GRO-ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION and the alternative/conventionalA agriculture debate became an important feature in industrialized countries during the 1980s and 1990s @eus and Dunlap 1990; Lowe 1992). A combination of voluntary and compulsory measures have been applied by governments to promote the development of more eco-friendly agriculture, and regulatory processes interface in complicated ways with economic and social processes within agriculture.Voluntary environmental regulation, which aims at informing, educating and advising farmers or at influencing their values and attitudes, is often regarded as inefficient and a farmers' 'trick' to avoid compulsory measures such as new responsibilities or mandatory rules for use of manure and agro-chemicals. Voluntary measures have no doubt been advocated by farmers in their political struggle against compulsory regulation, but recent surveys among farmers in Denmark and the Netherlands, and investigations of farmer study group schemes in both countries, question the inefficiency assumption. A process of change in farmers' behaviour and attitudes can be observed, and voluntary measures seem to have played an important part.The combination of voluntary and compulsory measures has stopped the post-war intensification process in the two countries, and to some extent even resulted in extensification. It is possible to see such reversal merely as a consequence of the restrictions which compulsory measures have imposed upon rational farmers, but probably there is more to it. The sustainability agenda has partly been adopted by the farming community and their priorities and values have changed. This implies that farmers would not automatically turn back into old practices, even if all restrictions and incentives were removed. One
Like many other areas of intensive agriculture in Europe, the Netherlands is struggling with environmental pollution caused by overuse of pesticides and fertilizers. The Dutch government has been investing in the development and implementation of integrated farming systems (IFS) since 1979, with a view to a national conversion to sustainable agriculture. Although IFS ideas are becoming more widely accepted in the farming community, they have only been implemented on a small scale so far. This article describes those developments and discusses marketing, extension, and policy initiatives that might motivate more Dutch farmers to adopt IFS.
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