Extension Education’ harks back to the early seventies, when the event was organised for the first time in Finland. At that time, the ESEE comprised a relatively small group of Western European centres involved in research and especially training to support the activities of public sector agricultural extension workers who were employed in their hundreds by ministries of agriculture and by farmers’ organisations.
Today, we are facing a different situation. In the first place, Eastern European countries have joined the ESEE. They are preoccupied with transforming their erstwhile collective agricultures. In the second place, in Southern Europe, the crunch is on to change age-old forms of livelihood farming into competitive commercial agriculture, a process which leads to very rapid change in rural populations, community viability, and landscape management. In the third place, the concerns of West European countries have moved on. The armies of public extension workers have gone, or have been privatised or commercialised. The agricultures in those countries are struggling to establish a new contract with society in which the emphasis shifts from efficient production of agricultural commodities to the multifunctional use of green space.
For all of us, the outlook has changed. Where we were first pre-occupied with controlling nature, and then with overcoming scarcity, we are now facing the sobering fact that the future is a human artefact: humans have become a major force of nature, and maintaining the conditions for (human) life is a question of purposeful collective action at the farm, community, regional, national and global levels. Purposeful communication no longer only serves to transfer technology, ensure compliance with policies, or reduce transaction costs, but also to foster interaction, negotiation and collective action to deal with predicaments we have created ourselves.
These predicaments include food safety and loss of consumer confidence; loss of bio-diversity and genetic resources; reduced resilience in the face of ‘surprises’; reduced access to safe drinking water; problems of trade-off among productivity, equity, sustainability and stability; contested land use; loss of viability of rural communities; and increasing domination of life science companies and food industries of agricultural production and food. These and other issues pose severe challenges for researchers, educators and facilitators involved in agricultural and rural development.
In the light of these considerations, we propose that the 15th ESEE will have one central main theme and a number of related issues:
Main theme:
Integrating multiple land uses for a sustainable future, with such questions as:
- How can horizontal and vertical integration result in a sustainable future?
- What do these developments mean for the relationship between agriculture and society?
- How should research, education and professional facilitation be organised to be effective?
- Which technologies (ICT, GIS) and methodologies can stimulate integration?