Framing northern Australian agriculture’s future
Framing northern Australian agriculture’s future Book Section
Agriculture and Resilience in Australia’s North: A Lived Experience
- Author(s): Noble, Keith, Dennis, Tania, Larkins, Sarah
- Secondary Author(s): Noble, Keith, Dennis, Tania, Larkins, Sarah
- Published: 2019
- Publisher: Springer Singapore
- ISBN: 978-981-13-8355-7
Abstract: This chapter frames Northern Australia’s possible agricultural future and considers the specific relevance of planet and people matters to the past, present and future of individuals involved in Northern Australian Agriculture. As human populations have grown and civilisations developed, land use planning has emerged as a profession to facilitate a negotiated outcome between conflicting parties. While regional land use planning has not developed to the level of complexity of urban planning, its focus in most countries remains on the institutional processes to meet “public” interest and “utopian” ideals, of which sustainable development is the latest manifestation. Despite widespread adoption of neo-liberal principles by governments in the later decades of the twentieth century, and the commensurate improvement in living standards attributed to them, the free market has not delivered an optimal simultaneous solution for allocating resources, maximising consumer welfare, stabilising foreign trade, and reducing agricultural price instability. Governments are still called upon to intervene in the market and stimulate, regulate, or control economic forces, particularly when policy focus moves from direct production issues into less agreed arenas such as environmental management. Some of these policies emphasise the willingness of the middle-class consumer to pay a little extra for quality, a force that encourages product differentiation and thereby feeds investment in both production and marketing of new goods. This latter role has become more pronounced with the expansion of global trade, and new trade theories have evolved to explain why most trade expansion has been occurring at the extensive margin – that is, through the expansion of new goods rather than greater trade of existing products.
- Urls: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8355-7_4
- Publisher Location: Singapore