How should the relationship between agriculture and the environment be understood? In 2011, the UK government's ‘Foresight Report’ (Government Office for Science, 2011) showed how, in general, intense agricultural production methods were directly responsible for soil erosion, biodiversity loss and several other adverse effects on the environment. Production of key agricultural products leaves a significant environmental ‘footprint’: for example, many cattle are grain-fed to produce the best milk. The required grain supplies are maintained through heavy fertilizer use which, in turn, can drain off the fields causing damage to aquifers. Cattle also produce quantities of the greenhouse gas methane (pp. 51–53). These combined problems mean that dairy products have a particularly pernicious effect on the environment. The ‘Foresight Report’ indicated the ways in which the environment, specifically climate change, also impacts on agriculture. Simulations using a variety of models show that climactic variations coupled with rising populations especially in urban areas will lead to rising grain prices and price volatility, especially for key staple foodstuffs like rice (p. 66). One study cited in the ‘Foresight Report’ predicted that the prices for maize, rice and wheat could rise by as much as 127 per cent, 110 per cent and 68 per cent respectively by 2050 due to the way rising temperatures adversely affect crop growth (p. 69, citing Van der Mensbrugghe, Osorio-Rodarte, Burns and Baffes, Reference van der Mensbrugghe, Osorio-Rodarte, Burns and Baffes2009). The statistics clearly indicate that there is a symbiotic relationship between agricultural production and the environment.

To state a series of facts in this way enables us to say a relationship exists, but it does not help us to make sense of that relationship. How are we to understand the ways in which agriculture and the environment co-exist? What, if any, weight should we accord to each fact? Should we pay greater attention to certain agricultural products than others, or should we be instead focusing on specific aspects of the environment, like climate change? Given that climate change is one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century, should we concentrate on every way in which climate change affects agriculture, or is it more important to look at specific portions of climate change, every environmental problem, certain agricultural products, or a combination of all of these? How should we understand the ways in which our institutions deal with the interaction of agriculture and the environment? More importantly, how can we evaluate whether their efforts are a success or a failure? Which approach makes the most sense?

Brian Jack offers one way to understand the relationship between agriculture and the environment in his book, Agriculture and EU Environmental Law. He looks at this problem in the context of the one of the most comprehensive institutional attempts to address the issue, the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Starting with a chapter which describes the origins of the CAP and its objectives as set out in the EC Treaty and elaborated on by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Jack shows how the EU's initial attempts to regulate agriculture in the late 1950s were influenced by its member states' protective attitude to their domestic agricultural sectors (pp. 1–2). Whilst all the policies shared the same aim–to ensure their domestic farmers would not be adversely affected by cheap agricultural imports–in reality, Jack argues, the plethora of diverse measures used to achieve this goal led the CAP to concentrate its efforts first on imposing a common programme for agriculture. As Jack goes on to note, this first step was a general expression of support for a common policy together with a framework for action, but it was certainly not a comprehensive attempt to draft detailed measures covering key product areas, nor was there any reference to broader non-agricultural goals, like preservation of the environment (pp. 1–2). Rather, Article 33 of the Treaty Establishing the European Community (EC Treaty) stressed the need for the CAP to increase productivity through the development of technical expertise; to optimise the use of labour resources (p. 2);Footnote ⁵ to ensure a ‘fair standard of living’ for those who worked on the land;Footnote ⁶ to work towards stabilising markets, and guaranteeing the availability of supplies, especially to consumers, at ‘reasonable prices’ by maximising the efficient operation of agricultural markets (p. 6).Footnote ⁷ It is only when the highly complex domestic price support system found in the common organisations for key agricultural products, like cereals and dairy, failed to guarantee domestic farm incomes that the CAP shifted its focus towards structural support and eventually to rural development (pp. 12–14).

In Chapter 2, Jack goes on to look at the history of the CAP's shift in perspective in more detail. As he points out (p. 21), agriculture accounts for over 44 per cent of land use in the European Union, with over 70 per cent of land turned over to agriculture in some member states like the United Kingdom and Ireland. Whilst farmers may share the belief that a key part of their role is to preserve the countryside, commentators argue that increased intensification of agricultural production, facilitated by the CAP's farm price support systems that gave subsidies based on production, and general technological developments to improve yields both contributed significantly to environmental damage (p. 21, citing Shoard, Reference Shoard1980). As a consequence, between 1945 and 1984 over 80 per cent of unimproved grasslands, 40 per cent of lowland heath and 30–50 per cent of ancient woodlands were either lost or damaged (pp. 22–23, citing Nature Conservancy Council, 1984). Jack presents several small case-studies to indicate the ways that increasingly efficient agricultural production across the European Union impacted badly on biodiversity, destroying key habitats, causing soil erosion and polluting watercourses (pp. 23–31, 35–40). Notably, over 140,000 miles of hedgerow were removed between 1945 and 1974 to enable new larger farm machinery to work more efficiently, with the consequential loss of habitat for birds (pp. 24–25).

Towards the end of Chapter 2, Jack sets out the economic and environmental pressures on the CAP pushing the contemporary reforms. For Jack, there are internal economic factors, like the need to curtail surplus production which had caused the notorious ‘butter mountains’ and ‘milk lakes’ of the 1980s, and external economic pressures from the World Trade Organization (WTO) for the EU to improve market access for agricultural products originating from other WTO members. In addition, there is a growing awareness of the environmental problems caused by agriculture. Notably, the EU Environmental Action plans increasingly recognise the need to connect agriculture and environmental policies within the CAP itself (p. 46).Footnote ⁸

Chapters 1 and 2 therefore set out a historical baseline from which Jack explores how the CAP becomes a more integrated agri-environmental and rural development policy with equal weight put on the economic and environmental aspects of agricultural production. Chapters 3 to 5 then chart the ways the CAP expanded into its current form. The book looks at developments in several policy areas, like organic farming (Chapter 6), nature conservation and biodiversity (Chapter 7), food safety (Chapter 9) and pollution (Chapter 8), where agriculture and environmental issues overlap. Jack then shows how the legal rules impose order on the relationship between these various areas. The final chapter considers how external actors like the WTO constrain the measures that can be used to achieve the CAP's policy objectives.

Jack's book presents a clear and compelling analysis of the legal regulation of agriculture and the environment in the EU's CAP from the CAP's creation in the 1950s to the ‘Health Check’ in 2008 (European Commission, 2007, paras 1.2, 4.2).Footnote ⁹ By the end of the book, the reader is left with the impression that the CAP has reached a stage where its rules have managed to counterbalance the damage agricultural production can inflict on the environment. The CAP now appears more in tune with contemporary public concerns over the important place that environmental preservation has in society. Readjustments to policy that accommodate climate change or other modern environmental harms seem to be a natural and readily achievable next stage in the CAP's evolution.

To see Jack's book merely as a highly competent exposition of a general evolution of the relationship between agriculture and the environment in the CAP is to underestimate its contribution to the literature, however. His book is not an account that has smooth, nicely formed edges within which the relationship between agriculture and the environment in the CAP, with its various successes and failures, is readily explained and tidily laid out before us.Footnote ¹⁰ There is no sense of an overarching benevolent entity directing smooth shifts in policy as the CAP moved through the various stages of reform towards some predestined end-point where agriculture and the environment exist in perfect harmony. Instead, regulation is portrayed as messy, erratic and highly responsive to ever-changing diverse internal and external pressures and political events. For example, the EU's rural development policy was developed to promote structural change in agriculture. Jack shows that the policy only changed to a rural development policy when policymakers realised, in the late 1990s, that agriculture was no longer the main employer in rural areas (p. 91). Likewise, the less favoured areas scheme, implemented to compensate farmers for the poor agricultural conditions they had to endure in those areas, started as a welfare system to support mountain and hill farmers (p. 99). Its environmental credentials were limited and ‘largely incidental’ to the general preservation of farmers' livelihoods (p. 100, citing Fennell, Reference Fennell1997, p. 345). Jack notes that the scheme's adverse environmental effects were only rectified once several reports showed the scheme led to over-grazing (p. 100). Even the overarching ‘blue skies’ thinking contained in the European Commission's policy documents on CAP reform mostly have their genesis in the political environment of the time. For example, the important MacSharry reforms that prompted the CAP's profound restructuring away from production-specific payments to decoupled farm support are shown to have their origins in the proposed changes to permitted types of farm payments from the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade talks (Tangermann, Reference Tangermann, Ingersent, Rayner and Hine1998, p. 12).

What Jack presents is the reality of the history of the CAP's regulation of agriculture and the environment with all its quirks and inconsistencies, highs and lows, together with its failure to grasp the full pro-environmental potential of some of its policies.Footnote ¹¹ This is an important achievement. For to ask whether the CAP's agri-environment programmes are good or bad, whether they could have achieved more, or should have given greater prominence to some environmental aspects, would be an attempt to make sense of the facts as they are presented today. It would be to make an assessment of the changes to the CAP against contemporary values, with the benefit of hindsight. Such an account could only ever be a partial truth because elements of the developing agri-environment relationship must be sheared off to make such an account coherent. The lessons that can be learned from such a retelling of the CAP's history must, in turn, be less useful as a result.

For example, an author's major interest may be how the CAP's evolution in the past can provide lessons for multilateral trade reforms in the future. For such an author, the fact that the EU was grappling with budgetary constraints and the challenges of expansion in its membership while undertaking the 1992 MacSharry reforms is less important than the fact that the CAP underwent a shift from production support to decoupled support programmes. This is because decoupled support mechanisms proved to be more palatable forms of support for the purposes of the multilateral trade talks. The lesson such an author proposes his audience learn is how evolution in domestic agricultural policies affects multilateral trade agreements. The budget and expansion difficulties may be ignored completely in this retelling of the CAP's ‘history’, or may be reduced in importance and portrayed instead as less interesting and compelling than perhaps they actually were during the period of reform, so that the author's ‘lesson’ is learned more effectively by his readers.Footnote ¹² The evolution in the type of financial support offered to farmers under the CAP becomes the ‘flagship’ issue, the most important ‘lesson’ to be taken forward from the past. This analytical approach conceals a historical trap.

The CAP is highly complex. Many authors have grappled with its various integrated objectives and rules in very compelling ways (see Cardwell, Reference Cardwell2004; Fennell, Reference Fennell1997; Snyder, Reference Snyder1985). Each author inevitably has their own view about how the regulation works and how the various policies fit together. Each will select material and accord weight to it accordingly. Each author, too, possesses their own criteria against which they will assess the success or failure of the material they are writing about. Taking a position on a set of facts is expected and necessary in academic writing. However, a later author is in danger of falling into the historical trap if he ‘stands on shoulders of giants’Footnote ¹³ and uses the historical ‘facts’ from previous great works as the starting point from which to formulate his own conclusions about key instances in the evolution of the CAP to its present agri-environmental and rural development policy. This is not to say that the later author is lazy in his research or intellectual endeavour, but rather that he should guard against selecting the same historical facts as the starting point for his own account, or placing the same weight on the historical facts as previous great authors. Instead, the various programmes and rules should be allowed to speak for themselves in the full context in which they originally occurred. For to do otherwise is to perpetuate the perceived importance of some historical events over others, when the context in which they were originally selected has long ceased to be relevant.

Our twenty-first-century world is one where the environment is under pressure from climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. In an attempt to understand the difficult relationship between agriculture and the environment, some authors are looking into the past where a relationship has been worked through in regulation to find ‘lessons for the future’ (Government Office for Science, 2011). Building the future on a past created from a partially constructed truth cannot be helpful. It is difficult for an author to separate himself from others' values and beliefs when he writes an historical account of regulation.Footnote ¹⁴ It is always possible for them to fall into the historical trap. Jack rises to the challenge. He presents a detached account that gives the facts, not as he believes the modern audience should understand them, nor as others have presented them before, but as they truly appeared to be at the time they occurred. Jack's book is a useful text for existing experts in the field due to its comprehensive nature. It will be particularly useful for academics wishing to explore the issues for the first time; it will also be good for students. It is an important stepping-stone for further reflection on the difficult relationship between agriculture and the environment both in the CAP and beyond.