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TRADITIONAL‐STYLE FARMING AND VALUES FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN MALTA
Author(s) -
SHORT DAVID
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.766
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1467-9663
pISSN - 0040-747X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9663.1997.tb01582.x
Subject(s) - modernization theory , diversification (marketing strategy) , lagging , realm , agriculture , economic geography , sustainable development , industrialisation , geography , economics , economic growth , political science , business , market economy , medicine , archaeology , pathology , marketing , law
Contemporary ‘sea‐changes’ in rural policy, particularly in Europe, are promoting a search for diversification and ‘relocalization’ of farming goals, values and systems away from the globalizing model of capitalist industrial productivism. Part of this quest has centred on an insight that some rural areas have ‘lagged behind’ in an uneven modernization process. There, persistence of more traditional styles of farming appears to offer prospects for revival of more ‘ecological’, less environmentally threatening, forms of production. This article presents the findings of a survey of Maltese farm‐based opinion on prospects for development in this new policy setting. It takes rural Malta as a locality exhibiting ‘lagging’ characteristics which recur in other peripheral areas of the Mediterranean realm. The case‐study evidence is used to suggest that defining a strategy which meets the shifting ambitions of policy makers while finding a consensus among highly differentiated local farmers may prove hard, particularly in the very ‘marginal’ settings which appear to have evaded full modernization.