Canada's environmental farm plans: transatlantic perspectives on agri‐environmental schemes

Abstract

Evaluation of Ontario's Environmental Farm Plan (EFP) scheme, launched in 1993, provides an opportunity for comparisons with agri‐environmental measures instituted in the European Union and other parts of North America. The EFP has a strong ‘bottom‐up’ dimension in that it is farmers’ organizations that have been central both to the scheme's instigation and to its ongoing management. This has affected the nature of the actions taken by individual farmers participating in the scheme. These actions are reviewed, especially in terms of the participants’ attitudes towards stewardship of the land, environmental outcomes, cross‐compliance measures, barriers to participation and the role of statutory regulation. Some contrasts are drawn with the greater ‘top‐down’ controls exerted in several EU agri‐environment schemes, with the latter's promotion of extensification and the changing role of farmers as ‘producers of countryside’ in a multi‐functional agricultural system. The diffusion of EFP schemes throughout Canada is noted and is cited as confirming the maintenance of fundamentally different attitudes to the development of farm‐based environmental actions compared with those adopted in the EU.