ABSTRACT
Policymakers have for decades presented public-good and social-equity justifications for shielding farmers from market forces, but it was not until the 1980s that an environmental public-good rationale was articulated with any great persuasiveness. Mounting evidence that agricultural intensification and the production of food on an industrial scale were depleting biodiversity, eroding soils and contaminating the wider environment throughout industrialized countries brought about a profound questioning of the idea that the rural environment could safely be left to the self-regulated farmer’s care (Lobley and Potter, 2004; Fish et al, 2008). The result was a rethinking of policy models and approaches and arguably one of the largest scale policy experiments in what, in current parlance, would be called ‘payments for ecosystem services’ ever attempted in jurisdictions such as the EU or the USA (Potter, 1998). Since then we have seen the notion of agricultural stewardship established in Europe as a central policy idea, simultaneously justifying large expenditures of public money in order to support (chiefly extensive, grassland) farming as a beneficial land use in its own right but also to incentivize environmental management and a stream of public benefits on farms in a more narrowly conceived, ‘fit for purpose’ sense.
