The environment as a policy problemintensive farming methods. Livestock production, wherever possible, has
maximised the use of factory farming methods. The specialisation of arable
production has seen the appropriation of every possible piece of land and
thelavish use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. The benefits are obvious:
astable farming sector, readily available and affordable farm produce for
the consumer and a food surplus that has contributed to exports; but the
environmental damage has also been immense. The British countryside, for
example, has been transformed since the mid twentieth century by the
massive destruction of hedgerows, ancient woodlands, wetlands and low-
land heaths, which has harmed many species of animals, birds and insects.
Intensive farming gradually erodes soil quality and consumes vast amounts
of water, and run-off from slurry pollutes rivers and underlying water tables.
Yet t he ef forts ofenvironmental and consumer groups to get new issues onto
theagricultural agenda were, for many years, effectively rebuffed by policy
communities across Europe (Cox et al. 1986 ;Smith 1990 ;Glasbergen 1992 ).
Until recently, any group questioning the underlying expansionist ideology
of agricultural policy was marginalised. Typically, when a new environmen-
tal issue emerges, the agricultural policy community will initially seek to
deny the existence of the problem or to play down the danger. As concern
grows, delaying tactics are employed, such as a call for further research or
the setting up of a commission of inquiry (Glasbergen 1992 ). When action
can no longer be avoided, problems are dealt with in ways that suit the
interests of the policy community. Some issues, such as the Dutch prob-
lem of surplus manure, are depoliticised by defining them as ‘technical’
problems – i.e. uncontroversial – which can be solved by expert insiders.
Alternatively, the EU set-aside scheme, which encourages conservation by
farmers through financial compensation, also created a new justification
for high public support for the agrarian sector. British farmers’ groups have
tried to deflect criticism from environmentalists of their destructive meth-
ods by using the concept of set-aside to recast their role to become ‘stewards
of the countryside’. Thus agricultural policy communities, by institutional-
ising the power of farmers, have managed to keep new issues off the policy
agenda or, where this is impossible, impeded or diluted policies intended
toreduce the environmental damage from agri-industry – although agricul-
tural policy communities have become increasingly unstable in recent years
(see below, pp. 199 –200).
The example of the agricultural sector shows how the state, by facilitat-
ing the formation of a closed policy community, has helped institutionalise
thestructural power of producer groups within individual policy sectors.
Producer groups derive structural power from the policy network because
‘rules, procedures and beliefs support the interests of the powerful without
thepowerful having to decide on every occasion what should be allowed
on that agenda’ (Smith 1990 : 39). Hence the values underpinning sectoral
policy communities frequently produce policy outcomes that are explicitly
expansionist and likely to damage the environment. If a policy community