Landscape, Heritage, and Conservation:
Farming Issues in the European Union

March 27-29, 2008
University of Pittsburgh

Farming has been in a process of change in the European Union and elsewhere in the world as a result of many factors.  In particular farming has been linked with issues to do with landscape, conservation, heritage, sustainability, and cropping policies, including setting aside areas for conservation and the question of genetically modified (GM) crops.  Several of these issues involve farmers in the USA as well as in the EU, and questions of shared or divergent policies between these two regions of the world have emerged.  Further, with the marked recent expansion of the EU, divergences between the needs of different countries within the EU with regard to agriculture have also become evident.  In the older-established EU countries, farming has turned more and more towards conservation.  In newer-entrant countries a priority may be to seek access to EU-wide markets.

Harmonizing these divergent needs will no doubt remain a major policy objective in the future, as it is already.  However, in our Conference, while keeping policy imperatives in mind, it is our plan to explore how farmers themselves and others in their communities experience and cope with the shifting political, economic, and cultural conditions in which they work.  Our major focus will be on the U.K., Ireland, France, Spain, and others in the older West European bloc of nation-states, with some reference, hopefully, to countries with a recent history of agricultural changes, such as Poland.  Throughout, we will look at how the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is felt; at the development of parks and tourism; at the intertwining of concerns over natural heritage and social heritage; and at the likely or possible outcomes for the overall sphere of heritage as it applies to the farming world. Continuity or rupture in family farms will be looked at as a correlate of the above issues.  And, if possible within the conference framework, note will be taken of literary representations of rural change which have formed a major part of the theme of nostalgia for the rural past and attempts to preserve small farms against the predations of agribusiness in the contemporary context.

Wherever feasible, also, cross-regional comparisons will be made which may help to set the issues in a wider global framework.

Conference Co-Organizers:

Professor Andrew J. Strathern, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Anthropology,
and Dr. Pamela J. Stewart (Strathern)
Department of Anthropology
3302 Wesley W. Posvar Hall
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260

Office phone: (412) 648-7519