<html>
<body>
<h1><b>Dutch farmers battle technocratic forces driving them into
oblivion</b></h1>
<a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2022/12/08/dutch-farmers-technocratic-plan/" eudora="autourl">
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/12/08/dutch-farmers-technocratic-plan/</a>
<br><br>
<a href="https://tlio.org.uk/dutch-farmers-battle-technocratic-forces-driving-them-into-oblivion/" eudora="autourl">
https://tlio.org.uk/dutch-farmers-battle-technocratic-forces-driving-them-into-oblivion/<br>
<br>
</a><a href="https://thegrayzone.com/author/nash-landesman/">Nash
Landesman</a>·December 8, 2022<br><br>
<h3><b>Dutch farmers are in open struggle against a cartel of
multinational corporations, Davos-aligned parties and NGO’s seeking
control over the global food supply. “They are sweeping the culture from
the land,” a farmer laments.</b></h3><b>HEERENVEEN, NETHERLANDS</b> ––
The Netherlands is a patchwork of quaint towns and cities interwoven with
flat expanses of immaculately-kept green agricultural pasture. The road
and rail infrastructure are near-flawless. You could search for weeks
without finding a pothole. It is one of the most expensive countries in
the world, and makes some of the best steak, cheese, yogurt and milk on
the planet. The land is fertile, valuable, and strategically located with
easy access to the north Atlantic coast. So, for these reasons and more,
legions of committees composed of unelected, largely unknown figures
serving on the boards of an interwoven network of even lesser known
private and multilateral bodies, insists on seizing it all, on account of
saving the planet from its deadliest enemy: man himself. Their target:
the Dutch farmer. “They are slowly killing us with regulation,” one
farmer told The Grayzone.<i> </i>It is death by a thousand paper-cuts, or
<i>The Art of War</i> by the modern technocrat.<br><br>
<img src="cid:7.0.1.0.1.20230109001839.05005660@cultureshop.org.uk.0" width=608 height=459 alt="Emacs!">
<br><br>
First, some background: Holland exports the most food on earth, behind
only America, on a landmass roughly the size of Indiana. Farmers the
world over come to study Dutch techniques. The country embraces what’s
known as the Mansholt theorya philosophy of ensuring food security and
self-sufficiency that emerged from the second world war as a response to
Nazi-imposed famine. To stave-off a similar tragedy, Dutch agriculture
embraces the
<a href="https://www.britannica.com/technology/Haber-Bosch-process">
Haber-Bosch process</a>, a method of infusing fertilizer with nitrogen to
increase yield efficiency. Invented in the early 1900s by a pair of Nobel
Prize-winning chemists, Haber-Bosch is
<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/22672">responsible</a> for the
existence of half the world’s population today (and is known in
<a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Malthus">
Malthusian</a> circles as
“<a href="https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1999Natur.400..415S/abstract">
the detonator of the population explosion</a>”), thanks to its ability to
grow more food on less land.<br><br>
But now global bodies like the World Bank’s
“<a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/climate-smart-agriculture">
Climate Smart Agriculture</a>” program, the UN’s
“<a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/06/14/world-bank-report-investing-in-protected-areas-reaps-big-rewards">
protected area initiatives</a>,” the European Commission and armies of
well-funded NGO’s are executing a wholly-comprehensive platform targeting
Dutch farmers restricting both organic and artificial fertilizer use
while asserting “biodiversity protection” as the pretext for snatching
land from the productive.<br><br>
Dutch farmers,
<a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2022/08/19/farms-food-dutch-farmers-protests-elite/">
in protest,</a> have driven tractors to the Hague, tossed flaming trash
onto the roads and sprayed manure across government buildings.<br><br>
It’s worth reemphasizing that the Dutch government is carrying out the
same
<a href="https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-decimates-sri-lankan-crops-government-popularity-ebbs-2022-03-03/">
radical experiment</a> conducted in Sri Lanka earlier this year
<a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05/sri-lanka-organic-farming-crisis/">
eliminating</a> nitrogen-based fertilizer, the basis of modern survival.
In the southeast Asian country, it led to a
<a href="https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-decimates-sri-lankan-crops-government-popularity-ebbs-2022-03-03/">
famine</a> that toppled the government. The Sri Lankan
“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/world/asia/sri-lanka-organic-farming-fertilizer.html">
disaster</a>” fronted a simple premise: replace something with nothing.
And to eliminate Russian gas from the geopolitical scene. The
<a href="https://www.inms.international/colombo-declaration/colombo-declaration#:~:text=The%252024th%2520October%2520was,goal%2520for%2520improved%2520nitrogen%2520management.">
Colombo declaration</a>, signed in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2019,
celebrated the end of food security and sovereignty, offering in its
place a model for import-dependency and agricultural destruction now
being imposed on the Dutch.<br><br>
“They are sweeping the culture from the land,” says Sieta Van Keimpema, a
sturdy 6-foot Dutchwoman in her 50s with short, wavy black hair. She is
head of the European Milk Board, and leader of the Dutch farmers’
de-facto political arm,
<a href="https://farmersdefenceforce.nl/">Farmer’s Defense Force
(FDF)</a>.<br><br>
“Our government has made laws and laws that put us in a corner that you
cannot come back from,” she says. “If people cannot put food on the table
you get riots. You get an unstable society. I don’t see the benefits to
this.” Her group, Farmer’s Defense Force, is characterized as vigilante
populist heroes by some; and as troublemakers
<a href="https://nltimes.nl/2022/08/06/farmers-group-pledge-hardest-demonstrations-ever-environment-policy-meeting">
responsible for sparking the protests</a> by others. FDF originated after
environmental activists, <a href="https://meat-the-victims.org/en">Meat
the Victims</a>, forcefully occupied a pig farm in a small Dutch town in
2019. Instead of taking action, police sent in negotiators, prolonging
the ordeal. FDF subsequently created a “Bat Signal” whereby farmers can
call on a special WhatsApp group to rally others to come to the
rescue.<br><br>
When they aren’t producing food, members can be found battling Brussels
or butting heads in the Hague. “We have a government spending 25 billion
euros to reduce agricultural production,” Sieta says, confirming official
policy. According to heavily-redacted
<a href="https://farmersdefenceforce.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/20220429-1Flash-report-mtg-Cmr-SINKEVI%25C4%258CIUS-with-NL-Minister-of-Agriculture-H.-Staghouwer-17012022-1_Redacted.pdf">
European Commission documents</a>, the goal is “terminating farms”
through overregulation, deploying mandatory buyouts if
necessary.<br><br>
Official justifications are not up for debate. Take some of the most
insulting regulations, made in the name of
“<a href="https://www.oecd.org/env/resources/financing-water-supply-sanitation-and-flood-protection-country-fact-sheet-the-netherlands.pdf">
flood prevention</a>,” a puzzle the Dutch have
<a href="https://www.humanprogress.org/how-the-dutch-tamed-the-waters/#:~:text=Relentlessly%2520draining%2520lands%2520through%2520clever,have%2520overcome%2520their%2520oceanic%2520challenge.">
solved</a> since the country’s inception, erecting dykes, walls, levies
and canals to build a civilization out of the oceans (as half of Holland
lies below sea-level). In its green manifesto, the Dutch Environmental
Assessment Agency preaches that “more radical policies are needed,
particularly for flood protection…The main emphasis is on the planet
dimension…a Netherlands that is more sustainable and Future-Proof.”
Accordingly, some computer models predict “with 80% certainty” a
sea-level rise of 20 meters within the next century, after having risen 2
cm across the last one.<br><br>
A related justification is that nitrogen leakage caused by agriculture
makes Dutch tap water undrinkable, and so farming must be eliminated. The
reality is that Holland’s tap water was awarded second best on the
continent by the
<a href="https://www.wetapwater.com/european-water-awards-2020/results-top-10/">
European Water Awards</a>; behind Austria, in a debatable placement.
Dutch drinking water is so crisp and clean, it almost makes <i>Evian</i>
taste like toilet sludge. The real problem: Holland is 50% composed of
mostly independently-owned agricultural operations, and they occupy prime
real-estate.<br><br>
The Dutch environmental report further seems to justify what many have
been speculating: “The inflow of foreign migrants [caused in no small
part by U.S. wars] feeds the need for expansion,” calling for the
elimination of 300,000 hectares of farmland between now and 2040. This
will be initiated by “the conversion of agricultural land into nature
conservation areas,” without irony. Additionally, rich people need second
homes, since “it is assumed that families with a high income will opt to
live in green areas. Dutch households display a marked preference for
single-family homes with a garden. The Dutch concept of the ideal home
will shift, possibly in the direction of ‘gated communities’, [and] more
second home ownership.”<br><br>
To nobody’s surprise, housing developers subsidized by the government and
working with the Society for Preservation of Nature Monuments in the
Netherlands, have already begun to
<a href="https://www.ad.nl/doetinchem/pal-naast-natura-2000-gebied-in-barchem-wil-natuurmonumenten-grote-huizen-bouwen~a2655cac/">
erect houses</a> in “protected areas,” on lands wrested from farmers.
<br><br>
In the Netherlands around 800,000 people work in agriculture. “If you
reduce half the sector there’s not critical mass anymore to continue,”
Sieta explains. “The big dairies need a certain amount of milk to have a
viable cost price…I think we are the only country in the world that has a
minister of nitrogenwho really doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
She admitted ‘I really don’t know what I’m saying.” I say, go home,
because what she’s doing is destroying a whole sector.”<br><br>
Meanwhile, many farmers have reached consensus about the forces they
believe to be behind the attack on their livelihoods.<br><br>
“Left-wing parties like
<a href="https://d66.nl/verkiezingsprogramma/election-manifesto-in-english/">
Democrats 66</a>,” which promises, “we’ll be working towards reducing the
cattle population by half,” “are very close to
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-vHK3kO3wI">Klaus Schwab</a>,”
Sieta says. “They go to Davos and don’t deny it. It’s a fact that the WEF
[World Economic Forum/Davos Group] is pushing legislation that isn’t
decided in a democratic way. If you comment on that, as I did in the
meeting, the civil servants get really aggressive. The Netherlands is
pushing legislation that has never been discussed in the parliament.”
Mention that the air is comprised of 85% nitrogen, and you’re slammed as
a “climate denier.”<br><br>
“The D for democracy has become dictation. They have no shame,” Sieta
says. “The government has given an enormous subsidy to artificial meat;
lab meat, and they’re calling it ‘future food.’ But I’m not going to eat
insects. I’m going to eat beef and chicken.” The bottom line, according
to Sieta: “They produce hot air, we produce food on the table…They don’t
want innovation, they want buyouts.”<br><br>
Indeed, Holland’s world-famous agricultural innovation hub,
<a href="https://www.wur.nl/en/research-results/research-institutes/plant-research/field-crops/agriculture-of-the-future.htm">
Wageningen University</a>, the Stanford /Silicon Valley of farming, has
ceased developing techniques that help farmers. Instead they’re now
focused on
<a href="https://www.wur.nl/en/dossiers/file/insects-food-and-feed.htm">
producing bugs for human consumption.</a> The World Economic Forum
promote this agenda with ads featuring Hollywood stars like Nicole Kidman
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYhlxo6ezwE&t=27s">chomping
down</a> on a bowl of crickets, putting an Aussie-accented celebrity glow
on a grim and deeply disturbing future.<br><br>
“The farmers have seen what is happening with the World Economic Forum,
with Bill Gates, etc…that’s why they are so active,” Sieta adds. “They
know that what they are fighting is a very strong lobby of multinationals
who really want to control food. After the war we decided we should never
have hunger again, to produce as much food as possible and to use
nitrogen and fertilizer to do it. But now they are pushing an
<a href="https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.L_.2014.148.01.0088.01.ENG&toc=OJ:L:2014:148:TOC">
agenda</a> very similar to what Hitler wanted. If you control food then
you control everything.”<br><br>
The Dutch government has teamed up with pools of private capital and NGOs
linked to international institutions to mobilize over $25 billion to
terminate Dutch farmers. One group in particular strikes fear into the
heart of farmers: the relentless, racketeering eco-lobby,
“<a href="https://mobilisation.nl/en/">MOBilization for the
Environment</a>,” known as MOB.<br><br>
“We have MOB. When we go to court we lose because of legislation; the
provinces will fight the MOB. MOB is fighting the provinces,” Sieta says.
“It all started in may 2019 when the court decided our program for
nitrogen was not good. They made us guinea pigs, like in Sri
Lanka.”<br><br>
MOB has a
<a href="https://www.trouw.nl/duurzaamheid-economie/deze-man-maakte-van-de-stikstofcrisis-de-milieukwestie-van-het-jaar~b07ae7ba/?referrer=https://www.google.com/">
superpower</a>: to sniff-out any
<a href="https://nos.nl/artikel/2440593-natuurorganisaties-niet-van-plan-ruimte-te-geven-in-stikstofoverleg">
leeway</a> that a Dutch provincial government may be offering to a farmer
to aid in his survival, and to
<a href="https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=207424&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=408977">
sue</a> that government into imposing more rules, harsher restrictions,
tighter regulations until his existence is terminated.<br><br>
Mainline Dutch media called MOB’s leader, Johan Vollenbroek, “the most
hated man in the Netherlands by some.” And on the group’s dominance over
recent nitrogen negations: “MOB is of course not in charge; the
cabinet will eventually have to make the decision. But MOB and a number
of other nature organizations do have an important means of pressure:
lawsuits. In recent years they have carried hundreds of them and very
often the judges proved them right.”<br><br>
MOB’s mandate runs from the petty they’ll sue to reject a single farm’s
grazing application to the grandiose, setting new and major national
legal precedents, like revamping the country’s entire nitrogen program in
2019. Governments fear them. Farmers cannot stop them. And this is how
Vollenbroek supposedly spends his retirement. Of course he is likely an
agent of those who wrote the treaties to begin with.<br><br>
While Vollenbroek applauds the fact that five Dutch farms are destroyed
each day, he also argues that more work is needed to be done. Vollenbroek
receives death threats and lives most of the time in France, according to
reports. Dutch royalty, the Order of Orange-Nassau, has even knighted
Vollenbroek for his efforts against farming. He is not a lawyer. Nor an
activist. He is a corporate chemical engineer and somehow a treaty expert
who consults EU nations on how to override their own laws in obedience to
a galaxy of global treaties written over three decades ago at the 1991
Rio Earth Summit. Every country has its own versions of such groups
built-into the framework of the global system: inside-experts posing as
environmentalists to enforce or extend vaguely-written treaties for the
sake of opportunistic exploitation, fulfilling geopolitical goals and
long-term plans. But in Holland, MOB has a track record for setting
anti-farming precedents that stick. <br><br>
As Vollenbroek stated, “Once you’ve concluded a treaty, you can’t just
break it open and negotiate again…The livestock population simply has to
be drastically reduced, a large number of farmers have to stop … There is
no alternative.”<br><br>
MOB is responsible for revoking thousands of Dutch farming permits in
court. According to part of MOB’s lengthly mission statement/public
<a href="https://mobilisation.nl/index.php?id=10">manifesto</a>,
translated from Dutch: <br><br>
“I am ashamed to be Dutch. Time is running out, especially for the people
of the rich countries, to open their eyes to a disturbing truth: we have
colonized the future. The Netherlands has become a developing country in
terms of environmental sustainability. The pariah of Europe.”<br><br>
<b>It is on this basis that MOB has singled out farmers as the main
source of the nation’s supposed environmental problems. They have been
ringing this same alarm bell for thirty years now, ever since the group
was founded in the early 1990s. And yet somehow, the Netherlands still
stands.<br><br>
<br>
<h3><b>Four Dutch farmers</b></h3><b>Johan/Paula: “They’ve left us with
no room to move into the future”<br><br>
</b>From an environmental perspective, no country on earth could be less
environmentally menacing than Holland.<br><br>
Near the Dutch town of Emmen, along the German border, Johan and his wife
Paula struggle to survive as 5<sup>th</sup> generation dairy farmers.
“Milk runs through my veins,” Johan says, standing with his hands on his
hips, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette out back behind his shabby house.
“Home is where the cows are.” Yet Johan’s down-home wisdom and
minimalistic way of life are being eradicated, as his wife, Paula, chimes
in: “They are slowly killing us with more rules and regulations. They’ve
left us with no room to move into the future.”<br><br>
The family plan to flee to Ireland where they perceive climate regulation
to be less stringent. Their children, enrolled in agricultural school,
will not be able to inherit the family farm as intended. Under a new
Dutch law, once you stop farming, you and your entire kin are forever
banned from farming in the Netherlands again.<br><br>
The family is not being offered a buyout because their land falls within
a so-called “protected area,” making it illegal to milk cows or perform
agricultural activity under the
EU/<a href="http://web.worldbank.org/archive/website00660/WEB/OTHER/GEFIUCNW.HTM">
World Bank’s GEF</a> (Global Environmental Facility)
<a href="https://www.government.nl/topics/nature-and-biodiversity/natura-2000">
Natura 2000 treaty</a>. They are also forbidden from planting corn until
late fall, when the crop is no longer viable.<br><br>
There <i>is</i> a push pull dynamic that offers farmers some breathing
room, provided they can pay for it. You can buy carbon and phosphate
offset rights, giving the rich a chance to prosper in the new green
economy. But “every time they make an allowance, they take it back,”
Paula says, pointing to the Dutch government’s recent encouragement of
farmers to build specialized, $100,000 mechanical barn floors to separate
fecal matter from urine (thus reducing ammonia).<br><br>
The floor allowance held up briefly, with farmers taking out huge loans
to build them. But soon enough, the litigious “MOB came and argued it
wasn’t good enough,” Johan says. “They won the court battle. If you pay
the MOB enough money they will back off. That’s why they’re called the
mob, after all,” he laughs.<br><br>
The government has already snatched a parcel of his family’s property due
to its being within 30 meters of a “protected watershed.” “Soon it’s
going to be 40 meters, then 400,” Paula says. “Eventually they will take
everything.”<br><br>
<b>Nelly: “There have been many suicides. People get sick and ill and
depressed.”<br><br>
</b>In the Friesian town of Hoogeveen, resides Nelly, a 73-year-old
champion horse-breeder and dairy farmer. She says she is tired of
fighting both breast cancer and overregulation. Nelly receives regular
“control checks” by bureaucrats visiting her farm up to five times a
week, ensuring her withering operation abide by increasingly unrealistic
standards. “They check for everything. Ear tags, manure, cows, your yard.
Now you need a permit to mow grass between stones, which is totally crazy
since it has nothing to do with dairy farming.”<br><br>
Her farm requires an endless array of new permits just to function, and
everything she does is tracked. “The cows have the ear tags and the
horses have a transponder under their skin, registered in the system. The
government wants to know where everything is, so if a horse has to go to
a training stable, we have to put it in the computer so they can see,”
she says, pointing to an Excel sheet on her laptop. “They make the rules
stronger and stronger. It gets harder and harder to survive.” Soon, Nelly
surmises, “we will need a permit to ride our own horses. Things are
heading in that direction.” The weeds between boulders in her front yard
have grown unwieldy, as Nelly has not yet received her renewed mowing
permit for the year.<br><br>
The irony, of course, as Nelly explains, is that “the government says we
need to get rid of the farmers, that we need nature; but if they send the
farmers away then it will be one big mess. We do not only milk cows, but
we keep our pastures and the forest in good condition. Everything is kept
neat by the farmers.”<br><br>
Nelly’s farm is emptier than usual, due to a new law stating that you can
keep no more than 1.5 cows per hectare, an impossibly small number down
from four. The regulation favoring large landowners has already cost
Nelly a third of her cows.<br><br>
“We have to sell 17 cows out of 55 and a heifer counts as two,” she says.
“We live in the middle of a forest and have only a few hectares out front
so we cannot use pasture, but we have loads of land. If we don’t give it
up, they take it away from our milking money. They know how to find
you.”<br><br>
The nature of the project is not lost on Nelly. “Holland wants to be the
best little boy out of the class,” she says. “We start with this nonsense
and the other countries are following. They are now talking about
nitrogen, phosphates.”<br><br>
Simply put, “they just draw a map and say how many cows should go there.
You are not allowed to spread manure, even organic. There have been many
suicides. People get sick and ill and depressed. What people do not
understand is that farming is a way of life.”<br><br>
Nelly’s farm is deemed insufficient nature by the UN/World Bank’s
development plan, its “return to nature” ethos embodied in a program
called “re-wilding,” under which it is illegal to harm predators. So,
last month, wolves ate four of Nelly’s cows, including one calf, and bit
one of her prized filly horses in the leg, forcing Nelly to put it down.
Shoot a deadly wolf, go to jail. That’s just the way things go around
here.<br><br>
<b>Jos: “There’s nothing scientific about it whatever.”<br><br>
</b>Still, other farmers remain defiant. “We will win,” asserts a rangy,
6’7, thirty-something Jos Ubels, standing on his beef cattle ranch in
denim overalls, his face and arms covered in dirt and mud and grime. Jos
makes no apologies, offering a simple critique of the government’s
policies: “It’s hideous, it’s crazy what they’re imposing. There’s
nothing logical about it.” Mr. Ubels’ cows live better than many people.
They are free to graze in the sun most of the time, before it all ends in
one bad day.<br><br>
As Jos explains, “They don’t want nitrogen because certain specific
plants hate nitrogen; they only grow on poor soils, so they want the soil
to be poor. And they are saying that the farmers are causing the soil to
get richer. So, if you’re farming more effectively than what is allowed,
you’re in trouble.”<br><br>
Official logic is reason inverted: The growth of obscure plants
supersedes food production.<br><br>
The threat posed by nitrogen, a gas that returns to the ground to feed
nutrients in the soil, is grossly overstated if not wholly fictitious. As
Jos notes: “It’s stupid because nitrogen is actually circular. In farming
it’s absorbed back into the soil. But they only take into account the
output. And they use flawed computer models to calculate this. There’s
nothing scientific about it whatsoever.”<br><br>
Across the West, as we have seen with wildly
<a href="https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/so-the-real-scandal-is-why-did-anyone-ever-listen-to-this-guy/">
inaccurate Covid predictions</a>, flawed computer models have become a
stand-in for science, not a supplement to it. But this is about politics,
so those on the take are indifferent to reason, let alone to the fate of
Dutch agriculture.<br><br>
“If you have people who live on the government payroll, they don’t have
to produce anything,” says Jos. “They can just dream all day about
idealistic solutions for problems that don’t exist. If you ask them about
real problems, they say it’s not our problem and they don’t have a
solution. Everything is the fault of the farmers.”<br><br>
Compounding the crisis confronting the farmers is a massive, growing
fertilizer shortage. “Within 1 or 2 months there will be no fertilizer in
Europe,” Jos predicts, “So you can try to buy it but you can’t find any.
They are using the last of what they have in store. The price is 100x
higher than it used to be. This will create a crisis because the demand
is very high and there will be nothing left in stock. We need fertilizer
but there is no production and no import because the biggest importer was
Russia. There’s not enough gas.”<br><br>
He adds that the government still buys the very same Russian gas, only
these days through middle-men at huge markups on the spot
market.<br><br>
“The WEF [World Economic Forum] is radically trying to change the world,”
Jos notes. “And their front man Klaus Schwab says in the end you will own
nothing. The funny thing is that he will own everything. The rules they
are coming up with are sick. That’s why you see the upside-down flags,
it’s a sign of distress. It’s to show the people of the Netherlands don’t
support this.”<br><br>
Unfortunately, it seems the environmental lawyers of the mobilization for
the environment (MOB) have the know-how (and funding) to routinely defend
anti-farming laws successfully in court.<br><br>
“Our government made some stupid laws. So for a smart lawyer from MOB,
they know how to break down the laws because they are not very well
constructed. And they do this on a regular basis. The government already
lost four cases against them, and had to invent new laws. So they’re
getting scared to fight MOB. When they have a problem, like with farming,
they don’t ask the farmers how to solve it. They ask MOB because the
farmers do not get high-priced lawyers to fight the law. MOB has a key
position because the government is not smart enough.”<br><br>
The question: how much longer can such an assault go on? “If people are
fed you can keep them happy so long as you have a good story,” says Jos.
“But if they are getting hungry then the government will lose everything.
In the first week, people can’t buy anything; by the 2<sup>nd</sup> week
they start complaining. By the third week they go to the Hague and rip
the people out of office. Decades ago we decided as a nation that we want
to have good agriculture. Now we have perfect agriculture and they want
to shut it down. I think the roads will burn again.”<br><br>
Despite exceeding previously-set climate goals, the state is imposing
even more stringent restrictions on Dutch farmers.<br><br>
As even
<a href="https://www.oecd.org/environment/country-reviews/2958654.pdf">
OECD</a> admits, “Environmental agreements, which are more or less
binding substitutes for regulation, have been successful in a number of
areas in the Netherlands;” the
<a href="https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.L_.2014.148.01.0088.01.ENG&toc=OJ:L:2014:148:TOC">
European Commission</a> concurring, “Monitoring data show a downward
trend in nitrate concentration in groundwater.” Nevertheless,
“Implementation of environmental agreements should be accompanied more
systematically by transparency mechanisms and the threat of penalties for
farmers.” (And its list of demands runs on for hundreds of pages,
extending far beyond the scope of nature).<br><br>
“The farmer shall accept that the fertilizer application and account can
be subject to control. Periodic nitrogen and phosphorus analysis in soil
shall be performed for each farm. A fertilization account shall be kept
for each farmland. It shall be submitted to the competent authority for
each calendar year…”<br><br>
It seems that nothing Dutch farmers can do will be adequate. “We have a
million less cows than in 1991 when [the global environmental treaty]
Natura 2000 came, because of protected areas [where agriculture is
forbidden or restricted],” Sieta says. “We already reduced 70 percent of
emissions,” a marked improvement confirmed by OECD as being
‘insufficient.’ “But a lot of politicians want an end to dairy. They say
ammonia from animals is the worst thing that can happen.”<br><br>
So what’s to replace food-production? One more stated plan, far-fetched
as it might seem in the midst of Europe’s energy crisis, is to build a
new kind of metropolis, a
“<a href="https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/graphic/world-urbanization-prospects-2018-more-megacities-in-the-future">
megacity</a>” encompassing parts of Holland, Germany and Belgium, called
the “<a href="https://www.tristatecity.nl/">Tristate-City</a>.” <br><br>
The Tristate-City website brands the project as “Europe’s new
super-city…an organically green network metropol where urban and rural
space remain in balance.” Details are sparse, but the planners
wholeheartedly promise: “This model has no relation whatsoever with the
nitrogen policy of the Dutch government!” <br>
</body>
</html>