Australian agriculture in the global economic mosaic

Abstract

By any objective measure, Australian agriculture has undergone substantial change since the early 1980s (see Pritchard and McManus 2000; Gray and Lawrence 2001). In some respects, it seems something of a paradox to consider the past and current position of Australian agriculture under the rubric of globalisation. First, globalisation is itself still a contested and contentious idea. For many theorists, the phenomenon is more readily associated with industry sectors such as 'high-tech' and more basic heavy industrial manufacturing, finance and property services - the sectors in which flexible specialisation and accumulation, new international divisions of labour, space-time compression or convergence would appear to have had the greatest impact in terms of employment and production change. By contrast, agriculture, with its relatively constant temporal rhythms and real spatial fixity, seems relatively lacking in dynamism.