Producing healthy outcomes in a rural productive space

• Agricultural restructuring in correspondence with intergovernmental policy can have unintended consequences.
• A valorisation process within and into horticulture to accommodate a crises in overproduction is one such outcome.
• Another is the iteration of health as a localization strategy.
• What emerges through this process is innovation in migrant workers reproduction strategies.
• Consequently, the rural space becomes a node in a wider European strategy.

Restructuring within European agriculture is an ever-emerging phenomenon shaped by a reforming Common Agricultural Policy agenda, and increased concentration within the food industry. As an element of reorganisation within Irish agriculture, a new phase of expansion into horticulture emerged in the late 1990s. This happened in correspondence with the introduction of a more concentrated retail market and within the context of specific labour market policies developed to facilitate a flexible workforce. Thus, producers were encouraged to expand production and divert from constraints associated within mainstream farming, as part of a wider entrepreneurial drive within agriculture. Regime change such as has taken place within horticulture corresponds with Guthman's valorisation thesis i.e. moving from so-called commodity crops to speciality crops in an attempt at overcoming a crisis in overproduction (2004). Within this context, ‘health’ emerges as an iteration of a localisation strategy and an attempt to counter the negative effects of globalisation. As the sector has undergone significant contraction, an unintended legacy of this valorisation project has been innovation in migrant workers' (the labour force) reproduction strategies and a dynamic engagement with the rural space. Taken together, these changes foreground the role of intergovernmental policy in shaping rural productive spaces in unintended ways. Furthermore, it suggests that more research needs to focus on health as a production system and the multi-dimensional factors that position it within a food chain context.