ABSTRACT
Germany is a highly industrialised, densely populated, and economically affluent country where conflicts between economic development and environmental quality have a long history, and where environmental degradation has, for many areas, been of a considerable scale. The development of German agri-environmental policy (AEP) needs to be understood in the broader context of agricultural structural change that has taken place since the Second World War. It is important to emphasise that in Germany, as a federal state, responsibilities for agricultural policy, and therefore also for AEP, are shared between the federal and the regional level. By the mid 1980s, and therefore long before the introduction of Regulation 2078 in 1992, most of the 'old' Lander had already implemented their own agri-environmental schemes. It is often argued that flat rate payments in heterogeneous regions, where the costs of participation in agri-environmental schemes vary most for farmers, cause substantial windfall-profits on farms that have to undertake only marginal management changes.
