340 Enabling Policies and Institutions for Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems
In addressing this challenge, consider exactly what kinds of policies tend to be clus-
tered in the different corners of Figure 18.1. Major examples are listed in Table 18.1.
Various kinds of grain and oilseed price supports used in the EU and the United
States during the last half of the 20th century clearly served primarily to increase
food and fibre production. In the United Kingdom, a number of those policies ini-
tially were intended to increase production of food commodities, but they also had
the social objective of supporting farm incomes. In the United States, price support
policies initiated in the 1930s were intended primarily to achieve social objectives of
maintaining farm income and a family farm structure of agriculture. However,
because the support mechanisms were so closely tied to crop production, these poli-
cies are represented by small boxes close to the production support corner of Fig-
ure 18.1. In other words, de facto, the policies tended to support an objective that
increasingly was not a priority in industrialized societies in the late 20th century.
Livestock headage payments in the EU also have been explicitly tied to levels
of production. The US deficiency payment policy of the 1980s and early 1990s,
Figure 18.1 Location of agricultural/rural support according to production,
stewardship and social objectives