ABSTRACT
European agriculture has undergone substantial restructuring in the post-war period and, while both Western and Eastern Europe experienced forms of agricultural intensification between 1950 and the 1980s, the direction of change has since been quite different. In Eastern Europe, this has been based on a return to private farming. The transition has not been easy, and many structural problems still confront the agricultural sector, not least the re-creation of landed property rights and the development of an efficient market system of agricultural production (Repassy and Symes 1993; Ilbery 1998). Controlling agricultural output has thus not been a priority, which is in contrast to Western Europe, where the emphasis since the mid-1980s has been on a post-productivist farming system. The objective has been to de-intensify agricultural production through extensification, diversification and farming in more environmentally beneficial ways (Ilbery 1992; Battershill and Gilg 1996; Evans and Morris 1997). This chapter therefore focuses on the applied characteristics of, and problems associated with, the de-intensification of agriculture in Western Europe.
