The Hague: Environmentally sensitive Dutch farmers are rebelling against government elites' more draconian green diktats -- and they're inspiring protests by other farmers across Europe. By Michael Sh
www.realclearinvestigations.com
Why Greens Can't Keep Angry Farmers Down on the Farm, in the Netherlands or Globally
By Michael Shellenberger, RealClearInvestigations
August 11, 2022
ALMERE, Netherlands — Farmers in the Netherlands reduced nitrogen pollution by nearly 70% through a voluntary system. But the government says that is not enough and is demanding that they cut pollution by another 50% by 2030.
By the Dutch government’s own estimates, 11,200 farms out of the roughly 35,000 dedicated to dairy and livestock would have to close under its policies; 17,600 farmers would have to reduce livestock; and total livestock would need to be reduced by one-half to one-third. The Dutch government has demanded that animal farming stop entirely in many places. Of the over $25.7 billion the government has set aside to reduce pollution, just $1 billion is for technological innovation, with most of the rest for buying out farmers.
This effort has sparked a fierce backlash among Dutch farmers, who argue that the government seems more interested in reducing animal agriculture than in finding solutions that protect the food supply and their livelihoods.
“Why would you buy out farmers or reduce livestock when you have the possibility to invest in innovation?” asked Caroline van der Plas, the founder and sole Member of Parliament for the Farmer-Citizen Movement party, or BBB in Dutch. “The car industry innovated for the past 40 years. There aren’t fewer cars and the cars we have are cleaner. We even have electrical cars. That's what I think is so crazy. Why don't we treat the farmers just like the car industry? Give them time to develop solutions or innovate? We can produce food in a much more efficient and cleaner way if we do that. And it's much cheaper also then by buying out farmers.”
Farmer protests in the Netherlands come at a time of heightened global food insecurity created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a major wheat exporter.
The Netherlands is the largest exporter of meat in Europe and the second largest exporter of food overall by economic value in the world, after the United States, a remarkable feat for a nation half the size of Indiana. Farm exports generate nearly $100 billion a year in revenue. Experts attribute the nation’s success to its farmers’ embrace of technological innovation.
The Netherlands is just one of the countries where governments are pushing for sharp limits on farming. Canada, for example, is seeking a 30% reduction in nitrogen pollution by 2030. While the Canadian government says it is not mandating fertilizer use reductions, only pollution reductions, experts agree that such a radical pollution decline in such a short period will only be possible through reducing fertilizer use, and thus food production. The cost to farmers would be between $10 billion and $48 billion.
“If you push farmers against the wall with no wiggle room, I don’t know where this will end up,” said Gunter Jochum, president of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association. “Just look at what’s happening in Europe, in the Netherlands. They’ve had enough of it.”
Where the proposed Dutch restrictions are driven by land and air pollution concerns, the Canadian restrictions are driven by the desire for strong action on climate change. But greenhouse gas emissions from farming pale compared to those from energy. Where carbon emissions from farming in Canada rose 87% to under 8 metric tons between 1990 and 2020, emissions from oil and gas production tripled, adding 69 metric tons of carbon dioxide, during the same period. With the pollution, however, came more food. Canada’s spring wheat yields increased over 40% during the period.
The most dramatic consequences of government intervention occurred in Sri Lanka, where a 2021 fertilizer ban led to a massive reduction in yields, sparking starvation and an economic crisis that brought down the government in July. Because agriculture is a source of greenhouse gases, the efforts by the governments and the backlash they are fomenting may be a harbinger of a global crisis.
Why are politicians being so dogmatic, in the view of their critics, at a time of rising food insecurity? After all, it’s obvious the strategy is not working – not even for them. In the Netherlands, after farmers blocked highways, dumped manure on roads, and started fires in protests across the country, they won the support of the broader public. If elections were held today, the governing parties would lose a significant number of members in parliament while Van der Plas’ Farmer-Citizen party might win enough to form a new government, with Van der Plas as prime minister. In Canada, the federal government has sparked a backlash from the regional governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan. And now, Dutch farmers are inspiring protests by other farmers across Europe, including in Germany, Poland, and Italy.
What, exactly, is going on?
'The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness'
To better understand the situation, I visited the Netherlands in July, interviewing farmers, government officials, and agricultural experts. One of those experts was Dr. Rudy Rabbinge, Professor Emeritus in Sustainable Development and Food Security at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
Rabbinge, 75 years old, has worked all of his life as a farmer, scientist, and cofounder, with Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, of the Green Revolution, which brought modern farming technologies to poor and developing nations starting in the 1960s. Speaking rapidly in excellent English, Rabbinge told me how he had converted his own family farm into a nature preserve, which he has shown off to hundreds of visiting dignitaries over the decades. Rabbinge advocates for “nature sparing” farming techniques to increase yields, and thus reduce the amount of land needed for farming, thereby creating more land available for nature conservation through the use of fertilizer and other chemical inputs.
“My neighbor, a dairy farmer, does his job very well,” says Rabbinge. “And we are right next to each other. I invite people to come see it. Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, came to visit, and together we started the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa. But in the Netherlands we have ministers who say that they are the boss and know the best policy, but often they have no experience, and leave the work to the people in the ministry.” None had come to visit, he said, since the controversy began.
Rabbinge traces the current crisis back to 2006 when the Dutch government ended the system of “mineral bookkeeping” he helped to create. Under that system, farmers measured nitrogen inputs in the form of feed and fertilizer and measured nitrogen outputs in the form of milk and meat. From that they could calculate how much was escaping as nitrogen pollution. Farmers took various measures to reduce pollution and paid fines for exceeding their limits. Between 1995 and 2006, this system, which set targets but let farmers decide how to meet them, slashed pollution by 70%.
This success ended when farmers revolted against government efforts to align its system with more prescriptive European Union regulations. Spooked by radicalized farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture halted the system of mineral bookkeeping. As a result, the continuous reduction in nitrogen emissions also ended. “It would have been better had they stuck with the system,” said Rabbinge, who blamed extremes on both sides – green-minded government ministers and radical anti-government farmers.
There are two forms of nitrogen pollution harmful to people and the environment: nitrogen oxide (NOx), a compound of nitrogen and oxygen, and ammonia (NH3), a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen. Nitrogen oxide tends to come from industrial emissions, while ammonia mostly comes from farm animal manure and synthetic fertilizers. Data from the government show that ammonia flatlined after 2006.
Another pivot point happened a decade later. In 2015, the Dutch government introduced an emissions trading scheme, which would allow farmers to buy and sell from each other rights to pollute in the present in exchange for reductions in the future. In 2016, environmental groups sued the Dutch government. In 2018, the EU Court ruled against the Dutch government and said the nation’s pollution-permitting scheme was inadequate, and in 2019, a Dutch high court sided with the EU.
In response, the lower house in the Dutch parliament asked for an external committee of experts, including Rabbinge, to advise the government. Rabbinge and his colleagues proposed reviving the system of mineral bookkeeping. The government rejected it. “Our recommendations were never seriously considered,” he says.
The government sees it differently. “We made a promise 20 years ago to take care of our nature preserves,” a senior staff person who works for the governing coalition in the Dutch Parliament told me. “We never did because having a strong economy was more important.”
But Rabbinge stressed that if farming is done efficiently, it can significantly reduce negative side effects. “For example, you could produce the same 15 billion liters of milk that the Netherlands currently produces while reducing by 50% the amount of land, by reducing by 80% the amount of pesticide, and by 70% the amount of nitrogen pollution.”
Government officials latched on to hard targets and regulations. Rabbinge calls this the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” whereby bureaucrats lawyers and economists, in particular, tend to want to see hard-and-fast rules rather than the incremental and iterative approach of mineral bookkeeping and the similar "4R" program in Canada.
Consider the map published by the Dutch government in June. Government officials no doubt meant for it to be helpful. It showed which areas needed to reduce emissions by very specific amounts, which ranged between 12% and 95% depending on the location. But it alarmed farmers and, according to independent scientists, was based on false precision. Scientists simply don’t have a good enough understanding of the sources of nitrogen pollution to create such a detailed map.
One of the people who raised concerns about the accuracy of government maps of pollution is a microbiologist named Han Lindeboom, a member of the green-oriented D66 party that had pushed for strict pollution limits. Lindeboom says he debunked government claims about one of the sources of pollution. “I knew there was no ammonia coming from the North Sea and that they had simply added ammonia to their model. I went to the North Holland nature areas and found no critical excess of nitrogen pollution. Still, [government scientists] didn’t want to give in.”
Lindeboom says he wrote up a report and presented it to members of Parliament from the D66 party, but they ignored it.
In other words, the government is focused narrowly on shutting down farms near nature areas, even though the polluting nitrogen mineral deposits in the nature areas may have come from elsewhere. “You see that very often with policymakers and economists,” said Rabbinge. “They believe they know very well how society functions but don’t do experiments to test whether the outcomes of their models are in line with their simulations. As a result of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness you think you know things you don’t know. If you think pollution in a nature area is coming from a nearby stable, you might be wrong, because the pollution might be coming from higher levels in the air, and settling elsewhere.”
Rabbinge went on. “Economists and policymakers believe in the outcomes of models that have never been verified and are taken up by people sitting in an office in the Hague. They don’t know what’s happening in the stable or the field.”
Jeroen van Maanen, 44, loves cows. The windowsill in his kitchen in the Dutch countryside is cluttered with trophies he has won for his prize cows. “I have a lot more than this,” he explains. “These are from only from the last years, 2017, 18, and 19.”
Van Maanen is a dairy and beef farmer who has become radicalized by his government’s proposed crackdown on nitrogen pollution. We walk through his barn. “We milk about 130 cows. Sometimes my kids help but I got divorced five years ago, and so they live in the village most of the times.”
Van Maanen says he was born to be a farmer. “I was a very shy boy till I was 12 or 14. And the only reason I started talking was so I could talk about cows.”
At the same time, said Van Maanen, “It's not an easy life. There’s a lot of negative parts. In the past, you were just farming for high results.”
Back in the barn, Van Maanen said, “Now, there's demands for the environment or for the government. Every year there’s more. And it's increasing your costs.
They say the consumer wants it but the consumer’s not paying for it. The prices on the shelf are the same amount. People say they want small family farms. They say, ‘The farms are getting too big.’ Well, we had a ****ing system that made them get bigger.”
He continued: “You know, a farmer isn't a farmer for money. It’s the way of life. As long as there's people on earth, they need food. We need farmers for that. It’s a very responsible job. And I think every farmer in the whole world is doing the best he can, but it's not appreciated anymore. People don't really understand or respect farmers anymore.”
I told Rabbinge about what Van Maanen said. “Farming is not just a job,” Rabbinge stressed. “It's a way of life. And if you take that away, then you're taking away a lot of motivation to live. That's why you see more farmers killing themselves.” Indeed, researchers find higher suicide rates for farmers in Europe, Australia, the U.S., and India in what appears to be a global phenomenon.
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