Multifunctional Agriculture as an Assumption and a Condition for Rural Development in Serbia: Special Turn to Rural Tourism

Theoretical Basis Of Multifunctionality Concept

During the sixties in the twentieth century certain estrangement from recent dominant traditional understanding of agriculture appeared. The reason for this lies in the fact that large number of authors noticed that agriculture was determined by large number of factors which hadn't been treated adequately and which were, apart for its basic understanding, very important for its right understanding as well. In that sense, development of some alternative systems of agricultural production was started, like, for example, conventional, integral, sustainable, ecological or organic and multifunctional agriculture.

Multifunctionality of agriculture was described by “OECD” through the existence of production and non - production benefits which have appeared as a result of agricultural production. Non - production benefits have characteristics of externalities or public benefits, which are not directly measurable on the market. If this kind of interpretation is accepted, then it is necessary to analyze all functions of agriculture separately, in order to acquire right interpretation of the existence of production and non-production benefits that agriculture has on the society (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Systems of agricultural production

Functions could be divided on production, ecological and social.

• a)

  Production function, the word itself describes, includes food production and raw material production for light industry and market. In that way certain food security is enabled and markets are well supplied with food whose quality is appropriate and whose prices are acceptable.

• b)

  Social function means keeping population on rural areas, as well as even development of all parts of territories within a state. More precisely, agriculture represents generator of development in isolated areas where there is no possibility to employment population in industry or tertiary sector of agriculture.

• c)

  Ecological function represents preservation of natural resources, as well as preservation of biodiversity function, but cultural inheritance of rural areas as well.

Large number of different points of view regarding multifunctionality of agriculture could be united in the standpoint that the concept was made by creators of certain agrarian, politic and economic measures. First and primary characteristic of presented attitudes was that they are subjective, ideologically and pragmatically motivated.