(03 November 2016) – In an article published by ARC 2020, rural sociologist Jan Douwe van der Ploeg (Wageningen University, the Netherlands) outlines his vision for what he calls integrated rural development.
In recent years, European agriculture has effectively moved from a highly protected system towards a liberalized sector, with a strong orientation towards the world market.
Price protection and predictability have been replaced by volatility and insecurity. Beyond there are calls to change the very objectives of agriculture and agricultural policies.
The need for agriculture to play a substantial role in mitigating climate change, the need to contribute to the efforts to move beyond the financial and economic crisis and the need to create more employment, especially for young people are all new objectives that qualitatively differ from those that governed the previous modalities of the CAP.