"Keeping it tidy": The subjectivation of cattle farmers through bureaucratic control of bushes and shrubs in southwestern France.

Abstract

In France, extensive beef farmers have been increasingly dependent of public subsidies for the public goods they provide, especially landscape maintenance and associated biodiversity-rich habitats. For decades, these farmers, whose numbers are decreasing, have felt threatened by a rampant “closed landscape”. In analyzing European policies regarding permanent meadows, ethnographic studies have focused on the discrepancies between local and governmental rationalities and on the subsequent resistances and negotiations, overlooking how agricultural policies offer not only disruptions but also continuities in the way they affect landscapes and the people who inhabit them.

The goal of this paper is to look at the interactions between a policy instrument and the daily practices of cattle farmers. Specifically, we analyze how the bureaucratic control of shrub encroachment interacts with the local norms regarding what constitutes a “proper landscape”. We build on a qualitative study in the “Comminges”, a small region in southwestern France dominated by mixed crop livestock farming. Interviews were conducted with farmers, controllers and public servants to understand in order to grasp the weight of a policy instrument that does not seem to be contested.

We show how the fear of funds misuse and disappearance of livestock farming co-produce a paradoxical landscape, in which the conservation of its physical appearance may hide deep changes in the way and reason the landscape is produced. In a time of budget constraints and quest for efficiency, agri-environmental payments have come with increased bureaucratic control. Pushed by the European commission, administrations increasingly mobilize GIS, in order to map and control the allocation of money. Those are offer powerful governmental tools for conservation in creating “environmental subjects” to take care and perpetuate specific spaces. However, we show that cattle farmers experience a strong sense of decline of their activity and that land abandonment, although limited, may be closer than it actually looks.

While keeping the shrub out of the meadow, bureaucratic instruments have favored a formal compliance that has increased the discrepancy between the ecological, the esthetical and the social. This leads us to push further the need of policy based not on a fixed spatial characterization but on the diverse and processual nature of the activities of farmers. Moreover, this case study provides strong insights on farmers’ emotions towards nature, abandonment and resignation.