ABSTRACT
Holland has a major new and rapidly expanding export product: manure. Each year larger quantities of pig, poultry and cow manure are dried, bagged and shipped out of the Netherlands to be sold as fertiliser in garden centres all over Europe. The process is expensive, and in the normal sense of the word, ‘unprofitable’. The people of Holland have, however, decided that the environmental costs of continuing to poison their drinking water with animal effluents justify the hefty government subsidy which is now being paid to the companies processing the animal waste surplus into the latest fix for roses and begonias. The Dutch Government has decreed that the manure disposal plants must have a 200-million-tonne annual capacity by 2000.2
Most of the other northern countries of the Union face the same problem on a similar or smaller, but none the less serious, scale: too many people and too many animals all mixed up together on too little land. So far, none of them has yet taken the sweeping steps already taken by the Hague. But they will, as tighter EU legislation on water contamination is imposed. The Dutch example illustrates in a broader sense the major challenge which European agriculture faces in the 1990s: how to maintain production and profits with less pollution.
