ABSTRACT
Eight years after the designation of the first Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs) in the U.K. it is safe to assume that there are now more farmers involved in countryside management than ever before. The Ministry of Agriculture (MAFF) in England and agriculture departments in Scotland and Wales, in declaring the ESA programme their ‘core land management schemes for the British Countryside’ (MAFF, 1993, p. 1), have steadily expanded its coverage so that by 1993 some 10% of England, 25% of Wales and 19% of Scotland had been designated, qualifying several thousands of farmers for the 5 year management agreements that are its defining feature. Sister schemes such as the Countryside Commission’s Countryside Stewardship Scheme (CSS) and the Countryside Council for Wales’s (CCW) Tir-Cymen Scheme, extend other types of conservation contracts to many more eligible farmers and a raft of additional schemes is soon to be on offer under the recently agreed agri-
environmental policy (AEP) which will pay farmers to recreate wildlife habitat, reduce overstocking and input use and, if they have land under an ESA agreement, to open it up to greater public access (M AFF, 1993). Farmers have responded with alacrity, enrolling 513,000 ha of land with ESA agreements on over 3000 farms by 1993 (MAFF, 1994). The advent of A EP, it is generally agreed, has greatly extended the size of the total ‘conservation estate’ in the U .K ., bringing over 500,000 ha into management agreements of one sort or another by 1993; this compares with the 1.7 million ha designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest and enrolled in management agreements by that date (English Nature, 1994).
