The trend is rather towards expansion in the agricultural world and farms are getting bigger and bigger. What is happening in the Netherlands, where the government wants to buy farms to close them and force breeders to reduce their number of animals, is quite particular.
The government’s goal is to eliminate 3,000 farms, or 5% of all farms in the country, and to reduce the number of farm animals by 50%. These beasts produce meat, milk and especially the world famous gouda and edam cheeses.
The aim of the operation is to reduce nitrates, in particular ammonia and nitrogen, released by livestock and crops.
It is hard to imagine a government making such a shift here. In the Netherlands, the shock is major.
This small country of 18 million inhabitants, which suffered from famine after the war, was able to take advantage of its territory to become one of the largest agri-food producers in Europe. Agriculture today accounts for only 1.6% of the Netherlands’ gross domestic product, but the agri-food sector accounts for a quarter of all its industrial production.
It’s hard to believe, but the Netherlands is the second largest exporter of food products in the world in dollars, behind the United States whose territory is huge. It must be said that part of the agri-food exports of the Netherlands is in fact made up of the re-export throughout Europe of products that have arrived at its port of Rotterdam.
The fact remains that agriculture has long been the pride of the country. With reason. These are highly mechanized, innovative and highly productive activities that inspire the world. The Wageningen research center of the university of the same name, specializing in agriculture and food, is as famous as the tulips of the country. Robots, high-performance greenhouses, vertical crops and alternative proteins are among the innovations that have come out of it.
The Netherlands are in a way victims of their own success. The intensive breeding of pigs and dairy cows generates almost half of the territory’s greenhouse gas emissions. The concentration of nitrates in the soil is the highest in the whole of the European Union.
For several years, the country has been trying to find solutions to clean up and green agriculture. But the incentives have their limits and the government has decided to put the pressure on. If the number of farmers who voluntarily agree to give up their activities for a consideration equivalent to 120% of their value is insufficient, expropriations are planned. An overall budget of 24 billion euros (35.5 billion CAN) is planned to compensate farmers.
The anger that has been simmering for years in the Dutch countryside has translated into politics. A farmers’ party, BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB), which can be translated as Peasant Citizen Movement, was born to oppose government policies that target their sector.
And against all odds, the countryside has just beaten the city. The BBB party won a spectacular victory in the legislative elections which took place on March 16. He won 15 seats out of the 75 in the Senate, and thus threatens the majority of the government of Mark Rutte, which finds itself with 23 seats. Important negotiations are about to begin for the future of agriculture in the Netherlands, and many countries could learn from them.
