Reality Cheques - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 72

domestic agricultural and rural sectors. Increasingly, payments are being
shifted away from being production linked, such as through price support
or direct payments, to being re-targeted to support sustainable practices.
Generally, though, only small amounts of total budgets have been put
aside for environmental improvements though such policies as the US
Conservation Reserve Programme, the European Union's agri-environ-
mental and rural development programmes, and the Australian Landcare
programme. Many now believe that all public support for farming should
be entirely linked to the provision of public environmental and social
goods.
The Radical Challenge of Integration
The substantial external costs of modern agriculture, and the known
external benefits of sustainable agricultural systems, pose great challenges
for policy-makers. A range of policy reforms could do much to internalize
some of these costs and benefits in prices. In practice, since no single
solution is likely to suffice, the key issue rests on how policy-makers
choose an appropriate mix of solutions, how these are integrated, and how
farmers, consumers and other stakeholders are involved in the process of
reform itself. Attention will therefore need to be paid to the social and
institutional processes that encourage farmers to work and learn together,
and result in integrated cross-sectoral partnerships. Policy integration is
vital; yet most policies seeking to link agriculture with more environ-
mentally sensitive management are still highly fragmented.
The problem is that environmental policies have tended only to 'green'
the edges of farming. Non-crop habitats have been improved, as have some
hedgerows, woodlands and wetlands. But the food in modern farming is
still largely produced in the conventional manner. The challenge is to find
ways of substantially greening the middle of farming - in the field rather
than around the edges. A thriving and sustainable agricultural sector
requires both integrated action by farmers and communities, and inte-
grated action by policy-makers and planners. This implies horizontal
integration with better linkages between sectors, and vertical integration
with better linkages from the micro to macro level. Most policy initiatives
are still piecemeal, affecting only a small part of an individual farmer's
practices, and therefore not necessarily leading to substantial shifts towards
sustainability.
The 1990s saw considerable global progress towards recognizing the
need for policies to support sustainable agriculture. In a few countries,
this has been translated into supportive and integrated policy frameworks.