Integrating agri-environment policy farming systems and rural development: Tir Cymen in Wales

This paper examines a conservation scheme in Wales called Tir Cymen (tidy land in Welsh) as a means of exploring the extent to which policies designed primarily to support habitat, landscape, biodiversity and conservation are commensurate with goals to maintain viable rural communities, including viable agricultures. Maximizing the broader rural development impacts of conservation schemes, it is argued, is a vital ingredient in the pursuit of sustainable rural development, particularly in regions where many farm businesses are likely to be already highly dependent upon subsidy support. It is argued, through the presentation of the Tir Cymen case, that conservation policies can, if appropriately designed and regionally embedded, go some way to mitigating both the 'farm problem' and the 'rural problem', and are therefore capable of a sustainable and desirable rural development impact commensurate with the new rural development paradigm.