Germany will therefore enforce stricter restrictions on manure spreading in vulnerable areas. Berlin aims to prevent the European Union from actually imposing looming multi-million euro fines. Agriculture will have to maintain an even more extensive record of all (soil) materials entering and leaving the farm, and groundwater quality measurements will be conducted on a much larger scale.
As early as 1991, Brussels established in the Nitrate Directive that one liter of groundwater may contain a maximum of 50 milligrams of nitrate. However, Germany evaded and circumvented this directive for decades. On average, a quarter of the monitoring points in the German groundwater monitoring network still exceed the 50 milligram threshold.
Only after Germany was condemned by the European Court of Justice in 2018 to reduce fertilizers were changes initiated in the German Fertilizer Act.
Federal Minister Cem Özdemir said last Friday morning in Berlin that the years-long and costly nitrate conflict with Brussels had the opposite effect and that much trust had been lost between the professional sector and politics – this must be regained.
“We are now reinforcing the principle that the polluter pays: those who over-fertilize and thereby endanger the environment will be held more accountable and prosecuted. Especially given the tight budgets, no one benefits from having to pay exorbitant fines to Brussels; we can better use that money to support our agriculture.”