmen Lozano and Encarnación Aguilar 8. Towards sustainable food systems through civic food education in schools and in public catering services ..................................................... 215 Helmi Risku Norja and Minna Mikkola 9. Local small scale food production as an instrument for promoting nature conservation in agricultural landscapes .................................................... 249 Per Wramner and Odd Nygård 10. Contribution of different farming and forage systems to biodiversity: an example in a PDO cheese area in French mountains. ............................... 283 Alain Gueringer, Dominique Orth, Claire Balay and Fabrice Landre 11. Terroir - a key concept when building a geographic identity for food .................................................................................................................. 311 Odd Nygård and Per Wramner Presentation of authors ............................................................................. 365 1. Food and Rurality - Economy, Environment and Institutions in Contemporary Rural Europe Paulina Rytkönen1 Introduction The empowerment of rural actors and their productive systems has for a long period been at the centre of European, agrarian and rural development policy. For a long time the main focus of agricultural production was to rationalize production and optimize the use of resources in order to achieve and maintain food security and safety. Paradoxically, the benefits achieved by obtaining food security and rationalizing agriculture came negative side effects. These included the depopulation of rural spaces; loss of rural employment and dimin- ishing income for rural municipalities with the implication of reduced welfare expenditure for remaining inhabitants. Perhaps the most importance conse- quence of all is that the rural population has become older as young people 1I am grateful to Fred Saunders and Tina Åhlén for their fantastic work with English proof- reading, as well as to professor Per Wramner for encouragement and valuable comments and to Vesa Matti Loiske, Chief editor of the COMREC Environment and Development Studies series. 1 flock to more dynamic urban areas looking for opportunities. The issue of maintaining a vivid and economically prosperous countryside has become even more important as the transformation pressure from globalization has acceler- ated the process of concentration and centralisation at all levels of agricultural and food production. Since the 1990’s the means to counteract the negative population trend in rural areas, has been to create a shift in some parts of agriculture from increas- ing productivity to adding value to farm production. This overall goal reflects several factors. Amongst the most important are: the need to meet the pressure from an increasing depopulation of rural spaces, but also of the loss of compet- itive power against new emerging countries in the international market; a new consciousness about the relationship between agricultural production and envi- ronmental problems and climate change; as well as the search for a post indus- trial economy. In this vision the rural sector is supposed to contribute with new sources of employment, create recreational opportunities, provide sound and healthy places to live, form cultural values and generate regional pride. During recent years, this shift has become more urgent in the backwater of the acceleration of climate change and the latest financial crisis. An important answer to these problems has been the empowerment of rural actors through policies that aim to facilitate agricultural restructuring from large scale produc- tion, to rural development through diversification of rural activities and the articulation of a “new rurality”. In some countries, like Spain, France, Austria and Italy, some expressions of the new rurality are the articulation of localized agri-food systems and of short value chains. Experiences from these countries indicate that these systems and short value chains might be able to contribute to slowing down structural rationalization in rural areas, create new jobs, coun- teract the loss of biodiversity and add value to small scale farm production by linking rural agents around production of goods and services that are strongly anchored in specific territories (Rytkönen et al. 2010). 2 Responses to contemporary challenges disclose vast differences between EU countries. While the experiences mentioned above are part of a reality that is often used as an “ideal model” in the public as well as the academic discussion, other cases show a very different reality. In some countries the focus on agri- cultural productivism led to a far reaching uniformity in agriculture in which responses are conditioned to existing productive and social structures. That is in some instances agricultural practices have become path dependent and are therefore hard to change. In some new EU-member states the desire to modern- ize agriculture and leave traditional society behind pushes development to- wards the very pattern that the EU is trying to reform. The global and the local – interacting levels Contemporary debates on food and agriculture are performed in numerous contexts and theoretical schools. Many studies are devoted to the asymmetries caused by globalization that benefits wealthy countries and negatively affects less developed ones (Barkin 2006), while others study globalization as the cause of the new rurality that emerged from the shift from the previous pre- dominant productivist monoculture paradigm and that diversified rural econo- mies (Losch 2004; Kay 2009). Others study agro-food globalization as the cause behind a new gender based division of labour (Whatmore 1993). One predominant discussion is the “New Political Economy of Agriculture”. This school of thought stresses the globalization of agriculture and food production since 1870 (Mc Michael 1996 and 2007; Goodman et al. 1997). A key assump- tion is that production and consumption of food takes place under a specific economic and geopolitical organisation of international agricultural and food relations, i. e. a food regime. The basic components of a food regime are al- ways the same irrespective of the historical period of product that is being studied. A food regime comprises an institutional/structural power base and it 3 has a mode of regulation and economic agents with varying degree of econom- ic space. It results in the production of certain food, a pattern of distribution and environmental effects. It also creates asymmetries and different outcomes for economic agents differently situated in the core and periphery. The current food regime is characterized by a far reaching structural ration- alization that caused a decline in the number of farms and firms at a global scale driven the search for quarterly profits and global sourcing strategies of global companies and the increased use of financial instruments in food trade (McMichael 2007; Rytkönen 2009). Another important force is the emergence of global food retail companies that increasingly demand increasing “flexibil- ity” and larger scale farming. (Wrigley 2002). There is a strong correlation between what happens at the global and at the local level. This will be illustrated here with examples from the dairy sector. The increased structural rationalization and competition that the industry is exposed to, with a dramatic increase in the number of mergers and take-overs, forces the industry to raise demands on farmers and to lower the prices, and/or to demand higher productivity. It is a simple equation, the larger