Multifonctionnalite agricole : biens non marchands ou biens identitaires ?

Agricultural multifunctionality: non market concerns or identity production? - In the international discussions, the analytical framework about agricultural multifunctionality usually puts great emphasis on the separation between commodity outputs and non market concerns . But these two aspects seem not to be accurately specified. Economists use to analyze non market products as joint products, externalities or public goods, what in our opinion induces a lose of substance in multifunctionality notion. We are holding the opinion that market relationship requires some necessary counterweight relationship, whose aim is to produce or to maintain peculiar states of things according to time and space. The concerned goods are devoted to satisfy need for each group to build up own identity. They give to these groups ability to persist is as much as they constitute the material of their heritages : historic and cultural, natural, professional patrimony... In this way, multifunctionality as a concept would be to understand as the necessary connection between commodity production and identity production.