The rise of illicit rural enterprise within the farming industry

Abstract

In this viewpoint article we seek to make the farming community aware of the increasing presence of organised criminals and crime within the farming community. In the past decade there has been a discernible rise in the level of organized criminality in rural areas especially in relation to farm crime across Britain and Europe. This has been reported in the media in many European States and is exacerbated by the financial crisis and by a lack of cooperation between member states and agencies.

The Reality of Rural Crime: The unintended consequences of rural policy in the co-production of badger persecution and the illegal taking of deer

“…An anomalous configuration of crime and context is elucidated in the article with a comprehensive theorization that foregrounds the precise interaction between structure and agency, thus directly emphasizing the impacts of political policy upon actors and locales (Archer 1995;Elder-Vass 2010). The theorization complements existing literature of illicit rural endeavours and advances them by incorporating remote, distal causal conditions with an account that is facilitated by a realist social relations theory of crime (Edwards and Levi 2008;McElwee et al 2011;Smith et al 2013;Edwards 2016). As such, it is contended that the crimes of the illegal taking of deer and the persecution of badgers for financial gain are the unintended consequences of the following pieces of rural policy: the Hunting Act 2004, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Natural England 'badger cull' policy and the European food law Regulation EC 178/2002.…”

The Long Goodbye: A Note on the Closure of Rural Police-Stations and the Decline of Rural Policing in Britain

“…As a result, the rural bobby is now very much a part of the rural idyll (Mingay, 1989). During the last decade, various scholars 2 have warned against the related closure of rural police stations and the demise of the country bobby on efficiency and effectiveness grounds (including Neyroud, 2001;McLaughlin, 2004;McLaughlin, 2008;Smith, 2009;Mawby & Yarwood, 2010;Smith, Laing & McElwee, 2013). In this note we review the literature and provide some basic supporting empirical evidence to highlight this very important, slightly controversial and very topical subject.…”

“…Smith (2010), in a case study set in a Scottish context, drew attention to the inexorable closure of rural police stations, along with the demise of the rural bobby and the deskilling of the rural policing function. Smith, Laing & McElwee (2013) discussed the effect of the closure of rural police stations in the UK on the rise of rural crime concluding that the closures were but one part of the wider picture of the changing landscape on rural crime in the UK and that whilst there is clearly a need to reduce to fiscal costs of policing, this has to be balanced against the needs of the individual communities because withdrawing services without putting in place a workable strategic plan, is not a sensible course of action.…”

“…To correct this, there needs to be a planned and implemented increase in the number of innovative policing practices (see Smith, Laing and McElwee, 2013, for a discussion on the role of Parish Constables, Rural…”

The Place of Rural in a Southern Criminology

“…Within these, depending on the commodity and the nature of the distribution systems, criminological issues of food fraud, theft and food security more generally can be considered based on variations in food production regions in the global South. Gerard McElwee, Rob Smith and associates (Smith 2013;Smith, Laing and McElwee 2013;Smith and McElwee 2016) pioneered this approach by taking a business management viewpoint to the subject matter, applying the concept of 'pluriactivities'; that is, the idea that a farm operation (and other rural enterprises) of any size and type is an on-going business that seeks to make a profit, and may do so by diversifying beyond traditional or exclusively food-producing activities, some of which may be used simultaneously for both legal and illegal activities. This straightforward and eminently common sense assumption dispels the ideal that farmers are always 'yeoman'-like caretakers of the land (Cheshire, Meurk and Woods 2013;Stenholm and Kytti 2014).…”