Sustainability, Agriculture, and Agricultural Policy

Abstract

In this paper, the problem of achieving sustainable development in the context of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and other policy suggestions is examined. Sustainable development is defined as a commitment to conserve necessary biological, cultural, and aesthetic capital for future generations. This is not a costless process. Constraints are required on current economic activity, entailing sacrifices by the current generation, if sustainability requirements are to be met. Specific wildlife sites within the farmed landscape are critical to the sustainability programme. Conservation of these sites entails the continuation of specific and often technically obsolete farming practices. Their conservation cannot be ensured by the practice of efficient sustainable agriculture as advocated by the authors Pretty and Howes. Furthermore, those authors are wrong in believing that such agriculture could be profitable without continuing subsidy. The approach of the CAP is to make payments for the practices necessary to safeguard these sites. However, the economic sustainability of the CAP is doubtful. Its costs are excessive and reforms are not reducing the excessive financial burden and resource costs. Alternative reform packages involving conservation through cross-compliance have even greater resource costs. The ability to safeguard these critical sites in the long run is therefore questionable. This suggests there is a need to rethink sustainability requirements for cultural and biological diversity.

Food, Environmentalism and Rural Sociology: On the Organic Farming Movement in Ireland

“…'Sustainable development' is not regarded by all of those who favour more environmental regulation of the countryside as a good thing. Bowers (1995) points out that in Britain organic farming has been decried by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) as potentially in conflict with many environmentalist goals for the countryside. According to the RSPB, organic farming does not particularly contribute to the conservation of habitats, Sites of Special Scientific Interest or Environmentally Sensitive Areas; in fact it may increase rather than reduce pressures on nature in such locations because it encourages a return to a more land-extensive type of farming.…”

Ecological modernization and the US Farm Bill: The case of the Conservation Security Program

“…Furthermore the process of extensification and environmentalization is considered a byproduct of government funded agri-environmental programs that mostly focus on marginal lands, allowing for continued intensification on lowland arable lands (Evans et al, 2002;Wilson, 2001;Tilzey, 2000;Potter and Tilzey, 2005). The excessive costs associated with continuing these types of programs, especially under the Common Agricultural Policy regime, have called into question their economic sustainability (Bowers, 1995).…”

Green Protectionism and Organic Food Exporting from New Zealand: Crisis Experiments in the Breakdown of Fordist Trade and Agricultural Policies

“…These reforms involve attempts to create an agrisocial (Commins 1990) climate in rural areas, engendering diversification out of farming and extensification of remaining farm units . However, only the smallest of farms-those that contribute least to food overproduction-have taken advantage of diversification grants, while compensatory payments provided to larger farms that set aside land have been paid out irrespective of whether total farm production has declined (Bowers 1995 ;Commins 1990) . The agrisocial aspects of CAP reform have failed to reduce food overproduction, and total support for European farmers has increased rather than decreased.…”