The common agricultural policy and the re-invention of the rural in the European Community

Abstract

This paper shifts the focus of definitional debates about the nature of rurality from the academic field to an agricultural field that includes the European Community, its Common Agricultural Policy and farmers whose lives and livelihoods are significantly entailed by it. It traces the evolution of the Common Agricultural Policy, the concepts of rurality embedded with it and the mediated effects of this policy on farming people and their practices. Ethnographic material about hill sheep farmers of the Borders Region of Scotland is used to illustrate the 'policy-effect' (a term derived from Bourdieu's notion of 'theory effect') of the Common Agricultural Policy: the definitions of and policies for rural spaces devised by the European Community in its Common Agricultural Policy set the conditions for hill sheep farmers to produce in their practices a version of the rurality represented in the CAP; and the CAP records these mediated effects of its policy in its analysis of the nature of rural spaces within the European Community for which it has to devise further policies.