Today, we are talking about the agricultural crisis in the Netherlands with the decryption of the Dutch journalist, Roger Stryland, correspondent in Paris. Because it’s been two months that the agricultural world in the Netherlands is in full “revolution”. A crisis that dates back to the 1950s, after the war, explains Roger Stryland.
franceinfo: What is happening with our Dutch neighbours?
Roger Stryland: The situation is very complicated and to understand it, you have to understand that the Netherlands is a very small country: each hectare is optimized and the crisis that exists today is the result of a Dutch agricultural policy that goes back in the 1950s, post-war. At the time, there were small farmers who had small land. They were forced to exchange them for other pieces of land, elsewhere, to expand. And that’s how much later, we arrived at a situation of the industrialization of agriculture in the Netherlands. An agriculture that has become intensive, to such an extent that there are a great many heads of cattle.
For example today, there are 11 million pigs, 4 million cows, 100 million chickens, for 18 million inhabitants. Agriculture is very intensive and very polluting. And one of the pollutants, nitrogen, is now a problem. This pollution is such that it affects natural regions, designated in the Natura 2000 program.
That’s the main warm-up point. Nitrogen itself is not a pollutant, it is in the air. It is a product that is found everywhere, but in very large quantities, it falls back to earth, it enters the ecosystem and it pollutes. So we had to tackle this problem.
And the farmers are against the Dutch government, the government of Mark Rutte?
Absolutely, against the government of Mark Rutte, and like several governments, still led by Mark Rutte since 2010, they let this problem slip away a bit. It’s coming back like a boomerang today, and to solve this question in a pragmatic way, the measures are radical. Radical, because the government says that to fight against nitrogen, it is necessary that a third of the farms stop their activities, that another third reconvert, which makes all the same 60% of the farms.
Today, we are at 50,000 farms, and that means that roughly speaking, 30,000 farms today are in danger. So we can understand the anger of farmers and especially that of the youngest.
30,000 farmers, how will the country feed itself?
That is precisely the big question. But also, we must not forget that today, the Netherlands is the second largest agricultural exporter. You see how intensive the industry has become. Farmers are not even farmers, they are entrepreneurs.
And you will no longer be the second largest exporter…
This will be one of the consequences. The Netherlands, normally, it is a relatively peaceful country, but not this time. The farmers demonstrated in a violent way that we have rarely seen. Politicians, especially ministers, have been intimidated. The actions were particularly violent, police cars were “stoned”. A violence that paralyzes the Dutch.
Today, what we are proposing to farmers is already to use technologies that pollute less. But this requires large investments and farmers have already invested heavily in their businesses. So not all of them can do it. Today, to calm things down, the government has appointed a mediator who himself comes from the government which, three years ago, designed the current project. So he’s less of a mediator than that, but he’s an eminence grise. In any case, he knows his case.
So what exactly to offer these farmers? The mediator left with a check for more than 7 billion euros which can effectively help farmers to convert. The only advantage is that most Dutch farmers are over 50, 60% of them to be precise. So I think that Mr. Remkes, the negotiator, is racing against time hoping that without really solving the problem, over time, it will subside.
Do the people, the Dutch themselves, defend their farmers?
I think there is a difference with France, where every Frenchman feels close to farmers. In the Netherlands, the situation is somewhat different. The country is divided in two: one part in the west, the economic and political center, which understands absolutely nothing of the problem of farmers, and on the other side, far from power, in the villages, they understand nothing of what is happening in The Hague to the government.