RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

Sustaining social and rural entrepreneurship towards hybrids 69
to traditional and unsustainable agricultural policies; transformation seems to open up a positive
reading of rural development policies as a potential to spend towards a sustainable development
(Mölders, 2013).
Developing a multifunctional agriculture in rural areas represents a social, ecological and
economic challenge. Multifunctional agriculture implies to integrate plant and animal production
with environmental care in terms of management of water, soil and air, conservation
of nature and agro-historical landscape, control of climate and the effects of global warming.
Conflicting conditions are required to drive transition from conventional to multifunctional
agriculture requires both that farmers have to reduce environmental effects of plant
and animal production to minimum and consumers or authorities have to create a market for
the variety of rural products in the region itself: European and national authorities tend to
support a sustainable production whilst farmers tend to increase the scale of production (Vereijken,
2002).
Multi-functional agriculture is characterized by various public aspects: environmental
effects in terms of landscape and open space amenities, enhancement of biodiversity, recreation
and aesthetics; pollution, food security, food safety rural economic viability, prevention
of natural hazard, cultural heritage, enhanced food security as local supply and short chains,
and groundwater recharge (Knickel, Renting & Douwe van der Ploeg, 2004).
The common objectives for the agricultural sector are to be sustainable, viable and innovative,
to contribute to sustainable management of natural resources and quality of the environment,
to contribute to the socio-economic development of rural areas (OECD, 2003).
Maintaining a multi-functional activity, as not merely a characteristics of the production process,
takes on a value in itself becoming a policy objective because multiple roles are assigned
to agriculture as an activity fulfilling certain functions in society (OECD, 2001).
Mardsen and Sonnino (2008) recognize that three interpretations of the concept of multifunctional
agriculture are explained: multifunctional agriculture as an adjustment for those
producers unable coherently with an agro-industrial paradigm that emphasizes the notion of
pluri-activity related to multifunctional character of agriculture; multifunctional agriculture
is interpreted as spatial regulation of the consumption countryside coherently with a postproductivist
paradigm that implies rural areas as consumption spaces and emphasizes the need
of local environmental protection. Agriculture loosing centrality in society is conceived in
terms of landscape value as a consumption good. There is a farmland diversification. Multifunctional
agriculture as part of an emerging rural development paradigm should add income
and help sustain employment opportunities; contribute to the construction of a new agricultural
sector sensible to the needs and expectations of the society; redefine radically rural
resources beyond the farm enterprise.
Multi-functionality emphasizes economic, social and environmental functions assigned
to agriculture as provider of rural environmental goods, cultural heritage and related to contribute
to safe food, environmental conservation and landscapes amenities as to support the
economic growth, and contribute to revitalize viability of rural areas, by providing environmental
values and conserving agro-ecological systems (Van Huylenbroeck, Vandermeulen,
Mettepenningen & Verspecht, 2007). Multi-functionality tends to emerge as unifying concept
in which productive role and land management tend to contemporarily coexist in agriculture
encouraging a joint relation between farming and rural landscapes. Multi-functionality
as a new policy paradigm implies a different content of policy choices in terms of preserva-