Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Dutch Farm Crisis

  • Victory for Farmers’ Party Is Challenge to Dutch Government

    Sigrid Kaag Mark Rutte
    Finance Minister Sigrid Kaag and Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands listen to a debate in parliament in The Hague, September 21, 2022 (ANP/Sem van der Wal)

    The outcome of provincial elections in the Netherlands threatens to divide Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s ruling coalition.

    The Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), the third party in Rutte’s four-party government, lost a third of its voters to the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), which placed first. Many told exit pollsters they switched because of the CDA’s support for reductions in farming.

    Pieter Heerma, the CDA group leader in parliament, told reporters the election had created a “new political reality.” Party leader, and foreign minister, Wopke Hoekstra added that the government’s farm policy would need to be reassessed.

    But the left-liberal D66, which also lost seats but to more left-wing parties, insists that cuts in ammonia pollution must be made by 2030. “We don’t suddenly believe something different a week after the election than we did a week before the election,” group leader Jan Paternotte explained.

    Rutte’s own party (of which I am a member) is split. Its youth wing shares the view of D66. So do pro-business liberals, egged on by the Dutch employers’ association, which has advised against delay. Conservatives are wary of expropriating farmers for the sake of environmental protection.

    BBB leader Caroline van der Plas expects the government — Rutte’s fourth since 2010 — will collapse, which would trigger early elections that her party could win. (more…)

  • Dutch Plan for Organic Farming Underwhelms

    Netherlands dairy cows
    Dairy cows in the Netherlands, September 28, 2016 (Sebastiaan ter Burg)

    Dutch agriculture minister Piet Adema is spending €26 million in 2023 and 2024 to speed up the transition to organic farming.

    The money falls short of the €35 million per year Dutch farm lobby LTO had asked for. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the €1 billion in national and EU subsidies Dutch farmers receive each year, half of which goes to the production of dairy and meat.

    Adema would funnel 6 percent of EU subsidies into organic farming. Its share is meant to rise from 4 to 15 percent by 2030, when the European Commission’s goal is to have 25 percent organic farming EU-wide. (more…)

  • Farm Crisis Divides Dutch Government

    Mark Rutte
    Prime Minister Mark Rutte answers questions from Dutch lawmakers in The Hague, September 17, 2020 (Tweede Kamer)

    Farm protests in the Netherlands have divided Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s four-party coalition.

    Foreign minister and deputy prime minister Wopke Hoekstra, who leads the junior Christian Democratic party, told the AD newspaper last week that the government’s ambition to halve nitrogen emissions by 2030 was no longer “sacrosanct”.

    Christianne van der Wal, the minister who designed the targets, and a member of Rutte’s liberal party (of which I am a member too), publicly described Hoekstra’s seeming capitulation to demonstrating farmers as “unpleasant”. Het Parool, the newspaper of Amsterdam, reports she privately called it a “stab in the back.”

    Sigrid Kaag, the finance minister and leader of the left-liberal D66, accused Hoekstra of undermining “trust” between the ruling parties.

    Rutte downplayed the split on Tuesday, arguing Hoekstra had a right to speak his mind as party leader, even if, as a member of the cabinet, he is expected to represent the government’s policy. (more…)

  • More Misinformation About the Dutch Farm Crisis

    Netherlands farm pigs
    Pigsty in a Dutch farm (LLTB)

    I debunked four misconceptions about the Dutch farm crisis here a month ago: that reducing Dutch farming will lead to food shortages; that the Dutch government prioritizes an elite green agenda over the livelihoods of its people; that farmers are being chased off their land to build homes; and that the media weren’t covering the story.

    That’s certainly changed, but with all the media attention there have also been more mistakes and a few outright fabrications.

    Before I debunk those, let me recommend better sources. AFP and Time have excellent stories. I wrote an explainer about the farm crisis in June and have an article in World Politics Review about what it portends for food producers elsewhere.

    Onto the blunders! (more…)

  • Misinformation About the Dutch Farm Crisis

    Dutch dairy farm
    Cows are fed by a robot on a Dutch dairy farm (Lely)

    When I wrote my explainer about the Dutch farm crisis a month ago, there had been little interest in the story abroad. Now when you type “Dutch farmers” in Google News, you’ll get hundreds of results.

    I noticed a change when I suddenly got 10,000 readers in a day. (I usually have a few hundred.) Two things happened.

    First a policeman shot at a tractor leaving a farmers’ protests. The driver turned out to be a sixteen year-old boy. Nobody was injured. National police are investigating exactly what happened, but it appears the officer thought the tractor was deliberately trying to crash into a colleague. (He didn’t realize the driver was a teenager.) In a country where cops seldom draw their weapons, much less shoot at people, the story was frontpage news, which led to Netherlands-based foreign correspondents filing their own stories.

    Then Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a failed parliamentary candidate for the Netherlands’ far-right Forum for Democracy, was interviewed about the protests on Fox News. (Vlaardingerbroek was credited as a “legal philosopher” rather than a former politician for the only political party in the Netherlands that still defends Vladimir Putin.) She told one lie after another. Media Matters has the details.

    Other right-wing commentators and media, some writing about the Netherlands for the first time, repeated Vlaardingerbroek’s fabrications. I’ll debunk the four most common misconceptions. (more…)

  • Rutte Between Rock and Hard Place in Dutch Farm Crisis

    Mark Rutte
    Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte arrives at NATO headquarters in Brussels, June 14, 2021 (NATO)

    Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte finds himself between a rock and a hard place.

    His government’s plan to reduce pollution from farms, which requires reductions in livestock, has caused farmers and their sympathizers to leave his liberal VVD and Christian democratic coalition partner, CDA. Both parties are down in the polls.

    But to the extent that Rutte is willing to give in to farmers’ demands, it disappoints left-wing voters, which hurts his other governing partner, D66.

    It’s one of the issues I discussed last week with Alex Keeney and Atlantic Sentinel contributor Pratik Chougule on their podcast for political prediction markets, Star Spangled Gamblers. Can the center in the Netherlands hold? (more…)

  • The Netherlands’ Farm Crisis, Explained

    Netherlands
    Aerial view of the Netherlands (Skitterphoto)

    One in three Dutch farms may need to close. It’s the most painful consequence of the government’s plan to cut nitrogen emissions in half by 2030.

    The farmers’ lobby is furious, calling the plan “unrealistic” and an attack on the countryside. Pro-farmer parties have gained in the polls at the expense of the ruling Christian Democrats and liberals.

    Provincial deputies, who would need to decide on a case-by-case basis which farms can stay and which need to go, fear a backlash in regional elections in March. That would also put Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s majority at risk. Provincial deputies elect the Senate in May.

    Rutte’s center-right VVD (of which I am a member), is split down the middle. 51 percent of members who attended the annual party congress on Saturday voted for a motion to soften the farm policy.

    The cabinet minister responsible for it, Christianne van der Wal — who is of our party, but who answers to parliament, not the party — told a reporter on Sunday she has little wiggle room. “I’m always open to good ideas,” she said. “But the targets are crystal clear.”

    Before the coronavirus pandemic, Rutte — who has been in power for twelve years — called the nitrogen crisis the biggest of his political career. Yet there has been little coverage of it internationally. I suspect the reason is that Dutch media tend to emphasize reduction targets that are the result of judicial rulings, which gives foreign correspondents the impression that this is a Netherlands-only problem. But when you take a step back from nitrogen pollution and look at the impact of agriculture altogether, the Dutch is not an isolated case at all. It looks more like a preview of the future of intensive animal farming globally, if intensive animal farming has a future at all.

    I’ll do my best to explain both the narrow issue of nitrogen pollution and the broader story of animal farming. Along the way, I’ll review the arguments farmers have made against reductions and I’ll end with the political implications for Rutte’s coalition. (more…)