Agricultural multifunctionality, environmental sustainability and the WTO: Resistance or...

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Geoforum 38 (2007) 1290–1303

Agricultural multifunctionality, environmental sustainabilityand the WTO: Resistance or accommodation to the neoliberal

project for agriculture?

Clive Potter *, Mark Tilzey

Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, RSM Building, Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom

Received 14 December 2006; received in revised form 11 April 2007

Abstract

The liberalisation of agricultural markets is one of the most contested issues in international politics. Debates surrounding it counter-pose the moral imperative to dismantle protectionist agricultural subsidies in order to combat rural poverty in the South with fears forthe livelihoods of marginal farmers and the environmental integrity of the countryside in the developed North. A largely European con-cern with defending the ‘multifunctionality’ of agriculture is dismissed by critics as a protectionist excuse for continued farm support. Inthis paper we seek to assess how far support for multifunctionality can be construed as a form of resistance to the neoliberal project foragriculture. The paper begins with an analysis of the European negotiating stance in the Doha round and the subsequent evolution ofdebates surrounding multifunctionality in an international setting. Having identified the European Union as one of the key sites of artic-ulation concerning the implications of trade liberalisation for a multifunctional agriculture, the paper goes on to argue that multifunc-tionality within the framework of European rural policy emerges as a much more elusive and susceptible concept, informed by radicallydifferent interpretations of the vulnerability of family farmers to greater market exposure and the extent to which agricultural restruc-turing should be regarded as an issue of wider public concern. This maps onto a technically complex debate about how best to procureenvironmental public goods in a period of rapid agricultural change. The paper concludes that with these differences still very much inplay, questions concerning the compatibility of multifunctionality with market liberalisation remain deeply unresolved at an importantmoment in the internationalisation of rural policy governance.� 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Neoliberalism; Multifunctionality; Environmental Sustainability; WTO

1. Introduction

In a recent paper in this journal, McCarthy and Prud-ham (2004) lament the lack of scholarly attention to theconnections between neoliberalism, environmental changeand environmental politics. The rise of neoliberalism andits establishment as the dominant state discourse of ourtimes is now increasingly widely acknowledged and under-stood (Peck, 2001, 2004; Jessop, 2002; Peck and Tickell,2002). While commentators disagree about the extent to

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doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.05.001

* Corresponding author.E-mail address: [email protected] (C. Potter).

which neoliberal discourse can yet be recognised as hege-monic (Barnett, 2005; Larner, 2003; Castree, 2006), manygeographers would appear to agree with McCarthy andPrudham that neoliberalism represents one of ‘‘the mostpowerful ideological and political project in global gover-nance to arise in the wake of Keynesianism’’ (2004, p.275), discursively coherent as a class-driven project of staterestructuring, yet highly variable and adaptable as a set ofinstructions for government. Academic interest is growingin the implications for spaces, subjects and ‘technologiesof governing’ (Higgins and Lawrence, 2005) of a set of pro-cesses that not only operate at many different scales butwhich are also now encrypted within a vast range of policy

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C. Potter, M. Tilzey / Geoforum 38 (2007) 1290–1303 1291

programmes. Interest is also growing, however, in the dis-courses and mechanisms of resistance to these processes,given the manifest failures and contradictions of a projectthat asserts the superiority of the market and an associatedprocess of commodification as organising principles for allaspects of material and social life. According to this emerg-ing research agenda, environmental protest and concernmay constitute a powerful source of local and extra-localopposition to the neoliberal project.1 Environmentalistshave questioned both the sustainability of the model ofunrestrained economic growth which neoliberals seek topromote, and their attempts to bring nature into the mar-ket by way of remedying the environmental degradationwhich results (Benton, 1996; McCarthy and Prudham,2004; Robertson, 2004). Analyses of the way in which thisresistance is organised and articulated in relation to differ-ent policy fields and jurisdictions is held to be especiallyvaluable. Grounded studies enable neoliberalism to be fullyunpacked as a contingent set of political struggles, strate-gies and techniques (Larner, 2000; Larner et al., 2006;Castree, 2006) but also reveal the contested politics ofdifferent governing strategies (Le Heron, 2006). It followsthat the most useful critical engagements with neoliberal-ism and its socio-environmental consequences tend to behistorico-geographically specific and should be framed asattempts to understand the environmental consequencesand governance implications of particular ‘neoliberalisa-tions’ in different geographical spaces and contexts.

The case of agricultural liberalisation is a particularlyinteresting one, for the debates surrounding it counter-posethe imperative to dismantle protectionist agricultural subsi-dies in the interests of combating rural poverty in the South(see, for instance, Losch, 2004), with fears for the environ-mental integrity and social sustainability of rural areas inthe developed North (McCarthy, 2005; Potter and Burney,2002; Potter and Tilzey, 2005). At the centre of this debateis the concept of agricultural multifunctionality, a term ofart which first began circulating in international circles dur-ing the latter stages of the Uruguay trade negotiations(Hollander, 2004; Potter and Burney, 2004; Wilson, 2007)when it was used by the European Union (EU) to denotethe public good contribution of (a necessarily protected)agriculture to the rural economy and environment along-side the production of food (CEC, 1998). Dismissed by crit-ics as an exceptionalist excuse for continued agriculturalprotectionism, multifunctionality has nevertheless also res-onated with developing countries, where it has been takenup by advocates of food security as a vital ‘non-trade con-cern’ within the WTO process (Losch, 2004). As Hollander(2004) points out, multifunctionality has come for some todefine a discourse of resistance to unfettered trade liberal-isation and an important reference point for the formula-

1 Though as McCarthy and Prudham also acknowledge, environmentalaction equally may be integrated into the neoliberal ‘norm complex’ (seeBernstein, 2002) through the use of market-based instruments as elementsof an emerging neoliberal mode of regulation.

tion of more sustainable alternatives. The relationshipbetween these rural environmentalist and internationaldevelopment agendas is complex and possibly even contra-dictory, however, and the convening in 2000 of a newround of trade negotiations charged with furthering theDoha Development Agenda (DDA) saw a struggle todefine different versions of multifunctionality and to gainWTO recognition for these in relation to internationalrural governance. A proliferating academic literature hascompared definitions and attempted to prescribe how anapparently generic form of multifunctionality can best beachieved through the actions of policymakers, bureaucratsand farmers (see, for instance, Clark, 2006; Holmes, 2002;Knickel and Renting, 2000; Marsden and Sonnino, 2005;Huylenbroeck and Durrand, 2003; Wilson, 2007). We fol-low McCarthy (2005), however, in arguing that agriculturalmultifunctionality is still best apprehended as a highly pol-iticised, essentially discursive and deeply contested policyidea. Within an unfolding ‘geography of multifunctional-ity’ many different constructions are possible dependingon spatial scale and politico-institutional context. Someof these are undoubtedly part of a movement of resistanceto the neoliberalisation of agriculture but others are in theprocess of being integrated into the ‘norm complex’ thatdefines what neoliberalism is as a political project.

Our aim in this paper is to explore further the nature ofthese resistances and accommodations by presenting ananalysis of multifunctionality discourses within both globaland domestic circuits of policy debate. The paper beginswith a review of the nature of the current post-Fordist con-junction in agriculture and the origins and underlyingpolitical dynamics of agricultural liberalisation as aWTO-authored project. We then examine the origins andsubsequent political evolution of the debate surroundingmultifunctionality in this international setting and discussthe way in which European policymakers and lobbyistsof different complexions have used it to sum up a set ofarguments for income support and environmental protec-tion in those large parts of rural Europe dominated bymarginal farming. Arguably a principal sponsor of multi-functionality as a so-called ‘non-trade concern’ (NTC)within the round, the EU can be seen as one of the key sitesof articulation and contestation concerning the implica-tions of trade liberalisation for a multifunctional agricul-ture. Prichard (2006) observes that much of the potencyof neoliberalism lies in its effective projection of a set ofend states or ‘global imaginaries’, in which a dominant pol-icy future is anchored in market processes. The specificallyEuropean contention that high levels of state interventionare necessary to keep large numbers of economically mar-ginal but multifunctional farmers on the land was thereforealways going to be controversial with trading partners andthe WTO. As this paper argues, however, the constructionof the case for support is not straightforward and the over-arching European negotiating stance within the WTO ismore accurately characterised as one that seeks selectiveaccumulation opportunities through trade reform while

1292 C. Potter, M. Tilzey / Geoforum 38 (2007) 1290–1303

striving to sustain varying degrees of multifunctionality inagriculture. The essentially technocratic nature of tradepolicy discourse and its translation of the multifunctional-ity debate into a narrower concern with the degree of ‘tradedistortion’ implied by different types and levels of domesticsupport, has meant that the contradictory implications ofthis policy stance has been little explored within an incon-clusive Doha round. Multifunctionality re-emerges withinthe domestic circuit of European rural policy debate as anequally elusive concept, informed by often radically differ-ent interpretations of the vulnerability of family farmers tomarket exposure and the extent to which the long termrestructuring of agricultural should be seen as an issue ofwider public concern. This maps onto a technically com-plex debate about how best to procure public goods in arapidly evolving policy setting. There are important differ-ences in the extent to which individual member states areprepared to reform the system of agricultural subsidies inorder to minimise its trade distorting effects. The commit-ment of the French to maintaining the (highly trade distort-ing) link between subsidies and production, for instance,contrasts markedly with the apparently more WTO-com-patible stance of the British in their approach to agri-envi-ronmental governance. In the paper, we focus on these twomember states in order to illustrate in more depth some ofthe causal assumptions that are made by advocates of a‘working lands’ versus a ‘public goods’ construction ofthe agri-environmental relationship. The paper concludesby observing that these competing policy models are stillvery much in play under an increasingly bifurcated Com-mon Agricultural Policy (CAP). Meanwhile, the largerquestion of the compatibility of agricultural multifunction-ality with market liberalisation remains deeply unresolvedat an important moment in the internationalisation of ruralpolicy governance.

2. Neoliberalism, agricultural restructuring and the WTO

It is now widely acknowledged that industrialised socie-ties are passing through a long and contested transitionfrom a Fordist to a so-called post-Fordist mode of socialregulation (Higgins and Lawrence, 2005; Potter and Tilzey,2005).2 Rather than witnessing the emergence of a single,coherent post-Fordist accumulation regime, however, thepresent era of economic upheaval is characterised by a plu-rality of ‘rival concepts of restructuring’ (Ruigrok and vanTulder, 1995). Neoliberalism and its associated programmeof ‘freeing the market from the shackles of the state’appears to be dominant amongst these, but its implanta-tion is highly uneven and contested and there is a sense

2 It is interesting that this established and previously well theorisedconceptualisation is largely absent from the debate surrounding ‘post-productivism’ that has dominated the rural geography literature in recentyears (Wilson and Wilson, 2001; Evans et al., 2002; Holmes, 2002). But seePotter and Tilzey (2005) for a further critique of the limited theoreticalterms of this discussion.

in which the current conjunction is best understood asone of experimentation with, rather than confirmation of,a settled neoliberal policy programme for government(Larner, 2003). This is well exemplified in the EuropeanUnion, where, since the mid 1980s, a struggle has ensuedbetween those anxious to defend the traditions of Euro-pean social democracy and the post-war institutions ofthe labour market and the welfare state, and those whosee in the completion of the single market and the projectof European integration opportunities for increased globalcompetitiveness and the accumulation of capital. The 2003Lisbon Treaty, with its strong assertion of neoliberal valuesand its reframing of the long term political agenda for Eur-ope in avowedly economistic terms, suggests that it is theinterests of finance capital in ‘disembedding’ the marketwhich now dominate the discourse. However, this policyagenda is still subject to critique from supporters of an‘old Europe’ social democratic model and the last two dec-ades have seen a prolonged and still not fully resolved ‘kul-

turkampf’ between neoliberal advocates and defenders ofthe European public domain (Marquand, 2004).

It is a tension that is particularly acute in the agricul-tural sector, where the retreat from Fordism and attemptsto usher in a new domestic and international regulatoryregime is proving to be a politically highly charged process.Early policy designs for the CAP were informed by theinfant industry idea that the sector required protection inorder to nurture an industry of production units largeenough to be capable of competing on world markets(Coleman et al., 1996; Coleman, 1998). A common imagein the late 1960s, and one which still provides a referencepoint for policymakers in member states with strong mer-cantilist tendencies such as France, is of a lagging sectorthat must be brought up to speed with other industries.However, falling world market prices for agricultural prod-ucts during the early 1970s combined with an erosion ofemployment opportunities outside agriculture and a grow-ing appreciation of the cultural significance of the familyfarm, meant that this ‘restructuring’ rationale graduallygave way to ‘state assistance’ as a dominant policy princi-ple under the CAP (Potter and Lobley, 2004). As Reiger(2005) describes it, the CAP now effectively became an agri-cultural welfare state, in which the incomes of millions offarmers and their families would be underwritten by thestate over the long term. Specifically, high product priceswould be institutionally guaranteed and farmers shieldedagainst import competition by import levies and non-tariffbarriers. According to its original architects, the resultingsystem of price subsidies and border protection should beself-financing because the costs of price support would beoffset by the expenditure raised from levies on agriculturalimports. But they had not foreseen the technological revo-lution in farming of the 1960s and 1970s that enabled themore efficient farmers to respond to these high price guar-antees by increasing output. Once domestic outputexceeded self-sufficiency for staples such as cereals anddairy products (which it did for cereals in the mid 1970s),


policymakers found they either had to store the surplusproduction or export it onto world markets with the aidof export subsidies. As a result, the CAP was both expen-sive at home (absorbing over 70% of the EU budget by1985) and increasingly controversial abroad due to the dis-torting impact of the EU’s growing use of export subsidieson world market prices.

For some time, a well-organised and institutionallyentrenched farm lobby nonetheless succeeded in resistingfundamental reform of the CAP. Budgetary pressures,while politically significant, yielded surprisingly modestadjustments to the overall level of farm support duringthe 1980s and early 1990s such that the EU was still allocat-ing over 55% of its budget to agricultural support in 1995(CEC, 2003). Policymakers, responding to growing domes-tic criticism of the CAP but also mindful of its pariah statuswithin the WTO and amongst trading partners, had begunto move away from price support (the most trade distortingform of subsidy) with the MacSharry reforms of 1992 butwhile each successive reform package brought lower insti-tutional prices they also compensated farmers with pro-gressively increasing direct payments. Meanwhile, borderprotection measures remained largely intact and the EUcontinued to make extensive use of export subsidies. Itrequired the entry of a new grouping of policy actors tomount a serious challenge to agricultural protectionismas such. This came with the globalisation of the agro-foodsystem and the recasting of farmers (or at least the moreproductive and market competitive amongst them) as sup-pliers of raw food inputs to a much larger network of pro-cessors, distributors and retailers. Over the last twodecades, corporate agro-food capital has made indirectrather than direct inroads into the farm labour process,drawing farmers into a growing network of external rela-tions in the form of production contracts for the supplyof technological inputs to the farming process and for thesale of agri-products to food processors and retailers (LeHeron, 2003; Goodman and Watts, 1997; Murdoch et al.,2003). This has increased the distance in terms of situationand outlook between agri-business operators integratedinto these networks and those many family farmers whofind themselves on the margins (Caruny, 1989; Ingersentand Rayner, 1999). While state assistance and its associatedinfrastructure of production aids, income transfers andborder protection continues to be fiercely defended byfarmers and those who represent them, the increasinglyinfluential ‘non-productive’ fractions of capital and a grow-ing agri-business sector have begun to challenge the contin-uation of an agricultural welfare state and the widerimplications of its existence for international market accessand material sourcing. The liberalisation of agriculturaltrade not only opens up world markets to these interestsbut also guarantees global sourcing and facilitates theinternationalisation of production through joint ventures,direct investment in foreign branch plants and the creationof export platforms. As McMichael (2000), Coleman(1998) and others have observed, the resulting embrace of

a global and essentially ‘disembedded’ market model bringswith it a profound challenge to the corporatist proceduresof policy governance centred on nation states that have forso long dominated the agricultural sector. It also intro-duces new discourses into the debate that emphasisemarket competitiveness, comparative advantage andimproved market share over the traditional agriculturalpolicy referents of market protection, state assistance andexport promotion.

The convening in 2000 of a new round of WTO tradetalks centred on agriculture offered an important venue inwhich to advance a neoliberal agenda as part of a complex‘re-regulation’ of the global agri-food system (Higgins andLawrence, 2005). The previous Uruguay Round hadfocussed international attention for the first time on theneed to reform the trade-distorting agricultural policies ofindustrialised countries. In retrospect, most commentatorsagree that the Uruguay Round Agriculture Agreement(URAA) that concluded the round is mainly significantas a statement of intent and in its establishment of rulesof engagement for future negotiations. By inventing theessential nomenclature relating to ‘decoupling’ domesticsubsidies and ‘tariffication’ (see definitions below), key pro-cedures in the project of agricultural liberalisation, theURAA laid firm foundations for further negotiations inwhat was expected to be a more auspicious policy context.Specifically, signatories made binding commitments toagricultural liberalisation under three main headings:

• Reductions in ‘domestic support’. Under the URAA, sub-sides to farmers have been subject to a traffic light clas-sification according to their ‘degree of trade distortion’,ranging from subsides like price support which directlyreward output and therefore offer farmers a competitiveadvantage over producers outside the EU, throughAmber Box subsidies such as compensatory paymentsto Green Box subsidies like direct income transferschemes, rural development and environmental pay-ments deemed to be least trade distorting because theyare ‘decoupled’ from production and are calculated onthe basis of need, land area or environmental output.The ‘inbuilt agenda’ carried forward to the currentDoha round commits signatories to further restrictingthe use of the most trade distorting measures and liber-alisation has been associated with a shift towards GreenBox models of support.

• Increased market access. Import levies and quota sys-tems are regarded as major barriers to trade whichdirectly limit the ability of economically more competi-tive overseas producers to realise export potential. Tar-iffs in the EU are complex and structured in such a wayas to discriminate against imports of certain products,particularly those for which the EU is a major producerbut where internal price levels are held significantlyabove those on the world market. ‘Tariffication’ is theprocess of converting non-tariff barriers to trade suchas import quotas to more transparent and measurable


(and thus reducible) monetised tariffs. The market accesscomponent of the inbuilt agenda centres on the formulato be applied to reduce the tariffs in place here and inother industrialised countries and to the question ofhow far these should be limited in relation to certain‘sensitive products’.

• The elimination of export subsidies. These subsidies areeffectively designed to bring down the price of domesti-cally produced agricultural goods so that they becomecompetitive on the world market, thereby creatingexport opportunities for domestic producers that wouldnot otherwise exist. As we have seen above, the EU con-tinues to be a major user of export subsidies, particu-larly for dairy products and sugar. The inbuilt agendaincludes a commitment to the eventual elimination ofall such subsidies.

For European policymakers, the crystallisation of such aneoliberal programme of reform for agriculture, linked to atimetable for its achievement and overseen by the WTOand its constituent appellate body, poses a considerablesocio-political challenge. In line with Sheingate (2000), itis helpful to see this as a case of venue change which chal-lenges the traditionally tightly drawn jurisdictional bound-aries of domestic agricultural policy and brings newpressures to bear on domestic policymakers by elevatingthe issue of CAP reform to the status of an internationalpolicy problem. Anxious to reap the perceived economicrewards of further progress in other sectors covered bythe current negotiations under the so-called ‘SingaporeAgenda’3 and aware that a failure to make concessionson agriculture might jeopardise these parallel agendas,Europeans found themselves confronted with two politi-cally charged but apparently opposing arguments. On theone hand, that the CAP penalises the development of indig-enous agriculture and perpetuates rural poverty in develop-ing countries (Losch, 2004); on the other, that the CAPmust be seen as part of a strategy of sustaining a unique‘European Model of Agriculture’ (EMA) for the publicgood of European citizens. The considerable moral chal-lenge to the CAP and agricultural protectionism generallyfrom the developing south within the DDA is a complex,contradictory subject which deserves separate analysis inanother paper (but see Losch, 2004; Peine and McMichael,2005).4 What interests us here is the emerging geography ofmultifunctionality within a specifically European context

3 The Singapore Issues include a commitment to liberalise trade inservices and the investment sector, along with a review of publicprocurement and labour standards, all sectors and issues in which theEuropeans have a significant stake.

4 Many developing countries entered the Doha round highly critical ofthe URAA. They had accepted complex new disciplines on investmentmeasures and intellectual property rights in exchange for greater access toindustrialised country markets for agricultural products and textiles. Inthe event, the concessions on agricultural market access proved to belimited while the opening up of textile markets was back-loaded to the endof the implementation period.

and the extent to which the entry of biophysical nature intothis debate through appeals for continued state assistanceto farming can be construed as a form of resistance to neo-liberalisation on agri-environmental grounds. This too canbe seen as a morally charged, if in some respects politicallycompromised, movement against unfettered market rule.On one level European negotiators have deployed the con-cept of multifunctionality throughout the Doha round tomake a specific claim to be allowed to defend the qualitiesof a distinctively rural space against the forces of globalisa-tion and agricultural intensification through continuedstate intervention. As the discussion below will demon-strate, however, it is an idea that has been extensivelyappropriated and subverted by class fractional interestsin pursuit of both neoliberal and neomercantilist agendas.The result is a domestically contested multifunctionalitydiscourse that expresses many of the deeper contradictionsof the current post-Fordist conjunction and the crisis ofindustrial agriculture in an increasingly problematic binaryformulation.

3. Multifunctionality in the Doha trade round

The extent to which the Europeans would make multi-functionality a cornerstone of their initial WTO negotiat-ing stance becomes clear from early submissions made bythe EU negotiating team to the Committee on Agriculture(CEC, 1999a,b). These outline the unique qualities of theEuropean countryside as an agriculturally occupied andmanaged public space and begin to rehearse the case forcontinued high levels of subsidised agricultural activity inorder to keep it that way. In its Explanatory Memoran-dum, for instance, the EU affirms that ‘‘the fundamentaldifference between the European model and that of ourmajor competitors lies in the multifunctional nature ofEurope’s agriculture and the part it plays in the economyand environment, in society and in preserving the land-scape, whence the need to maintain farming throughoutEurope and to safeguard farmers’ incomes’’ (CEC, 1999c,para 3). This is amplified in another discussion paper ‘Agri-

culture’s contribution to rural development’ (CEC, 2000)which argues for continued support to the farm sector inorder to maintain the economic viability of rural areas,even in instances where commodity production might bemore efficient elsewhere. The exceptionalist tone of theseand other submissions provoked a critical response fromtrading partners and the acrimonious debates surroundingmultifunctionality at the Seattle Ministerial Conferencesaw the publication of critiques from the US (Bohmannet al., 1999) and the Cairns Group of agricultural exporters(ABARE, 1999). This exchange is revealing on a number oflevels: it underlines the centrality of multifunctionality as apoint of reference during the early stages of the WTO pro-cess and the degree to which a neoliberal state like Austra-lia perceived the concept as a potential protectionistbandwagon. But it also highlights fundamental differencesin the way the relationship between agri-environmental

5 The ‘Friends of Multifunctionality’, a grouping of over 40 countries,was formed following a conference on non-trade concerns in Norway, July2000.


governance and neoliberalisation is configured by three ofthe key players in the WTO process. These differences arehelpful in explaining the eventual course of multifunction-ality debates once returned to their domestic settings.

Australia, a leading member of the Cairns Group and astrong supporter of a radically decoupled form of ruralgovernance, predictably dismisses the concept of multi-functionality as a protectionist excuse for continuing withhigh levels of trade distorting domestic support. At thelevel of trade policy, multifunctionalism and the high levelsof state support the Europeans claim it requires, runsentirely counter to the strongly neoliberal thrust of Austra-lian agricultural policy since the 1980s and a long history ofagro-export dependency (Gray and Lawrence, 2001; Prich-ard and McManus, 2000; Tilzey, 2006). This is linked to anunderstanding of the relationship between agriculture andthe environment which places biodiversity concerns largelyoutside the farming system and which equates conservationwith ‘wilderness’ and agriculture with production (Figgis,2003; Williams, 2004). Far from resisting the restructuringof agriculture, successive federal governments have dis-counted the public benefits which justify maintaining a cer-tain level and extent of farming activity, intervening insteadin the accumulation process to promote the creation of a‘hyper-productivist’ industry (Dibden and Cocklin, 2005;Cocklin et al., 2006) centred on large productive units.Within this neoliberal setting, self-help initiatives such asthe Landcare programme and the National Drought Policyand a range of ‘market-orientated measures’ such as thepricing of ecosystem services (Higgins et al., 2006), attemptto address environmental problems on farmland by appeal-ing to the entrepreneurial tendencies of subjects. InitialAustralian scepticism towards multifunctionality is thuseasily explained and it would later translate in negotiatingterms into a strong insistence on the need to confine agri-environmental support strictly to the Green Box. Accord-ing to this most decoupled model of agri-environmentalgovernance, WTO members are entitled to offer farmersenvironmental subsidises but they must do so in a mannerwhich minimises their trade distorting effects by linkingpayments as directly as possible to the environmental out-puts that are required. It should not involve governmentsseeking to justify ‘spurious income support’ (ABARE,1999) to farmers on socio-cultural or environmentalgrounds.

American attitudes towards multifunctionality have fol-lowed a more tortuous path, co-evolving with domesticpolicy reforms and a growing public interest in the biodi-versity importance of ‘working lands’ and the role of farm-ers in maintaining them (Dobbs and Pretty, 2004). At thisstage, however, the US joined the Cairns Group in its crit-icism of the idea that land needs to be farmed in order tosafeguard biodiversity, landscape character and social via-bility (Bohmann et al., 1999; USDA, 1999). A traditionalunderstanding of the relationship between agriculture andthe environment as an essentially competitive one had seenland being taken out of production under successive federal

government programmes in order to address specific envi-ronmental problems such as soil erosion and diffuse pollu-tion (Batie and Horan, 2005; Potter, 1998). The bulk ofexpenditure on environmental programmes in agriculturesince their inception under the 1985 Farm Bill have thusbeen designed to create a ‘Conservation Reserve’ of farm-land set aside in order to conserve the soil or eliminatesources of diffuse pollution. It would be some time beforeUS policymakers would institute measures (such as theConservation Security Program (CSP) under the 2002Farm Act) that approximated to the European conceptof paying farmers to ‘produce’ biodiversity in any positivesense.

With the failure at Seattle to reach agreement on a nego-tiating framework, views on how to reconcile multifunc-tionality with ‘freer world trade’ appeared to divide alongtwo distinct lines: on the one hand, the view of the Europe-ans and other ‘Friends of Multifunctionality’5 that the twoare incompatible without continuing high levels of agricul-tural support, albeit delivered in more WTO-compliantways; on the other, the attitude of the Cairns Group and,to a qualified extent, the US, that payments for multifunc-tionality are liable to be trade distorting and subject to cap-ture by protectionist interests unless they are strictlydecoupled from production and linked directly to the deliv-ery of environmental and other public goods. Yet ratherthan debate these linkages by moving deeper into the con-tested territory of agricultural multifunctionality, discus-sions quickly turned to the necessity and mechanics ofreaching some sort of trade agreement. The pragmatic re-convening of agriculture negotiations in late 2000 underthe aegis of the WTO’s Special Committee on Agriculturemeant that concerns about multifunctionality were rapidlytranslated into a largely technical discussion about thedegree of trade distortion implied by different levels anddefinitions of domestic subsidy. It was left to the neoclassi-cally inclined OECD to explore the relevance of an essen-tially sanitised and decontexualised version of themultifunctionality concept to policy design (OECD, 1998,2001) The WTO ‘Special Sessions’ were mandated underArticle 20 of the URAA and re-focussed attention strictlyon the three pillars of market access, export subsidies anddomestic subsidies prescribed by the Inbuilt Agenda. Ofthese, domestic support emerged as the main potential test-ing ground for multifunctionality, with members adoptingdifferent negotiating stances regarding the manner in whichsupport should be categorised according to the URAAtraffic light system described above. As Tilzey (2006)observes, by instantiating the metric of red, amber andgreen boxes, the Agreement commits members to a set ofdisciplines which prescribe the way governments can goabout procuring public goods through subsidies to farmersand land managers. While EU policymakers would


continue domestically to make a case for baseline agricul-tural support in order to maintain agricultural activity inrural space (see, for instance, CEC, 2000, 2003), the effectat this stage in the process was to narrow trade policy dis-course into an essentially classificatory discussion centredon the traffic light system itself. Direct discussion of thelegitimacy of multifunctionality as a policy concept largelydisappears from the WTO process at this point and itsplace is taken by a long series of engagements about thenature and extent of domestic subsidy that can be permit-ted within WTO disciplines. One is reminded of Peck’s(2001) comment that such carefully constructed closuresin debate are indicative of the hegemony of neoliberal dis-course, participants in forums like the WTO finding them-selves locked into often sterile exchanges for which the keyparameters are given and beyond dispute.

Subsequent agriculture negotiations thus revolvedaround the way in which current subsidy levels are mea-sured, the base periods chosen, the starting conditions thatapply to individual countries in terms of allowable supportand hence the allocation of levels of permitted supportunder potential agreements. Although the literature track-ing these discussions and offering analyses of the complexseries of offers and counter-offers which have followed isextensive (see, for example, Aggarwal, 2005; Blandford,2005; Anania and Bureau, 2005; Evenett, 2006; Swinbank,2004), the suspension of the Doha round negotiations inJuly 2006 means that many of the key ‘modalities’ remainunresolved. The essentially taxonomic debate precedingthis stalemate, and the box-shifting tactics to which it gaverise, is not only one which bestowed an advantage ondeveloped countries by dint of their greater budgetaryresources (Peine and McMichael, 2005). It also margina-lised multifunctionality as a non-trade concern and gavegreater considerable policy discretion to trade negotiatorsactually present in Geneva to broker a deal. Significantlyfor the Europeans, this brought the Commission’s moreneoliberally inclined Trade Directorate General (Trade-DG) to the forefront of the policy process, opening up agap between the domestic and international presentationof CAP reform and arguably leading to a partial, if welldisguised, retreat from multifunctional principles withinthe WTO process.

The Commission’s DG-Agriculture approached the sub-sequent Doha Round (launched at the Fourth WTO Min-isterial in Qatar in January 2001) with a substantial tacticalinterest in defending the direct producer aids that by thistime made up a significant proportion of the transfers madeto European farmers, together with a concern to make lim-ited concessions on the other two ‘pillars’ of market accessand export subsidies6. Exploiting a comparatively generousnegotiating mandate given to them by the Council of Min-isters, the Trade DG, however, was gradually able to

6 According to Swinbank (2004), the EU had by this time become thedominant user of the blue box, accounting for 95% of all blue boxexpenditure notified to the WTO for the years 1996–1998.

develop a negotiating stance that counterbalanced continu-ation of these so-called ‘Blue Box’ subsidies with a moreliberal posture on export subsidies and market access. Inthis broad strategy they were joined by the US, now anx-ious to find a WTO-compatible home for its controversialcounter-cyclical payments in the wake of the 2002 FarmSecurity and Rural Improvement (FSRI) Act. In their jointdeclaration of August 2003, the US and the EU attemptedto break the deadlock that had followed publication of theso-called Harbinson draft modalities paper (WTO, 2002a)by proposing a modified Blue Box and a broadly conceivedGreen Box alongside some improved market access fordeveloping countries and reductions in the use of exportsubsidies (WTO, 2002b). Significantly, European negotia-tors move away from a multifunctionality rationale fordomestic support at this stage, their Specific Drafting Input

of 2003 (WTO, 2003c) on non-trade issues making no ref-erence to the term beyond a reference to the need to accom-modate environmental and rural development concernswithin an agreement (Swinbank, 2004). In the event, thelimited nature of the concessions on market access,together with what were perceived by others to be largelycosmetic proposals for reducing domestic support throughbox-shifting, galvanised the opposition and led to the for-mation of the G20 alliance of developing countries andagricultural exporters in the run-up to the Cancun Ministe-rial Conference of September 2003.

Although the EU continued to argue that agriculturalsupport under the Blue Box is necessary to ensure the con-tinued viability of farming in marginal areas (WTO, 2002),it also moved to adopt a noticeably more liberal stancewith respect to the overall conduct of the negotiations. Inpart this was made possible by a co-evolution of domesticpolicy reform with an unfolding WTO agenda. The rolling-out of the Single Payment Scheme (SPS) under the 2003mid-term review of the CAP, a new type of subsidy offeredto farmers on the basis of area farmed rather than quanti-ties of commodities produced, enabled European negotia-tors to argue that a large proportion of its domesticsupport was now decoupled and thus Green-Box compati-ble. By reducing the gap between domestic support pricesand tariff-import prices for agricultural products such assugar and milk, the Fischer reforms also enabled the EUto adopt a more concessionary negotiating stance on mar-ket access (Swinbank, 2004). Later in the round Europeannegotiators would set the scene for an elimination of allexport subsidies by offering to end its own use of thesemeasures within the context of an overall deal (Lamy andFischler, 2004, quoted in Swinbank, 2004). As has beenobserved elsewhere (Potter and Tilzey, 2005; Tilzey andPotter, 2006), the underlying strategy of the Trade DGwithin the overall context of the talks is best characterisedas one of qualified neoliberalism, in which the neoliberalpriorities of new trade actors representing agro-food pro-cessors, distributors and retailers have gradually gainedin influence compared to the more traditional, protectionistinterests of a middle/small farm constituency and a polity


with residual social democratic instincts. The need for anefficient, market-driven European agricultural industry ina position to be able to ‘compete on world markets’ is adominant theme in papers tabled in the period betweenthe Cancun Ministerial of September 2003 and publicationof the draft Framework Agreement in August 2004 (WTO,2002a,b, 2003). In line with Coleman’s observation thatpolicymakers since the mid 1980s have adjusted the policyreference system to make room for two agricultures, oneorientated towards world markets, the other constructedas ‘agriculture in a region’, the need to increase competi-tiveness is presented here alongside the continuation ofsome sort of ‘social agriculture’, sustained through a com-bination of income diversification, policy support and thecapture of growing consumer demand for quality products.This dualistic conception is reflected domestically in thebifurcation of the CAP into a commodity orientated (butincreasingly decoupled) ‘Pillar One’ and encompassingmarket regulation and producer aids and a rural develop-ment orientated ‘Pillar Two’, less farmer-centred and moreconcerned with safeguarding the public goods with whichagriculture is associated (see further discussion below).Internationally it has enabled trade ministers to play amulti-level game by adopting a posture that is neoliberalin its commitment to eliminating export subsidies anddecoupling domestic subsidies in international circles whileat the same time vocal in its defence of farming incomesand the multifunctionality of the countryside at home.

Such a complex, and in many ways contradictory, policyconjunction has nevertheless been difficult to sustain polit-ically, and pressure grew within the Council of Ministers inthe wake of the Framework Agreement to restrain the neo-liberal thrust of the Trade Directorate’s negotiating man-date (Evenett, 2006). Member states such as France,Ireland, Spain and Italy, chiefly anxious about the implica-tions of the May 2004 offer for community preference,argued that the 2003 reforms represented the limits of theEU’s negotiating mandate and criticised the trade director-ate for overplaying its hand on export subsidies and marketaccess (Agra-Europe, 2006). In the event, the ‘modalities’contained in the July 2004 Framework Agreement, linkingcomplex proposals for a tiered system of tariff reductions toproduct-specific cuts in domestic support, proved contro-versial amongst WTO members generally and negotiationsbegan to stall early in 2006. A shift in the US negotiatingstance in advance of congressional elections in November2006 led to a refusal to concede further reductions in farmsubsidies without improved access to the markets of emerg-ing economies such as India and Brazil (Agra-Europe,2006). This, combined with a number of other negotiatingtechnicalities, meant that the Doha process was suspendedin July 2006. Commentators are currently assessing theimplications of the suspension for the long- term projectof agricultural neoliberalisation but it seems unlikely thatdomestic policy debate about agricultural restructuringand the implications for multifunctionality is at an end.For the Europeans particularly, the Doha suspension

leaves in its wake a number of questions concerning thecompatibility of neoliberalism with a multifunctional agri-culture. The contradictory nature of the European negoti-ating strategy and its suggestion of a bifurcated rather thana multifunctional agriculture implies an internally muchmore contested narrative of multifunctionality and onethat has been over-written to a significant extent by neo-mercantilist and neoliberal concerns (see below). It is tothis spatially specific debate about the contribution of agri-culture to the production of public goods and the nature oflinkages between agricultural livelihoods, environmentalsustainability and the changing social relations of agricul-ture that we now turn.

4. Competing constructions of multifunctionality within theEU

The idea that Europe’s farmers deserve special treatmentbecause they are farmers was never likely to offer a plausi-ble long-term rationale for state support. Policymakershave thus been presented with public good and socialequity justifications for shielding farmers from world mar-ket forces and offering them income support from the ear-liest days of European agricultural policy. Unlike otherbranches of social policy in liberal democracies, which typ-ically observe the principle of distribution according toindividual need legitimated by facts relating to individualsor households, the CAP has long been guided by a princi-ple of distribution according to collective merit, legitimatedby (more or less valid) assumptions about the agriculturalindustry as a whole (Potter, 1998; Potter and Lobley,2004). One of the deepest-sunk of these, and an importantelement in the later promotion of a ‘European Model ofAgriculture’ within the WTO, is the idea that farming asan activity is actually constitutive of rural space and soci-ety. Farmers deserve state assistance not only because theirincomes tend to be lower and more volatile than those ofother groups in society but also because, without them,the communities and environmental endowments of ruralspace would no longer be sustainable or indeed particularlymeaningful in wider societal-cultural terms. As Gray (2000)observes, the morally-loaded idea that farming carried outby family production units is the condition for the kinds oflandscape and rural social life valued by society as a wholehas long been codified in the policies and procedures of theCAP and its protectionist use of price guarantees and pro-duction aids. In Stogstad’s (1998) terms, this goes to definea set of policy ideas which can be broadly characterised asa paradigm of state assistance, anchored in an analysiswhich says that farmers deserve government supportbecause of their role as foundational members of rural soci-ety and (a more recent emphasis, this) as managers of ruralland and landscapes. Translated into policy, this informsdecisions such as that taken in the mid 1970s to offer directpayments to farmers in Less Favoured Areas in order toprevent the social desertion of specifically marginal areasand maintain a farming way of life. The Less Favoured


Areas Directive of 1975, for instance, contends that ‘‘agri-culture is necessary to protect the countryside, (particu-larly) where the maintenance of a minimum populationor the conservation of the countryside is not assured’’(CEC, 1975, p. 3). The significance of the resulting systemof income support to LFAs, together with various otherforms of state assistance delivered through other regionalinitiatives such as the Integrated Mediterranean Pro-grammes of the 1980s, was that it established a territorialdimension to agricultural support and promoted the ideathat agriculture ‘in a region’ had a socio-cultural functionbeyond the production of food.

According to an argument which now began to link thecase for continued state assistance under the CAP to theneed to sustain the broad multifunctionality of agriculturein rural regions, the vulnerability of large numbers of eco-nomically marginal farmers to market exposure risksbringing about the abandonment of land and the ‘desertifi-cation’ of remote rural areas unless government continuesto underwrite agricultural incomes through state support.With a growing sense of economic differentiation betweenfarming in remoter rural regions and that practicised inthe more competitive arable heartland areas of Europe,the European Commission sought in its influential 1988paper The Future of Rural Society (CEC, 1988) to clarifythe rationale for state assistance to marginal farmers bylinking their vulnerability to market processes with theneed to underwrite their role as stewards of the country-side. Gray’s (2000) interpretation of Rural Society is thatit appears to appropriate the marginalisation of agriculturein order to redefine the relationship between an agriculturebased on family production units and the integrity of ruralspace. Hence the recognition that a large proportion ofEurope’s high nature value landscapes, particularly inMediterranean member states and in new member stateslike Romania and Poland, are agro-pastoral systems witha long history. If farming is abandoned here or stockingrates drop so low that pasture is replaced by spontaneousscrub regeneration, changes in flora and fauna take place,often with the loss of many valued and characteristic spe-cies (Andersen, 2004). By invoking the vulnerability offamily farmers to market forces and linking this to a sce-nario in which large parts of rural Europe would be aban-doned and degraded, farmer groups were able to exploitthis linkage for rent-seeking advantage. In this they wereassisted by the EU’s official information systems with theirrestricted focus on income from farming rather than thealternative measures of household income which criticsargued pointed to a much more robust and adaptablefarming sector (Blandford, 2000). The resulting policy posi-tion is classically stated in the Commission’s 1992 conten-tion that ‘‘sufficient numbers of farmers must be kept onthe land. There is no other way to preserve the naturalenvironment, traditional landscapes and a model of agri-culture based on the family farm as favoured by societygenerally’’ (CEC, 1992, p. 9–10). But it finds strongestexpression in particular member states like Germany,

where there has been a long-standing tradition of dissentfrom the notion that agricultural policy is about buildinga ‘competitive’ agriculture (Coleman, 1998; Wilson andWilson, 2001) and where successive Lander have intro-duced a number of programmes designed to sustain a largenumber of small farms in disadvantaged areas.

To many critics, however, it is the very breadth of thisconstruction of multifunctionality, and the highly agro-centric notions of rural society which underpin it, thatmake it so susceptible to protectionist capture. This isexemplified in France, where there is a problematic rela-tionship between the broad interpretation of multifunction-ality which the French have been so influential insponsoring at the level of the EU, and the entrenched neo-mercantilism which shapes so much of the French domesticapproach to agricultural policy governance (Coleman andChaisson, 2002). Unlike their German counterparts, withtheir more straightforward commitment to a ‘social agri-culture’ (Wilson and Wilson, 2001), or the much moreexplicitly neoliberal stance of the British (see below),French agriculture policymakers have consistently linkedthe realisation of that country’s considerable vocationexportatrice with commodity support and structural mod-ernisation of the sector and there has been a long-estab-lished tension between this policy emphasis and thecommitment to defending the territorial integrity of Frenchrural space. Buller (2004, p. 102) contends that the Frenchare unique ‘‘in being able to nurture across the entirenational space these twin models of farming, the one de-territorialised and industrialised, the other locally andsocially embedded’’. The suspicion of many, including theCoordination Paysanne Europenee (CPE) is that this separa-tion of purpose and intent is not always so clear cut, theaggressive promotion of modernisation and export poten-tial logically being one that erodes the territorial distinc-tiveness of the countryside and its environmental integrity(see, for instance, Jadot, 2000). For Delorme (1994), theagonised debate in France surrounding the first wave ofCAP reforms of the early 1990s is best understood as anideological battle between liberals and supporters of ‘sup-ply management’, a still powerful grouping of dairy andlivestock producers represented by the agricultural unionFNSEA and committed to the productivist notion thatcommodity support is necessary in order to keep agricul-tural lands occupied. This fundamentalist understandingof the farmer’s vocation continues to be influential at Euro-pean level within the Council of Ministers, where the Com-

ite des Organisations Professionalles Agricoles (COPA)exerts influence by appealing to the productivist policyinstincts of member states, particularly in southern Europe,but also now in the new member states of Central and East-ern Europe. In the battle to retain agricultural subsidieslinked to production along with continued export subsidi-sation and some form of Community preference, the mul-tifunctionality debate offered these interests a usefuljustificatory narrative and they have exploited it to the full.Indeed, far from supporting the multifunctionality agenda


that Agriculture Commissioner Fischler put forward in hisdraft Agenda 2000 proposals of 1999, COPA and its alliesraised the spectre of widespread land abandonment toargue against any further decoupling of support (Swinbankand Daugbjerg, 2006). Some commentators see the politi-cally compromised implementation of the supposedlymultifunctional SPS that eventually emerged (for instance,the ‘discretion’ given to member states to calculate the SPSon the basis of historic entitlements to individuals ratherthrough an average payment offered to all farmers in aregion) as evidence of the way in which agendas are beingconflated in order to preserve traditional policy entitle-ments in a more WTO-compatible form. The non-targetednature of these payments, their positioning under PillarOne rather than Pillar Two and the manner of their subse-quent presentation in the WTO talks (see above) suggests arather more ambiguous policy rationale which continues toelicit criticism from trading partners.

An alternative, much more decoupled model of multi-functionality predicated on a different understanding ofthe adaptability of farmers and the nature of the agri-envi-ronmental relationship, has also been gaining groundwithin the EU in recent years. This too is multi-layered asa policy idea and while its basic impulse is progressive, itis similarly vulnerable to appropriation – this time fromneoliberal interests anxious to accommodate public goodconcerns to market rule. The starting point is not neoliber-alisation as such, however, but a radically different con-struction of the economic vulnerability of farmingfamilies and an interest in locating the concept much morecentrally in an evolving ‘public goods economy’ (Buller,2004) of European rural space. If it is true that officialinformation systems such as the Farm Structures Surveyand the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN)emphasise the economic fragility of the welfare sector byrendering them as monoactive farm businesses rather thanpluriactive farm households (Potter and Lobley, 2004),then a central contention of those advocating a rural devel-opment agenda for the CAP is that other representationsare possible which give greater emphasis to the adaptabilityof farming families to policy change. Evidence fromresearch of the pluriactive nature of many farm householdsand their apparent reluctance to leave agriculture duringthe 1980s and 1990s ran counter to a policy narrative whichhas been predicting the imminent demise of the family farmfor the last 40 years. Work conducted by rural geographersand rural sociologists had established by the late 1980s theextent of multiple-job holding in agriculture and the signif-icance of pluriactivity as a permanent and defining featureof the rural economy (see, for instance, Gasson et al., 1988;Evans and Ilbery, 1993; Fuller, 1983). Estimates based onofficial statistics suggested that agriculture contributedbetween half to two thirds of the total income of agricul-tural households, with significant proportions in memberstates such as Germany, Finland and Sweden extractingless than half of their total incomes from farming (Hill,1999). The policy significance of work such as that con-

ducted by the Arkelton Trust in the early 1990s (MacKin-non et al., 1991), for instance, was that by documenting theextent of off-farm employment, it indicated the degree towhich the local rural economy provides the basis for thesupport of the agricultural sector rather than the otherway round. The alternative rural development agendawhich emerged following the reform of the StructuralFunds and the Cork Declaration of 1989 (CEC, 1988), thusargued for the creation of a rural development Pillar Twoof policy measures under the CAP designed to promotethe sustainable economic development of rural areas –but in a manner which recognises farmers as only oneamongst several client groups for state support. An influen-tial expert group which reported to the European Commis-sion (Buckwell, 1997), goes on to argue that a sustainablerural policy would thus be one which offers decoupled sub-sidies only to those land managers willing and able to pro-duce environmental goods for public benefit.

According to this opposing public goods policy model,the role of government is therefore not to support agricul-ture per se but rather to contract farmers and other landmanagers directly to supply the environmental goods andservices that markets, if left to their own devices, will failto deliver. Far from being produced jointly with farming,stocks and flows of environmental goods can be separatelyidentified and paid for through schemes which reward out-comes in a cost-effective manner. Meanwhile, rural devel-opment under Pillar Two should be fostered not throughincome supports to farmers but indirectly via structuralmeasures conceived at a regional level that create newsources of employment, augment social capital and exploitgrowing consumer preference for quality foods. The UKfirst began to assemble the case for this much more decou-pled approach in the mid 1990s when, frustrated at theslow pace of CAP reform and sensitive to the longer- termimplications of the URAA, its agriculture departmentcounterpoised a critique of the high budgetary cost andenvironmental destructiveness of the CAP with ‘‘a visionof a competitive, market led and sustainable EU agricul-ture’’ (MAFF, 1995). According to a more recent elabora-tion of this qualified neoliberal policy position in a paperjointly prepared by the UK Treasury and the Departmentof the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (HM Trea-sury and Defra, 2005), the international trade repercus-sions of continued protectionism make such a radicalreform now inevitable. In this paper the need to accept fur-ther restructuring of the farm sector is linked to an optimis-tic view of the essential adaptability of rural economies andfarmers and the benefits to the environment of reduced lev-els of farm support. The paper advocates a green box-com-patible approach to agri-environmental policy that seeks tokeep spillovers into production to an absolute minimum.The model is largely in step with the position taken on mul-tifunctionality by many of the EU’s trading partners and isheavily influenced by the OECD model (OECD, 2001).Most importantly, the paper challenges one of the coreassumptions of state assistance when it argues that ‘‘it


(should) not be an objective of the new CAP to maintainexisting or specific levels or patterns of produc-tion . . . Rather, production should be allowed to find amore sustainable level, reflecting natural advantages, com-petitive advantages and rational trading relationships in amore open market’’ (p. 15).

Such a robust attitude towards farm restructuring con-tinues to be controversial within the Agriculture Council(Agra-Europe, 2005). The UK may have succeeded in repo-sitioning itself politically as one of the main champions of adecoupled CAP (Ward and Lowe, 2004), but together withThe Netherlands and Denmark, it continues to occupy aminority position on the larger question of how far tomove away from a farm-centred rural policy by cuttingagricultural support. Presented with a politically favour-able conjunction of budgetary pressures and internationaltrade politics during its Presidency of the EU in 2005, forinstance, the UK failed to extract more than the minor con-cession that the CAP budget will again be reviewed in 2009(Evenett, 2006). The increased discretion granted to mem-ber states following Agenda 2000 has enabled the UK toexperiment with what Lowe et al. (2002) regard as a decou-pled ‘countryside’ agenda for the CAP, yet the expectedtransfer of funds out of Pillar One and into Pillar Twooverall has been slow and it has proved difficult to installrural development measures which succeed in shifting thefocus away from the farm. As we have seen above, this islargely explained by the defensive politics of the CAPand an entrenched form of neomercantilism that hasenabled traditional agricultural interests to successfullydefend their policy entitlements. However, it also reflectsa lack of agreement concerning the larger question ofhow far the defence of a multifunctional rural space canever be reconciled with the liberalisation of agriculturalmarkets. This is now a key dynamic of the European ruralpolicy debate, with supporters of the broad model of mul-tifunctionality outlined previously re-entering the debate toemphasise the social and environmental costs of wide-spread agricultural restructuring (see, for instance, CPE,2001). Far from showing the market adaptability of farm-ers and rural economies, they are beginning to offer aninterpretation of the persistence of family farmers andincreasing levels of pluriactivity as evidence of a strategyof resistance to neoliberalism. Farmers are staying on theland in much larger numbers than many commentatorsexpected, not because of their entrepreneurial flair inexploiting new markets and ‘turning to quality’ but by cut-ting back on consumption, lowering capital expenditureand substituting family for bought-in labour. The long-term effect may be rising levels of farm poverty, self-exploi-tation and personal stress (Potter and Lobley, 2004).

European environmentalists, meanwhile, face a dilemmain deciding how far to give the decoupled model their fullsupport. The idea that subsidies to farmers should be con-ceived in more or less exclusively public good terms is onethat environmental groups have campaigned for over thelast twenty years (Potter, 1998; Wilson, 2007). Yet there

is considerable uncertainty regarding the restructuring pro-cess that would accompany such a radical policy shift and alack of consensus concerning the types of landscape andbiodiversity that would be sustainable in a more neoliberalsetting. If struggles over multifunctionality are often aboutthe revaluation of rural natures in the context of trade lib-eralisation (McCarthy (2005), then the issue at stake inEurope is how far it will be possible to perpetuate workinglandscapes under world market conditions. Although inter-est is growing in the scope for ‘re-wilding’ upland land-scapes in the wake of a contraction of farming activity inplaces like the UK (Taylor, 2005) and the Netherlands(Vera, 2000), the idea that there may be other ways ofworking with nature than through farming has been slowto appear in European public debate. Illustrating thestrong geographical dimension of this debate, the idea ofagricultural retreat re-ignites fears of abandonment and aloss of knowledge communities that many stakeholders insouthern member states particularly find difficult to squarewith the idea of agricultural sustainability (Fish et al.,2006). In the meantime, experience with the EU’s agri-envi-ronmental programmes rolled out under the Rural Devel-opment Regulation demonstrates the difficulty ofdesigning measures that are fit for purpose and truly pro-duction neutral in policy design terms (see, for instance,Dobbs and Pretty, 2004; Hodge, 2000).

5. Conclusions

Despite their best efforts to close down the multifunc-tionality question by translating it into the abstract, decon-textualised realm of the WTO, supporters of agriculturaltrade liberalisation appear to have precipitated an interna-tional debate that shows few signs of being resolved. Mul-tifunctionality is interesting because, despite its ratherjargonised feel as a term of art, it has come to symbolisefor many opponents of neoliberalisation the defining attri-bute that a sustainable agriculture should possess. Ourargument in this paper, however, is that as a policy ideait is subject to widely varying interpretation, social con-struction and interest appropriation. Moreover, while mul-tifunctionality is heavily implicated in global, national andregional circuits of debate, the manner in which it is definedand contested at these different scales is far from consistent.The global debate about multifunctionality and its degreeof compatibility with trade liberalisation is centred on theWTO. It emerges from our analysis of multifunctionalitywithin the Doha round as a somewhat truncated affair.Broad and polarising statements of intent at the onset ofthe Doha trade round have been succeeded by a highlytechnical series of exchanges about the degree of trade dis-tortion associated with subsidy payments to farmers. Wehave interpreted this narrowing of the discourse as evi-dence of the hegemony of neoliberal ideas within trade pol-icy circles and have suggested that the sanitised andradically decontextualised version of multifunctionalitythat emerges is still contested because it evades many of


the deeper concerns at the heart of the multifunctionalitydebate. At root, these concern the relationship society seeksto construct between agriculture, food and the rural envi-ronment, whether on the basis of joint production or in amore decoupled form.

Within the EU, a complex and multi-layered multifunc-tionality discourse has emerged which concerns itself with ageographically specific set of linkages between neoliberal-ism, restructuring and environmental sustainability inEuropean rural space. International trading partners havefound it easy to dismiss the obvious exceptionalism of the‘European Model of Agriculture’ but we have argued thatat one level it expresses a genuine form of resistance to neo-liberalisation which seeks to defend a ‘working lands’understanding of the countryside conditioned by relationsof joint production between farming, biodiversity and ruralcommunities. This broad understanding of multifunction-ality is vulnerable to capture, however, by a still powerfulfarm lobby that has been able to use the idea to justifythe introduction of politically ambiguous (and internation-ally controversial) measures such as the SPS under recentreforms to the CAP. In response, a more decoupled andWTO-convergent model of multifunctionality has emerged,predicated on a very different construction of the agri-envi-ronmental relationship and the vulnerability of farmers tomarket rule. While this appears to place the provision ofpublic goods at the core of the justification for continuinggovernment support to farmers, we have suggested that itsessentially market relational understanding of environmen-tal provision and rural development implies a policy strat-egy which is more accommodative of, than resistant to, theneoliberal project. Indeed, we have theorised this accom-modatory response in this paper as one in which the statein jurisdictions like the UK may be actively seeking to sup-port adaptation to neoliberalism through a more ‘decou-pled’ multifunctionality agenda. Some commentators willbe anxious at this point to distinguish between a ‘post-pro-ductivist’ approach which relegates farmers merely to therole of environmental managers in a ‘consumption coun-tryside’ and a more thoroughgoing reconnection of farmersto new markets for quality products and alternative net-works under a radical new paradigm of rural development(see, for instance, Marsden, 1998; Marsden and Sonnino,2005). For us, the commodity fetishism of the ‘alternativeagricultural food networks’ literature and its constructionof farmers as entrepreneurial subjects, suggests an at bestambiguous relationship between this ‘alternative paradigm’and the neoliberal project. It is a conjunction that deservesfurther critical exploration than is possible here but seeopening salvos in the debate from Goodman (2004) andWinter (2003) concerning the overall policy significance,questionable alterity and long term sustainability of thequality turn.

In the meantime, the current European policy scene isone in which competing constructions of multifunctionalityare still in play. Faced with contradictory domestic andinternational policy pressures, policymakers appear to be

attempting to reconcile these by accepting a de facto segre-gation of rural space into super-productivist and multi-functional policy domains. The multi-level game playedby trade negotiators in the WTO, together with the distinc-tion increasingly drawn in a bifurcated CAP between amarket-led and a state-supported realm under Pillars Oneand Two, suggests a stance of qualified neoliberalism whichaccepts the imperatives of market productivism on the bet-ter land and for the more competitive sectors whileattempting to offer some protection and selective opportu-nities to diversify into niche markets to marginal farmersaffected by restructuring elsewhere. Under post-Fordismwe are therefore confronted with an emerging and littledebated dichotomy as the state assumes a role in securingthe conditions for the sustainability of a new regime ofaccumulation as it becomes more deeply implanted inEuropean space. This juxtaposes a resurgent form of mar-ket productivism and the associated interests of corporateagro-food retailers and processors against an increasinglyartefactual, desocialised and commodified nature thatostensibly seeks to meet the needs of affluent consumers.The lack of attention to the sustainability of such a funda-mental re-configuration of farming and land use remainsone of the great silences at the heart of contemporary ruralpolicy debate.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Geoff Wilson, Matt Lobley and theresponses of three anonymous referees to on an earlier ver-sion of this paper.

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