446 Localized Food Systems
necessary spatial, natural, regional and knowledge-based resources necessary to
progress real rural development options.
The broader field of rural development, as well as that of agro-food, has also
become increasingly populated with project managers, consultants, exchange
agents, etc., such that a profession has been established to which some are excluded.
Moreover, current priorities of national governments concern the reconciling of
the demands and risks of the ‘careful consumer’. In the agro-food sector this is
largely done by assembling a bureaucratic-hygienic apparatus – itself something of
a new compromise between governments and capital – in order to stave off a fur-
ther and potentially deeper consumer-led legitimization crisis in the old industrial
system as a whole. In this context ‘primary producers’ – those nearest to the natural
land-base – are continually disempowered. This has most recently been exposed in
the UK with the government’s responses to the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak,
where regulatory controls on the movement and selling of livestock is hastening
the demise of the smaller farms through the closure of livestock markets. Indeed
the paradox of the story to eradicate BSE and other risks from the industrial food
chain has been that the regulatory responses to it have further embedded industrial
systems of supply, processing and retailing in the livestock and meat sectors.
There is a need, therefore, for rural social scientists to contest these regulatory
modes and to apply other, for instance, agroecological and food ecological models
to rural realities. This will require us to explore the contradictions and practices
embedded in the different modes of environmental policy discourse, and for us to
challenge the specificity of environmental expertise and professionalization. How
can a more holistic food ecology be created? And, what novel forms of regulation
would this require? Is the bureaucratic–hygienic mode sustainable over time and
space? And what barriers does it place upon achieving real ecological moderniza-
tion? For instance, while the current agro-environmental policy and rural develop-
ment discourse continues apace in the European Commission, we see in Finland,
the rapid structural concentration of farms occurring as a result of the CAP. The
surface waves of ecological modernization discourses often seem to obscure the
deeper countervailing currents of structural changes in the agro-food sector.
Conclusions: Looking Through the Environmental Maze
Past analyses in rural sociology, and to a large extent in environmental sociology
more generally (see Redclift and Woodgate, 1998), have been built upon sophisti-
cated and critical interpretations of the (agro-)industrial modernization project. In
rural development terms, for example, this has focused upon challenging the pre-
vailing economic notions of scale, critical mass, centralization, globalization and
marginalization that this model has clearly engendered. Ecological modernization,
in all of its shades, nuances and theoretical flaws, at least brings forth a new ques-
tion. That is, how could/should the contested relationships between civil society,