Contending European Agendas for Agricultural Innovation

Amid expectations for a European ‘transition to sustainable agriculture’, there are competing transitional processes. Given the widely acknowledged harm from agro-industrial systems, unsustainable agriculture has divergent diagnoses and innovative solutions. In the EU policy context of a Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE), there are also divergent accounts of its key terms: biological resources, economy, relevant knowledge and knowledge-producers. These accounts can be analysed as contending agendas for future agriculture. The dominant agenda favours laboratory-based techno-scientific innovation as a means to use renewable resources more efficiently for competitive advantage in global value chains. Agriculture potentially becomes a factory for capital-intensive inputs to produce decomposable biomass for novel processes and industrial products. By contrast, a marginal agenda promotes farmers’ knowledge of natural resources, especially via agro-ecological methods, alongside agro-foodenergy re-localisation. Through short supply chains that valorise a comprehensive identity for agro-food products, producers can gain more of the value that they add. These agendas contend for influence over EU research priorities. Through their divergent agendas, stakeholders also promote different power relations: between farmers, the agro-input supply industry, research institutions, knowledge and markets. 1 Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK, [email protected] Published under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 France 172