Environmental Impact Assessment: Mapping the Interface between Agriculture,Development and the Natural Environment?

Maintaining a balance between promoting agriculture and food production, and controlling or minimising its environmental impacts, has always been problematic. Since 1947, changes in agricultural land use have largely remained outside the scope of the planning system, whatever their negative environmental implications. The assumption that agricultural development should remain beyond legal scrutiny has been challenged in recent years by initiatives originating in European environmental law, and in particular by the implementation of the 1985 Directive on Environmental Impact Assessment. The Directive requires an EIA of proposals to convert semi-natural areas to intensive agricultural production, and of projects for restructuring rural land holdings. These are categories of land use change which have, since 1947, been assumed to be outside the remit of development control. Nevertheless, the English courts have recently shown a willingness to extend its reach into areas of agricultural land use that were hitherto assumed to be outside the planning system altogether. This article reviews several recent cases – notably R (Hall Hunter Partnership) v Secretary of State (2006) and R (on the application of Wye Valley Action Association Ltd) v Herefordshire District Council (2011) – in which proposals to adopt intensive agricultural land uses have been challenged in the courts. It reviews the application of EIA to agricultural development – both within the planning system and under separate regulations adopted for non-planning cases. It considers the scope for “horizontal” environmental mechanisms such as EIA to address environmental protection issues at the interface between agriculture, “development” and the natural environment.