I am now moving into a period of CAP policy development and the changes in the measures designed to achieve the aims of the reformed CAP that occurred after my last period of fieldwork among hill sheep farmers in 2001, just before the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Four farms in the fieldwork area had to destroy all their sheep and the others were quarantined throughout the outbreak. What follows, then, is suggestive of how these policy documents construct the nature of rurality and an image of rural landscapes. It also sets a framework for future research into the way in which hill sheep farmers have practically adopted these policy measures together with the effects of the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.

To achieve the development of rural regions, the European Commission produced a number of documents that transposed the image of diversified rurality into tangible localities exhibiting characteristics of the pressure of modern life, rural decline and very marginal areas and exemplifying the mediated effects of previous agricultural policies. All of them envisioned a phasing out of price-support schemes and placed a revised CAP within the broader agenda of integrated rural development. This is a shift from a sectoral approach of assisting agriculture throughout the European Community to a more territorial approach supporting agricultural, infrastructural, educational, social and economic development in specific localities. The principal analyses and policy statements are: the MacSharry Reforms (1992), the Community Initiative for Rural Development (LEADER), the Cork Declaration (1996), the Buckwell Report (1997), culminating in Agenda 2000 (July 1997).

Agenda 2000 identified four aims for the CAP. First, ‘ensuring continued agricultural land use and thereby contributing to the maintenance of a viable rural community; note here the continuing importance of agriculture to the viability of rural communities’. Second, ‘preserving the countryside’. Third, ‘maintaining and promoting sustainable farming systems’. Fourth, ‘assuring environmental requirements’. Agenda 2000 also re-conceptualised the CAP as based on two ‘pillars’. Pillar one includes market and price mechanisms to support agricultural production. Pillar two consolidates various programs and mechanisms that contribute to rural development, including economic diversification, infrastructural improvement, rural heritage, protection of the environment, maintenance of the countryside, restoration of landscapes, extensification, and set-aside. Less Favoured Areas continue in the CAP, now explicitly as a component of Rural Development (pillar two), not only because of the impact of the poor land on agricultural production and the decline in farming and rural populations, but because of the environmental ‘high nature value’ of Less Favoured Area landscapes. As a result, rural areas are now like areas of European nature conservation interest—in fact, the two types of areas have large expanses of overlap (see Figure 1.4).

A common theme in these policy statements and reports culminating in the Agenda 2000 reforms is a reiteration of the effects that previous measures, particularly price-support schemes such as the Sheep Meat Regime and support through the Less Favoured Areas policy, have had on rural localities: overproduction, polarisation of incomes between small family farms and large technologically based farms, environmental degradation and continued rural decline. Based on this analysis, Agenda 2000 stated the objectives for a reformulated CAP for 2000–06. They incorporated the original aims identified in the Treaty of Rome of achieving social equity for farmers and promoting economic efficiency with new aims of environmental management and multidimensional rural development to maintain the viability of rural society:

Source: EECONET.

In the Explanatory Memorandum accompanying Agenda 2000 (European Commission 1997b), the ‘European model of agriculture’ is explicitly described as competitive, using environmentally friendly production methods and including a diversity of agriculture ‘rich in tradition…[and seeking] to maintain the visual amenity of our countrysides [sic] as well as vibrant and active rural communities’ (European Commission 1997b, Explanatory Memorandum:5). Again, as in the 1987 Green Paper, there is an explicit juxtaposition of European agriculture with Europe’s major competitors (that is, the United States), particularly the part it plays ‘in society and in preserving the landscape, whence the need to maintain farming throughout Europe and to safeguard farmers’ incomes’ (European Commission 1997b, Explanatory Memorandum:6).

All payments to farmers under the CAP were dependent on their compliance with (‘cross-compliance’) requirements to maintain their land in good agricultural and environmental condition including appropriate stocking densities on the land, and to ensure plant and animal health, environmental protection and animal welfare. Recognising the consequences of price supports on inputs (that is, headage payment on stock) for intensification and overproduction, financial support under the Single Farm Payment Scheme for achieving these aims was now to be made on a land-area basis. In recognition of the detrimental environmental effects of intensive production, area-based direct support payments were linked to requirements for farmers to use the land less intensively in order to preserve the high nature value of landscapes in the Less Favoured Areas (European Commission 1997a:20).

In order to achieve these policy aims in the 2000–06 period, European space was re-spatialised to reflect the three priority objectives for the use of structural funds under Agenda 2000. Two of them address the development problems in remote areas (objective one) and rural areas facing a decline in traditional activities (objective two)—that is, agricultural activities in the Scottish Borders, by providing financial assistance for the creation of the heterogeneous activities and spaces now represented as constitutive of rurality. As a result, rural regions are now defined in ‘objective’ terms. The pun—referring to the objectives for the structural funds and to the mode of defining and identifying real locations of such ruralities in terms of objective measures such as population density—is here intended. In the first sense of objective, rural localities are theoretically characterised using a combination of the OECD measure of population density at local and regional levels and the Eurostat approach of measuring the degree of urbanisation by population density. On this basis, the European Community is divided into ‘predominantly rural regions’ (about 10 per cent of the population covering about 47 per cent of the European Community’s territory), ‘significantly rural regions’ (about 30 per cent of the population and 37.4 per cent of the community’s territory) and ‘predominantly urbanised regions’ (about 60 per cent of the population and 15.6 per cent of the community’s territory). The geographical reality of these regions is attested to by the maps included in the report, which objectify the characteristics of rural localities and spatialise the community into tangible geographical spaces according to population density, degree of urbanisation and rural and urban regions. In the second sense of objective, these rural spaces are then assessed in terms of criteria relevant to each of the three objectives for the use of structural funds. On this basis, maps are produced that spatialise the European Community into tangible geographical regions that objectify these problems; it is these regions that qualify for structural funds to support rural development (see Figure 1.5).