Primary Industries

"Food producers and other producers of primary products such as forestry increasingly face international competition, and the markets for their products increasingly become globalized. This process can provide promising opportunities to reach new markets and to increase value added by marketing new products. But there are challenges though, as new competitors show up in the domestic markets and access to the retail outlets is denied .Norway is a country with a successful export oriented aquaculture industry and more protected forestry and agricultural sectors. This book explores some of the lessons learned from these sectors in coping with international competition and in exploiting the opportunities that are offered by more open markets. The perspectives adopted come from marketing, economics as well as multidisciplinary social sciences. Each perspective is essential to paint a reliable picture of the opportunities and challenges facing primary industries."

Climate change is expected to have a profound impact on natural resources, and thus on the primary industries (agriculture, forestry and fisheries) in the Nordic countries. Climate change induces risks but also creates possibilities for new production systems on land and in the ocean. Climatic changes also represent great challenges for policy-making and management regimes. The current knowledge base on natural resources in the Nordic region needs to be expanded to fully address the impacts of climate change. In particular it is important to address the need for improved policies and new policy instruments. The research programme Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation in Nordic Primary Industries is a coordinated set of thematic research networks with the objective to create a Nordic knowledge base on climate change interactions with primary industries in the Nordic region.

This PhD study explores a ‘culture industry’, that of the artisanal food industry in Tasmanian agriculture (https://eprints.utas.edu.au/8039/). Food production and consumption is a highly controversial, socio-political process, whereby diverse values and beliefs, levels of resources and interests struggle for survival. The resultant manifestation of this struggle – in the form of products, production methods and actions – stand testament to the diversity. This thesis demonstrates the politicised nature of food production by examining the paradox of enterprise expansion while retaining a number of identities/tags associated with small scale food businesses and their products (i.e. cottage industry, artisanality and quality food). The implications of these findings for the development of the artisanal food industry are also explored. Two phases of data collection were involved in exploring these issues. A first phase was a scoping study involving document analysis, semi-structured interviews with local knowledgeables and a range of cottage industries, and initial fieldwork. The second phase involved a case study analysis with three small-scale agricultural cottage enterprises (SACEs) and three that had expanded (ESACEs). The case studies primarily involved in-depth, semi-structured interviews. The research found that the cottage industry identity was meaningful as applied to the SACEs, but also that many of the defining characteristics of a cottage industry were also applicable to the ESACEs. Artisanality was found to be an appropriately assigned label in both the small-scale and expanded enterprises, with a set of specific characteristics, approaches and the principals’ role as ‘artisanal entrepreneur’ authenticating the ESACEs and their products as artisanal. It was found that the enterprises under study aligned with Ray’s (2003) notion of the cultural approach to Endogenous Regional Development (ERD) and particular place and space characteristics; whilst ‘the short food supply chain’, a ‘collective form of social action’, assisted in facilitating the preservation of these associated identities/tags. In examining the retention of food quality meanings upon expansion, the same set of characteristics and qualities that are potentially used and applicable to the SACEs in defining quality were also found to be relevant in the ESACEs. In examining the cottage industry, artisanal and quality identities, this research demonstrated that there are more similarities than differences between the SACEs and ESACEs, and that growth can occur without necessarily compromising values and actions; all of which enable identity preservation and value-adding potentialities. Moreover, the current use of the ‘short food supply chain’ holds significant promise for this industry as it assists in building relationships and trust between processors and consumers who share similar values and beliefs surrounding food production and consumption. In so doing, food products are heavily laden with eco-social information, which can assist in challenging unsustainable agrifood production and related practice.

Here, for the first time is a comprehensive handbook on economic entomolgy for field crops and pastures. It is organised by commodities such as cereals, sugar and tropical pasture legumes allowing all the arthropods on a particular commodity to be examined.