Ibis (2004), 146 (Supp. 2), 14– 21
Changes in farming and future prospects – technology
and policy1
Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.
ALLAN BUCKWELL 1*† & SUE ARMSTRONG-BROWN 2†
Country Land & Business Association, Belgrave Square, London SW1X 8PQ, UK
2
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Lodge, Sandy, Bedfordshire SG19 2DL, UK
1
The links between the drivers of change in farming structures and practices, the adoption of
those practices and their environmental impacts are complex, multidimensional and dynamic,
generally involving long time lags. We can visualize agriculture as having evolved, so far,
through two eras: pre-industrial and industrial. There are signs that we are now moving into
a third generation: post-industrial agriculture. This is outlined and illustrated. The thesis is
that we are passing the apogee of environmental destructiveness in UK agriculture. The policy
changes now in place in the new post-Fischler CAP have the capacity to steer rural land use
in a different and preferred direction. Of course, this outcome is not guaranteed.
THE DRIVERS OF TECHNICAL AND
FARM PRACTICE CHANGES – THE
ROLE OF AGRICULTURAL POLICY?
We can view European agriculture as having evolved
through two eras during the last three millennia (see
Natta & Buckwell 2004). The first generation, or
pre-industrial, agriculture lasted from the first efforts
systematically to grow crops and rear farm animals until
the 17th century. The second generation, industrial,
agriculture has developed through the successive application of horse, steam and internal combustion power
sources, and the application of mechanical, biological, chemical, managerial, information and biotechnological sciences to crop and animal production.
These developments were a resounding success story
for material human development, but during the
second half of the 20th century, society has become
aware of, and concerned about, the environmental
costs of second-generation agriculture. It is tempting
to think that at the start of the 21st century we are
witnessing the emergence of a third generation of
agriculture, which combines the productivity of food
production of the second with the better effects on
environment and natural resources of the first.
*Corresponding author.
Email: [email protected]
†The views in this paper are those of the authors and do not
necessarily represent the policy or position of the organizations.
© 2004 British Ornithologists’ Union
The principal expression of the nature of agriculture
and its impacts on the environment are the state and
development of technology. These are dependent on
the sheer inventiveness of humans, and on wide-scale
economic factors such as economic growth, prices,
wages, interest and exchange rates. They are also
dependent on political and institutional, including
fiscal, factors that define the nature of the exchange
processes for outputs and inputs, including labour
and land, and the tenurial conditions and legal
structures within which farming is conducted. In this
broad and long-term context, agricultural market
policies per se have relatively little impact on farming
technologies and their environmental effects.
The principal developments of second-generation
agriculture that have had deleterious environmental
effects are the application of machine power to farming,
which then enabled and stimulated the application
of mechanical, biological, chemical and information
technology developments to farming. These are the
developments which have given us the power and
capacity: to drain, irrigate and mono-crop; to bring
marginal land into cultivation; and to develop largescale, capital-intensive and of course highly productive farming operations. These supply side issues are
also driven by the changes in food demand of the UK
population. There have been wholesale demographic,
social and technological changes affecting food consumption patterns. A further driving force has been
the massive technological developments in food transport, storage, preservation, processing, retailing and
Changes in faming and future prospects
catering. These deep-set pressures were reinforced
by agricultural policy since the Second World War,
which explicitly set out to encourage higher productivity and production through education, advice, land
improvement grants such as for hedge removal and
drainage support, and through production subsidies.
Most of the technologies that led to the production systems that have had negative environmental
effects were already deployed before the UK joined
the EEC in 1973. Many were underway before the
protection offered to UK agriculture under the 1947
Agriculture Act. Likewise, some of the most intensive
sectors of British agriculture – horticulture, and pig
and poultry production – are also the least supported
under agricultural policy (before or since joining the
EEC). Trends of intensification of use of purchased
inputs established during the 1950s and 1960s were
certainly encouraged by the Common Agricultural
Policy (CAP), which also stimulated environmentally
damaging switches in cropping patterns. However,
these major technological changes on farmland have
been a feature of all agricultures around the developed
world irrespective of the agricultural policy pursued.
Agricultural policies have a poor record in mitigating the impacts of agronomic development on the
environment. This role for policy has been explicitly
recognized in the UK only since the early 1980s
when the first agri-environment schemes were set
up, and in Europe since 1992 when the MacSharry
reforms made agri-environment schemes available
for all member states. This was further reinforced
under Agenda 2000 when agri-environment programmes became compulsory for all states. In spite
of this, throughout most of their history the level of
investment in such schemes has been low, and delivery patchy. Until recently there has been no comprehensive attempt to assess and control the impacts of
agricultural intensification across the range of environmental impacts, and the various policy tools
available to mitigate the undesirable effects of technological developments (financial instruments, regulation, education and incentive schemes) have not
been guided by an integrated sustainability strategy.
It is not possible to predict how technological
developments and their environmental effects
would have proceeded if the policy drivers had been
different. However, it is possible that if agricultural
policies had been developed to mitigate environmental impacts of agriculture rather than simply to
support the drive towards higher production, this
would have provided different incentives and stimulated the development of integrated technologies at
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an earlier date. Such policies might also have internalized some of the external effects of farming that
are currently paid for by society at large, and made
some of the more extreme examples of intensification less financially attractive.
Thus if the connection between agricultural policy
and the technology of farming is complex then it
would be unwise to expect major effects on technology arising from simple changes in farm policy. It is
the maturity of the development processes summarized here, together with the explicit recognition of
the role of current policy developments in helping
deliver public environmental goods, that gives room
for some optimism regarding the future of the rural
environment.
THE RECENT PAST STORY OF
TECHNOLOGY, FARMING
PRACTICE, ENVIRONMENT AND
POLICY
From the point of view of agricultural production,
and general material economic development, the
development brought about by industrial agriculture
is a success story. It transformed a society with over
50% of its workforce in farming to a situation in
which less than 2% of the workforce provides the
majority of the primary food needs, of the larger,
better-fed population. These changes were generally
enthusiastically embraced by rural and urban citizens
alike. Moving the working population out of agriculture into, first, manufacturing, then services, is
what we mean by economic development. Income
levels rose. All conventional indicators of human
well-being rose: educational attainment, nutritional
standards, health, freedom from hunger and disease,
infant survival and longevity. Certainly, material living standards rocketed through this transformation
of society. The environmental costs, in so far as they
were noticed, were mostly accepted as necessary
prices that were willingly paid for these advances.
Notable exceptions were exemplified by the movement leading to the creation of the National Trust,
and early conservationists such as the founders of the
Soil Association.
But as this story unfolded through the second half
of the 20th century, new tendencies became apparent. Society became better fed, freer from disease,
more mobile thanks to mass transportation (itself
environmentally destructive), much better informed
by mass media, and with greater capacity to influence affairs through popular democracy and special
© 2004 British Ornithologists’ Union, Ibis, 146 (Supp. 2), 14– 21
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A. Buckwell & S. Armstrong-Brown
interest groups. With these new facilities society first
became aware, and then started to care, that economic developmental gains came at some cost to the
rural environment. Another way of expressing this is
that the very forces of technical change and economic advance that caused the supply of rural environmental and cultural landscape services to fall
simultaneously helped bring about the situation in
which the expressed demand for these services
increased.
It can plausibly be asserted that West European
society has now the largest, safest and best quantity
and variety of food and drink products available to it
of any time in history or any place on Earth. This is
all fundamentally the fruits of the Earth, but with
increasing contributions of other parts of the food
chain up- and downstream of farming. Yet, and
apparently paradoxically, the value (per unit) of
food, however expressed – in real prices, in hours
worked to buy a loaf of bread, or shares of disposable
income spent on food – has systematically fallen. The
farm-gate share of consumers’ food expenditure has
been driven down by three factors. First, the sheer
resource cost of producing the food has fallen, propelled by the technical progress outlined above. Second, the transformation of food through time
(storage), place (domestic and international transport) and form (through processing, and adding
preparation and convenience) has multiplied the raw
commodity value many fold. Third, as consumer
incomes have risen they are able to extend their
expenditures far beyond the basics of food and shelter necessary for survival.
As the value of marketed food at the farm-gate has
dropped in real terms, the value of the non-marketed
outputs of the countryside has risen (Sutherland
2004). The bulk of the population still lives in towns,
suburbs and cities in conditions of high population
density. Their demands for the space, greenery, solitude, fresh air, varied nature and recreational opportunities offered by the countryside all rise. We
observe a huge growth in the service sectors catering
for these demands. These activities generate employment, income and wealth in the rural economy (the
most startling demonstration of this effect was the
relative magnitude of the loss of rural tourism and
recreation activity during the shut-down of the
countryside in the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease
epidemic, which was uncompensated and far
exceeded the loss to agriculture). They depend
vitally on the intrinsic attractiveness of the rural
areas. In the vast majority of rural Europe – especially
© 2004 British Ornithologists’ Union, Ibis, 146 (Supp. 2), 14–21
that in easy reach of the bulk of its population – this
attractiveness has been moulded by the activities,
over centuries, of farming and forestry. This environmental and cultural landscape value takes a multiplicity of forms: the changing field colours and textures
over the seasons and the years; the rolling landscapes
of farmed countryside; the mix of farmland, wetland and woodland; the regionally varied, vernacular
architecture of rural housing and farm buildings
using local materials; the rich patterns of field boundaries, walls, hedges, ditches, dykes and fences; the
adapted wildlife where farming, forestry and nature
have adjusted one to each other; the customs, folklore,
language, dialects, costumes and cuisine.
So much of European cultural and heritage value
is rurally based because until the industrial revolution so much of the European population and wealth
was rurally based. For many generations, Europeans
moved off the land to the cities because this was
where incomes and living standards were higher, and
most ‘modern’ activities required the scale and proximity of urban living. It is only in the second half of
the 20th century that the developments in the service and creative sectors, in business structures and in
communications have permitted the opposite process to take place. The rural areas become more desirable, and rural house prices reflect this trend.
It is this combination of the declining real value of
farm-gate food production and the rising value of the
non-market outputs of the rural areas which ushers
in a new era, third-generation agriculture. It is characterized by the feature that we are moving, or in
some regions we have moved, to a situation in which
the value of land in terms of its non-market environmental and cultural landscape outputs are higher
than its value in food production alone.
However, the developments summarized here
have, naturally, come at what we now regard as a
high cost to the environment.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL COST OF
INDUSTRIAL ERA AGRICULTURE
The environmental impacts of 20th century agricultural intensification are well documented. The provision of public goods and services from farmed
countryside has declined in the past two to three
decades. This includes detrimental changes to biodiversity, landscape, natural resources such as soil and
water, and the rural economy.
Focusing on biodiversity, those changes that have
been identified as being most detrimental include:
Changes in faming and future prospects
(1) Loss of habitat diversity at farm and landscape
scale resulting from business rationalization (loss of
mixed farming; loss of non-cropped habitat on farmland; Benton et al. 2003);
(2) Changes in crop type and structure, especially
the switch from spring to autumn tillage, the associated loss of overwinter stubbles and the loss of breeding habitat for ground-nesting birds such as Northern
Lapwing Vanellus vanellus (e.g. Sheldon et al. 2004)
and Skylark Alauda arvensis (e.g. Morris et al. 2004)
(percentage of all wheat and barley which was
spring-sown declined from over 70% to less than 20%
between 1968 and 1998 (HGCA 1994, 1999)); and
the shift from hay to silage for livestock fodder;
(3) Direct effects of pesticides on flora and invertebrates
(around 10% of the 700–800 species of insect in cereal
fields can cause a commercial threat, but most can be
removed from the ecosystem by pesticide use);
(4) Indirect effects of pesticides, including the removal
of plant and invertebrate material from the food chain
[evidence exists for indirect impacts of pesticides
on Grey Partridge Perdix perdix (Aebischer & Potts
1998), Corn Bunting Miliaria calandra (Brickle et al.
2000), and Yellowhammer Emberiza citrinella (Morris
et al. 2001) and a total of 21 bird species are considered likely to have been affected by pesticides, on the
basis of direct evidence, diet and ecology (Campbell
& Cooke 1997, Boatman et al. 2004)];
(5) Use of inorganic nitrogen to promote grass productivity at the expense of broad-leaved flora [97% of
semi-natural lowland meadows have been lost since
the 1930s in England and Wales; there has been a
13% reduction in species diversity of unimproved
grassland between 1978 and 1990 in Great Britain
(MAFF 2000)].
The impacts of agricultural intensification have not
fallen on biodiversity alone. The Countryside Agency
has mapped England’s landscape into 159 countryside
character areas, based on distinctive features which are
often a result of regional farming patterns. Together
with insensitive development and extraction activities,
widespread intensification of agriculture is cited as a
threat to almost all the countryside character areas.
The key features associated with intensification from
the landscape viewpoint are the expansion of monocultures, the loss or fragmentation of field boundary
features and woodlands, improvement or overgrazing
of extensive grazing land, and drainage and canalization of rivers.
Agricultural soil management is associated with a
range of environmental impacts. Around 2.3 million
tonnes of soil are estimated to have been lost from
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agricultural soils by erosion between 1995 and 1998,
and soil structural changes associated with cultivation and trafficking by livestock and machinery are
thought to be linked to increased run-off and flooding. Raised soil nutrient status and loss of nutrients
from soils is an increasingly important aspect of
water pollution, and agriculture is estimated to be
the source of 70% of nitrogen, 40–50% of phosphorus and 50% of the silt pollution to freshwaters in
England (Defra 2004).
Agricultural change is not limited to the past few
decades. Indeed, dramatic changes have been taking
place on farmland for centuries, from forest clearing
to new rotations to the enclosures. Fertilizers, pesticides and mechanization were introduced in the
early part of the 20th century. But for a short window of three decades the rate and extent of change
may have outstripped the ability of natural systems
to buffer or to adapt to it.
THE FUTURE NEED NOT BE THE
SAME AS THE PAST – ARGUMENT
There are fundamentally two grounds for suggesting
that what has been described above is not an inexorable, non-ending process of agricultural economic
development accompanied by rural environmental
degradation. These are: food satiation and the adaptive responses stimulated by society’s growing
demand for environmental services. This should not
be taken to imply that the engine of technical change
in agriculture has run out of steam, but the inducement for further such progress, as far as increasing
the output of food is concerned, has diminished.
Indeed, the emphasis of new technical change is on
innovations that reduce input and reduce environmental damage.
Food satiation
In the EU there is no doubt that the desire to be able
to feed the population has been met. The EU is a
net exporter of most temperate zone agricultural
products, and this tendency will continue with the
enlarged Union of EU27. Although there are families
and even regions in the EU, especially in the new
Member States, where access to, and the price of,
basic food items is of huge concern, the predominant
concerns for European food consumers are variety
and quality rather than quantity. Indeed, concerns of
the effects of over-consumption are currently high
on the political agenda. These features of Europe’s
© 2004 British Ornithologists’ Union, Ibis, 146 (Supp. 2), 14– 21
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A. Buckwell & S. Armstrong-Brown
food economy mean that there is no longer the need
to seek to expand the physical output of food to satisfy domestic European demand. Starting from the
position of high border protection in Europe, and
given the World Trade Organization pressures identified at the Doha round both to reduce this protection and to eliminate export subsidies, there is no
prospect, overall, for the coming decade that Europe
can expect to increase its agricultural commodity
exports substantially. Growth in high-quality, highvalue products might continue, although the current
strength of the Euro (and pound) against the dollar
make this more difficult. These are the justifications
for arguing that pressure on the land and the environment from the need to produce more agricultural
output will be lower in coming decades than the past.
Food satiation does not mean that there is no
further pressure to increase efficiency. This is a never
ending process. Indeed, this pressure will be
increased to the extent that Europe really does open
its borders to international prices, and as the
remorseless process of concentration in the food
processing and distribution sectors continues. These
are now the prime economic drivers for continued
technical and structural change in farming (by
structural change we certainly include continued
enlargement of farm size: limits to economies of scale
in most farming systems have by no means been
reached. There is, however, no necessary implication
that larger farm businesses are any more damaging than
smaller ones). However, starting from the position of
protected, high, coupled product prices, we conclude that the combined effect of the above tendencies signals a levelling-off in the overall intensity of
UK farming and its pressure on the environment.
To put this another way: as the next section documents, the agricultural sector has been contracting
from its zenith of the 1990s in terms of gross volume
of output, and use of many environmentally significant inputs (see indices of final output and all inputs
depicted in Defra’s analysis of productivity in agriculture, Agriculture in the United Kingdom 2003,
charts 9.1 and 9.2). Static or even declining future
demand for raw agricultural output (which can well
happen as the demographic structure of the population ages) would tend to lessen these pressures.
Intensified competitive pressures and international
trade exposure will mean that more of the remaining
output is produced by the most efficient farmers.
The question is whether these producers are systematically more intensive users of environmentally sensitive inputs, and whether they manage these inputs
© 2004 British Ornithologists’ Union, Ibis, 146 (Supp. 2), 14–21
in a more damaging way than the less efficient producers they have displaced.
There is often a presumption, especially by
environmentalists, that more economically efficient
always equals more environmentally damaging.
However, there is more than a passing possibility
that less technically efficient farmers are partly those
who are profligate with their purchased inputs. It
does not stretch credulity to suggest that poor management of market processes is sometimes accompanied by poor management of natural environmental
processes too, and vice versa. There may be a role for
legislation in ensuring that input costs reflect the
environmental costs of their use, reinforcing the link
between efficiency and appropriate input use. However, when it comes to considering land-use patterns,
there can be little doubt that an intensively, even if
efficiently, commercially managed system is characterized by specialization and scale. It requires additional incentives to ensure this is not automatically
associated with a reduction in biodiversity.
This is as far as general qualitative argument can
take this issue. The question ultimately is an empirical one that should be settled by detailed research.
Growing demand for environmental
services
Just as the decline in the relative size of the commodity agricultural sector of the economy is driven
by the income inelastic demand for raw food products, the rise now in the importance of the environmental services supplied by agriculture is driven
by the income elastic demand for these services
(income elasticity refers to the percentage change in
quantity of food demanded per 1% change in disposable incomes. For most basic food items, this
elasticity is less than unity so growth in incomes
is accompanied by a steadily declining share of
expenditure on food items. However, given the nonmarket nature of environmental services, no empirical data exist from which to demonstrate the income
elasticity for these services. Whitby and Adger (1996)
discuss this proposition). In the absence of econometric evidence for this assertion we can point to the
demand for activities which are market driven and
which are associated with enjoyment of the natural,
rural environment. These include the demand for
day trips, week-end visits to beauty spots, heritage
sites, national parks, nature reserves, outdoor recreation activities and sports, e.g. equine activities. Other
indicators are the membership of organizations
Changes in faming and future prospects
devoted to these environmental services, such as
the Wildlife Trusts, the National Trust and the RSPB.
In large measure these activities take place in the
countryside. In the majority of the land area of the
UK, and especially England, these take place in,
adjacent to or over farmed land. The biodiversity,
condition of habitats and landscape, and the quality
of the natural resources (soil, air and water) are a
very large part of what is considered the quality of
these experiences. In addition, of course, there is
concern by most citizens for the quality and quantity
of these environmental features for their own sake –
but this is more difficult to measure. Recent studies
show that the public places a value on biodiversity and exhibits considerable willingness to pay; for
example, Cambridgeshire residents were willing to
pay £45–70 pa for biodiversity projects (Christie
et al. 2004).
These societal changes are demanding two sorts of
policy measures: publicly funded schemes to purchase environmental services from farmers and land
managers, and environmental regulation. There is a
large set of instruments now in operation in each of
these two categories. The balance between these
instruments and their efficacy are large complex
subjects in their own right.
In summary, the two fundamental changes food
satiation plus greater environmental awareness form
the core of the argument that we are moving now
into a new, post-industrial, third-generation agriculture (TGA). The challenge for TGA is to combine
the technological efficiency of second-generation
agriculture with the lower environmental impacts of
first-generation agriculture. The public wants food,
19
but supplying the sheer quantum of output is no
longer a challenge. That has shifted to supplying this
quantum but in greater variety, with higher quality,
produced in a way that is kinder to animals and in
better tune with the environment. An important
part of this challenge is to exploit the many situations in which the quality attributes are directly
related to links to the environmental character of
the product, its production process or territory of
provenance.
THE FUTURE NEED NOT BE
THE SAME AS THE PAST – SOME
EVIDENCE
If the forces and qualitative arguments described
above hold water, we would expect to be able to see
some signs that what is popularly characterized as
the damaging intensification of agriculture has moderated and perhaps even reversed. This section
reviews some indicators.
The analysis is offered at a national level and we
are well aware that there will be significant and
important differences within these aggregates. However, as the arguments are made at the aggregate
level, then these aggregates do have some relevance.
Following long established trends, production outputs and input indices increased during the period
from the late 1970s to early 1990s, and tend to have
reached a plateau since then (Fig. 1). Key environmental indices are characterized by declines over the
same period. Some of these trends have also levelled
off towards the end of the 20th century (e.g. decline
in farmland birds, reduction in hedge length).
Figure 1. Indices of agricultural characteristics since 1970. Note all data series are for 1970 = 100 except pesticides (1985 = 100) and
gross output (1983 = 100).
© 2004 British Ornithologists’ Union, Ibis, 146 (Supp. 2), 14– 21
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At this, admittedly crude, level of analysis it is contended that these trends support the broad qualitative arguments advanced. The most environmentally
destructive aspects of industrialization of agriculture
may have run their course before the end of the 20th
century. Although the majority of the trends have
not reversed, many have reached a plateau. The
environmental effects of these changes arrive after a
lag, and thus some of the comfort from the levelling
off in some of these indices has yet to appear. These
lags will depend on the variables under discussion
and a range of other factors, but for some, such as fertilizers and pesticides found in groundwaters, there
might be lags of many years under some conditions.
Throughout most of the period during which the
major expansion in use of purchased inputs was taking place and yield growth was at its peak, the agricultural policy was one of encouragement of these
changes mostly through open-ended commodity
price support. At the same time that the budgetary
cost of managing the effects of this policy became
unbearable, the perception of the environmental
costs also rose. After a decade (the 1980s) of avoiding the fact that agricultural policy would have to
change, the process of reform got underway in the
mid-1990s. This emerged as the MacSharry reforms
of the CAP in the early 1990s. In the UK, this policy
change coincided with successive disasters of BSE
(bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease) and foot and mouth disease, and a weakening
of the Euro (in which many agricultural prices and
subsidies are denominated). The effect has been profound, the incentive to produce has been diminished, gross production has fallen, and the whole
debate about agriculture and the most appropriate
policy has changed.
THE FUTURE WILL NOT BE THE
SAME AS THE PAST – POLICY
The story so far is that agricultural policy has done
little to influence or moderate the most important
factors determining the availability of technologies,
their transposition into usable farming practices and
their effects on the environment. Despite this, the
shift in agricultural policy signalled by the process of
the MacSharry (Official Journal of the European
Communities 1992), Agenda 2000 (Official Journal
of the European Communities 1999) and Fischler
2003 (Official Journal of the European Communities 2003) reforms of the CAP are, and will increasingly be, significant for the environment.
© 2004 British Ornithologists’ Union, Ibis, 146 (Supp. 2), 14–21
The 1992 MacSharry reform was the first step in
signalling to farmers that EU prices have to move
down towards those in international markets. The
introduction of the accompanying measures, including those for less favoured areas, afforestation and
agri-environment, was an important step in bringing
environment in to the heart of agricultural policy.
These two processes were reinforced in 1999, by the
Agenda 2000 reform. This explicitly defined the
two-pillar structure of the CAP: Pillar 1 for direct
payments and remaining commodity supports; Pillar
2 for rural development, including the accompanying measures. Although this change in the architecture of the policy was significant and it was
surrounded by a great deal of rhetoric about how the
policy was fundamentally changing, the distribution
of financial support between the two pillars was
adjusted only to a minor extent. The Fischler 2003
reform set out to achieve a 20% resource shift from
Pillars 1 and 2, but in the event this was reduced to
5%. The value of 20% was the headline figure, but
as the formula for the proposed Pillar 1 payment
cuts was highly modulated by size of payments (with
a cut-free franchise of $5000, a threshold at $50 000
and a ceiling of $200 000) the actual transfer of
resources between pillars would at most have been
12%. The most significant part of this latest reform
is the decoupling of payments from production, and
the linking of receipt of the Single Farm Payment to
a series of cross-compliance conditions, which
include keeping the land in good agricultural and
environmental condition.
The Curry report (Policy Commission on the
Future of Farming and Food 2002) recognized the
need to integrate economic, social and environmental drivers to deliver sustainable farming. The Strategy for Sustainable Food and Farming (Defra 2003)
is a first attempt at government level to bring
together these recommendations and deliver policies
that mitigate against the negative impacts of agricultural development in an integrated way. Policy initiatives such as this, together with the increasing
frequency of agriculture reforms, indicate that the
world of farming is moving away from a pure productionist stance, to which it is unlikely to return.
Of course there can be no guarantees that the
progress to a TGA is completed or does not reverse.
Much will depend on how the decoupled payment
regime is implemented, the nature of the crosscompliance constraints, the reaction of farmers
and others in the food chain, the uptake of the new
broad-application, Entry-Level Stewardship scheme,
Changes in faming and future prospects
and the further evolution of both pillars of the CAP.
It cannot be ruled out that changed market signals
in combination with clumsily implemented policy
initiatives could stimulate some degree of polarization
of agriculture – with intensification of some land use
and abandonment of other land. The argument is
that the conditions are now available to steer agriculture to a new third generation; it is up to all involved
to bring this about.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
If we are to move towards a TGA that is characterized by the high food production levels and standards which western society expects, combined with
much lower environmental impacts and recovery in
key environmental indices such as farmland bird
populations, the role of agricultural policy must
continue to be developed. The recent reforms are
moving towards a market-led agricultural industry
which produces goods according to consumer demand.
This removes the incentive to overproduce, but
increasingly exposes Europe’s countryside to economic and technical forces which do not recognize
environmental values. To move from industrial agriculture to TGA, public policy has a role to ensure
that land managers provide an increased output of
non-market goods which society requires – biodiversity,
landscape, historic environment, natural resources
and vibrant rural communities. Policy tools, many of
which are now available, must be further developed and
integrated. Through a combination of regulation against
pollution and degradation, the creation of markets for
public goods through the rural development regulation,
and enabling and educating consumers to opt for goods
produced to high environmental standards, the environmental benefits of agriculture could be delivered
to a high level alongside outputs of food and fibre.
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