●After the election results were announced, Caroline van der Plas, leader of the Farmer–Citizen Movement, addresses the crowd on stage. Image source: NUOver six months after Dutch farmers first took to the streets to protest the government’s nitrogen-reduction policy, the Farmer–Citizen Movement (BoerBurgerBeweging, or BBB)—widely regarded as the “pro-farmer” party—emerged as the dark horse of this March’s Dutch regional elections. Founded barely four years ago, BBB not only won nearly 20% of the vote but also secured 17 seats in the Senate, instantly becoming the largest party in the chamber. Yet was this electoral triumph truly a victory for Dutch farmers and agriculture? Let us begin with the Dutch nitrogen-reduction policy that sparked nationwide protests.
I. Do Cows Really Bear the Blame for Nitrogen Emissions?
The root of the nitrogen-reduction policy lies in the EU’s protective legislation for Natura 2000 conservation areas. Scientists believe that excessive nitrogen-containing gases in the air—primarily nitrogen oxides and ammonia—re-enter the soil, causing nitrogen deposition and, in turn, a range of ecological disasters. The Netherlands records the highest nitrogen emissions in all of Europe.
According to estimates by the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), 41% of the deposited nitrogen comes from agricultural emissions. So when the Dutch government last year called for a 70% cut in nitrogen emissions by 2030 to protect the country’s fragile nature reserves, agriculture naturally became the target of regulation: the policy plans a 30% reduction in livestock numbers, alongside government buyouts and forced closures to deal with the affected farms.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Dutch farmers feel this policy is specifically “targeting” them. In the accounting of greenhouse gases, Dutch agriculture had always accounted for less than 10% of the country’s total emissions—yet the moment the method of measuring gas emissions changed, agriculture became the “chief culprit”.
●Nitrogen emission distribution mapped by RIVM. The chart mainly accounts for ammonia (square symbols) and nitrogen oxides (round symbols). The top five nitrogen-emitting companies are: Tata Steel, Schiphol Airport, Dow Chemicals, Chemelot and Shell.
That said, nitrogen emissions from Dutch livestock farming have long been a serious problem. If one looks more closely at where those emissions actually come from, the picture grows considerably more complex.
“Cows’ dung and urine mix together into ammonia, and we live in this cloud of cow muck.” In a comedy song adapted to the melody of Leonard Cohen’s famous “Hallelujah”, two well-known Dutch comedians satirised the government’s habit of blaming all nitrogen emissions on animal waste. The song is called “All the Cows” (Alle koeien).
In reality, digestion and excretion in livestock are perfectly normal physiological processes; the true source of the problem is far too high stocking densities. According to 2021 statistics, the Netherlands’ 40,000-odd square kilometres of land—roughly the size of six and a half Shanghais—held 3.8 million cattle, 11.4 million pigs and nearly 100 million chickens, putting its livestock density four times above the EU average.
Large volumes of imported soybean feed and the nitrogen fertiliser required to grow forage are the very prerequisites that make high-density intensive farming possible. The Netherlands is the world’s sixth-largest soybean importer; in 2021 it imported 4.16 million tonnes of soybeans from Brazil, the United States, Canada and other countries, worth $1.96 billion in total. Converted into land area, this is equivalent to the Netherlands importing food production from a territory nine times the size of its own farmland—larger than the country’s entire landmass.
Total Dutch livestock numbers, 2021Total Dutch soybean imports and sources, 2021. In the same period, China’s soybean import value was 27.3 times that of the Netherlands.
And who, precisely, has been encouraging the import of feed and nitrogen fertiliser? It is none other than the Dutch government, which has long pursued an agricultural expansion strategy; Cargill, the multinational agribusiness giant trading in soybeans; and Rabobank, the Dutch cooperative bank that provides financial backing to Cargill and other companies while actively promoting large-scale farming. If one were truly to trace the origins of nitrogen emissions, these actors would be even harder to exonerate than the cows in the sheds.
II. Who Is Driving Intensive Livestock Farming?
“Together, we create a better world.” This is the false vision manufactured in Rabobank’s official advertising slogan. In reality, the bank is a root cause of all manner of environmental problems, the nitrogen crisis among them, and it is also the greatest beneficiary of the large-scale model of Dutch livestock farming. The expansion model that Rabobank actively encourages is what Professor Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, former Head of the Department of Sociology at Wageningen University and author of The New Peasantries, calls “entrepreneurial agriculture”.
In the preface to The New Peasantries, Professor Ye Jingzhong of China Agricultural University summarises its characteristics thus: “…Because expansion is heavily dependent on credit, entrepreneurial agriculture tends to carry relatively high levels of debt. Financial pressure is then translated into an urgency to accelerate production, extracting the highest possible financial returns (profits) from every available piece of land to cover interest payments and loan principal.”
The trend towards ever-larger farm sizes in the Netherlands is a case in point: between 2000 and 2021, the average farm size grew by between one and 2.3 times, and Rabobank’s profits from lending quadrupled. Yet the farms themselves failed to get their share of the so-called “economies of scale”. Why?
●From top to bottom: the average number of pigs, dairy cows and laying hens kept on Dutch farms (in thousands), and Rabobank’s profits from lending. Chart source: Greenpeace NetherlandsThe answer is simple: bound up with the bank’s credit are chemical inputs whose costs keep climbing, and the costly technology investments that go hand in hand with large-scale operations—heavy machinery, computers and agricultural robots, to name a few. The ones raking in the profits are the feed, fertiliser, veterinary-drug and farm-machinery companies; the abattoirs and meat- and dairy-processing plants; and Rabobank itself, which invests across the entire supply chain from end to end. Farmers, by contrast, are not doing so well. They must shoulder persistently high external input costs while lacking the power to resist the low prices imposed by supermarkets and retailers. In 2016, more than 44% of Dutch farmers lived below the low-income threshold; among dairy farmers, the figure rose as high as 56%; and at pig farms carrying an average debt of €1.8 million, poverty is particularly acute.
Under last year’s nitrogen-reduction policy, the Dutch government will release nearly €750 million in compensation for the closure and buyout of farms. This money can indeed help some farmers clear their loans, but it also means that funds will flow directly into Rabobank. The largest investor in intensive farming emerges from this nitrogen crisis virtually unscathed, while farmers’ livelihoods, biodiversity and public finances pay an enormous price for its negative externalities.
III. Where Is the Way Forward for Dutch Agriculture?
●In March this year, supporters of agroecology also organised a protest march. The Dutch banner in the centre reads ‘More farmers, less CO₂’.Professor Van der Ploeg told Foodthink: ‘We are now trapped in a double vacuum. First, there is the political vacuum: no party has yet had the courage and vision to put forward a viable proposal. Second, there is the socio-technical vacuum: no practical solution exists that all stakeholders can accept.’ Solutions are not entirely absent. In fact, he believes that “smallholder agriculture” is one possible way out of the current environmental crisis. Agroecology—the field that supports smallholder agriculture and emphasises the synergistic development of agriculture, nature, and society—has, after years of exploration and research, also been shown capable of addressing the twin agricultural and environmental crisis we face today.
Even in the Netherlands, beyond the highly market- and input-dependent intensive livestock farming, there are a good number of small farms transitioning to ecological mixed farming—farms that use no chemical fertilisers, pesticides, or herbicides, rebuilding nutrient and energy cycles through free-range livestock, and thereby achieving a more harmonious co-production with nature.
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Yet Professor Van der Ploeg also points out that in the Netherlands, where discourse is firmly controlled by big agribusiness, vested interests will not accept a sustainable transition that would raise smallholder farmers’ autonomy. Instead, they will continue to push through various high-cost technological solutions, drawing farmers, government, and society ever deeper into their “technological trap”. This may explain why the left-wing Party for the Animals, despite pledging to tax Rabobank and subsidise sustainable agriculture, failed to win the support of the majority of farming voters, and why the organisations behind the Green Farmers Plan ten-point joint petition remain barely audible in the public sphere.
01 Achieve fair prices through public fiscal interventions such as taxes on polluting activities.02 Establish reasonable, comprehensive pricing mechanisms that fully account for farmers’ interests and environmental value.03 Advocate circular agriculture integrating crop and livestock production, reducing dependence on external fertiliser sources.04 Ensure farmers can participate fully in decision-making and action.05 Governments and society should provide comprehensive support for farmers’ transition.06 Governments should lead by example, establish mechanisms to encourage ecological agriculture, promote healthy diets, and prevent corporate greenwashing.07 Promote localised short supply chain agriculture.08 Land policies must serve sustainable agriculture.09 Embed nature-inclusive principles in agricultural education, encourage farmers to take part in transition research, and pay farmers for sharing knowledge and experience.10 Emphasise legislative fairness, ensuring fair, appropriate and incentivising laws and regulations.Does the “pro-farmer” party BBB recognise the severity of the nitrogen emission problem? Probably not. Party leader Van der Plas has repeatedly stated that the nitrogen-reduction policy is merely the Dutch government’s own self-inflicted straitjacket, not a direct mandate from the EU, and that the Netherlands need only comply with EU law, like all other member states, without making any extra effort to cut nitrogen. Once the election dust had settled, she also began actively seeking dialogue with the EU to secure greater room for Dutch livestock farmers.
But what is crushing Dutch farmers is not only the top-down, one-size-fits-all environmental policy—it is also a mode of production that bankrupts farmers while financiers and upstream enterprises reap all the rewards. BBB, proud of the Netherlands’ efficient agriculture and high-quality agricultural exports, is probably equally uninterested in changing this unsustainable way of producing.
●Commentators have noted that BBB’s success owes much to capturing right-wing voters from the populist Forum for Democracy (FvD). In 2019, FvD—adept at exploiting anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment—surged from zero to twelve seats in the Senate, only to fall from grace soon after owing to internal conflicts and an inability to tackle real-world problems. Pictured: FvD party leader Thierry Baudet. Image source: EPAHow will BBB’s rise reshape Dutch politics? Where will the nitrogen-reduction policy go next? These remain to be seen. But what is certain is this: the solution to the nitrogen crisis must be systemic. The massive social and political backlash has laid bare the complex relationship between agriculture and environmental protection; it is absolutely impossible to untangle that relationship through one-size-fits-all mathematical calculations. Any attempt to simplify, polarise, or shy away from the hard truths will only deepen this crisis. On this, Professor Van der Ploeg adds that the time has come to return smallholder agriculture to centre stage, so that its ecological potential can be fully realised. Yet even in the environmentally conscious heart of Europe, the complex relationship between agriculture and the environment remains a gulf dividing city dwellers on one side from farmers and scholars on the other.
Unless the public can collectively recognise the unsustainability of the current agricultural model, any real political progress will remain out of reach, and conservative forces like BBB will ultimately reclaim centre stage.
Notes and Referenceshttps://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2023/03/brussels-or-the-hague-van-der-plas-and-timmermans-to-meet/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/world/europe/netherlands-elections-farmers-emissions.html
