ABSTRACT
The agricultural sector in the Netherlands can be seen as an exemplary success of modernization, especially after its take-off phase following World War II (Bieleman 2000). Yet it has also experienced increasing pressures and criticism, already since the early 70s (Grin 2010), when the first side-effects of its success—overproduction, emissions, biodiversity losses and overfertilization by manure—surfaced to become important environmental and societal issues. Whereas overproduction was tackled by EU regulation, the manure issue is still largely unresolved. Because of the environmental side effects, the Dutch agricultural system reached its critical point in the 1990s. According to Grin (2010: 263), this period can be regarded as a turning point, marking the take-off phase of a transition triggered by the side-effects of ‘simple modernization’.
