Agri-environmental Stewardship Schemes and ‘Multifunctionality’ 3532 See Dobbs and Pretty for a more complete discussion of issues associated with the UK experience,
including: opportunities for programmes to contribute jointly to social and stewardship objec-
tives; capitalization of scheme benefits into land values; and how to gain from bottom-up plan-
ning and subsidiarity.
3 See Dobbs for a distinction between changes in farming practices and changes in farming sys-
tems.
4 Bromley refers to these as amenities and habitat.
5 Based on perceived benefits to the environment, organic agriculture has been aggressively pro-
moted under the United Kingdom’s Organic Farming Scheme. Preliminary case study evidence
reported by O’Riordan and Cobb supports the existence of at least some of those perceived ben-
efits, relative to ‘conventional’ agriculture.
6 This does not imply that farmers in all regions of a country would necessarily qualify for given
environmental practices or performance. For example, farmers utilizing a particular agricultural
practice or system might qualify for incentive payments in a watershed threatened by soil erosion,
but not qualify in another watershed or region of the same country if it is not so threatened. That
is a separate issue of ‘spatial targeting’ (Claassen et al).
7 Preliminary estimates by the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) indicated
that net outlays on commodity programmes could increase by $49.7 billion over ten years (com-
pared with a baseline with previous farm bill provisions), and the projected increase was $13.2
billion for conservation programmes (United States Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition
& Forestry).
8 It has long been known that cropping systems that include regular rotation of forage and green
manure legumes contribute greatly to the creation of the soil’s natural capital (Balfour; Daily;
Doran and Werner; Peterson et al; Power; Pretty, 1998, 2002).
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