The Dutch Farmer’s Protests Explained (by an actual Dutch person)

If you’ve been in politics you have probably heard about the massive farmer protests that have been going on in The Netherlands and the more recent monster victory of the agrarian Farmer Citizens Movement.

And the story has made for nice international headlines. Everyone loves an underdog that sticks it to the elite. From Yellow Vests to the Trucker Convoy. However what I have been noticing with these kinds of topics that go international is that a lot of it tends to suffer from a game of telephone where a lot of the actual context gets lost in translation.

For example if you were to look on twitter you would think that the farmer protests are some kind of people’s revolt against the evil WEF globalists trying to depopulate humanity or something. But as much at I hate German engineers telling me to eat bugs this has nothing to do with some global revolt but rather has been an issue related to the following issues.

1. The Netherland’s and EU’s extremely strict laws regarding nitrogen usage
2. The radical nitrogen policy the government wants to implement that is going to shut down thousands of farms
3. Polarisation between the urban and rural regions where the Dutch regions outside the big metropolitan “Randstad” have long felt ignored and neglected.

So let me explained how we got here.

In 1991 the European Union introduced nature habitat guidelines as norms for all members to follow. These norms exist to protect the designated Natura 2000 areas which is a network of conservation areas. Now The Netherlands is known as a country with little landmass but with a very large agricultural industry making up the second largest exporter in the world. Agriculture also produces a lot of nitrogen in particular ammonia so we have a high gross nitrogen balance.

Now nitrogen in itself doesn’t harm the climate at all whatsoever. In fact it’s vital for plants. However nitrogen, in particular ammonia, favors certain plants over others which then leads to some plants outcompeting others and thus a loss of biodiversity. This is where the Natura 2000 areas come in because protecting their biodiversity is a big part of said guidelines. And although there are many industries that produce nitrogen and farmers have already cut down nitrogen by 60% since 30 years ago they continue to be the biggest target due to how much they still produce.

The Dutch government unlike other EU countries takes measuring nitrogen very seriously and use a method called Kritische Depositie Waarde (Nitogen Critical Loads) which is the amount of nitrogen a nature area can handle before it will affect the biodiversity. If the amount goes over a certain threshold then the country is legally not allowed to produce more nitrogen per the EU rules thus putting entire projects on pause. That threshold in The Netherlands is currently notoriously low (0,0001 mol per hectare). In contrast Germany is 7 mol.

Because of this extremely low threshold the government implemented a system known as PAS which to simplify it gave industries permits to work even in nitrogen sensitive areas under the promise that these industries would implement nitrogen reduction measures in the future. The idea was that projects would be able to continue for now while there were plans to reduce nitrogen in the future. This didn’t happen and simply ended up being a bandaid as environmental organizations dragged this to court which in 2019 ruled that PAS was no longer sufficient which nullified a bunch of permits that caused a number of projects most importantly housing projects to go at a complete standstill. This is where the nitrogen crisis and the housing crisis began.

This is also why the farmers protests started in 2019 and then basically got stalled during covid until they began to protest again in 2022 where the protests gained international recognition.

The combat the nitrogen crisis the Dutch government has vowed to reduce nitrogen by 50% by 2030 which it sees as necessary for preventing this kind of housing standstill to happen again.

More than 11 thousand out of the 35 thousand farms as a result of this nitrogen policy would have to be closed and 17 thousand farmers would have to reduce their livestock by 1/3rd threatening their livelihood. This is by the governments on estimate. They plan to spend more than 25 billion for this policy. Most of this not going to actual technological innovation that has been the main driver of nitrogen reduction but to buy out farmers, even by force if they live to close to a Natura 2000 area. In other words these policies would absolutely kneecap the Dutch agricultural industry.

The Dutch government insists that these are necessary measures from a legal perspective and that without them more projects will stall in the future. But there are many criticisms of this system in particular how nitrogen is measured and the strict legal requirements.

Some criticisms include as I mentioned before prioritizing the budget on buying out farmers rather than funding them to innovate in nitrogen reducing technology especially regarding manure which is one of its main causes. Another issue farmer groups have is the way that nitrogen is measured. In the past the government used a measurement known as MINAS which measured inputs in fertilizer and feed and outputs in meat and milk. MINAS was abolished in 2006 which is also when nitrogen reduction flatlined. The current government purely relies on Nitrogen Critical Loads or NCL to base its entire nitrogen policy which has been strongly criticized as inaccurate by a study in 2022 as they rely on measuring very small plots in order to get their reading for massive regions.

There’s also the fact that The Netherlands as I mentioned before has a notoriously low threshold for how much nitrogen is allowed compared to countries with similar size and that’s because they use a different methodology compared to them. So there have also been proposals to raise the nitrogen threshold to give farmers and building projects breathing room and then use the budget meant to buy out farmers on zero net emission technology innovation instead.

But the Dutch government has been absolutely adamant that they have to go this radical route and have shut down any alternatives as legally unviable. Even as legal experts have argued against this claim.

Ultimately what has happened is that the entire nitrogen crisis is a self-imposed crisis by the government based on the specific methodology that they have implemented and now insist that their hands are legally tied.

They also effectively abolished a realistic incremental approach to nitrogen reduction and put a band aid measure to continue allowing projects until environmental activists took it to court and effectively put the nation to a crawl. All this because of an arbitrary number of biodiverse areas and now the government has been wanting to implement a scorched earth method based on what effectively amounts to Malthusian panic. And pretty much a third of, if not half, of the farmers in The Netherlands could be destroyed by this.

The idea of your way of life being closer and closer to getting utterly erased while the government insists that there’s no legal options otherwise makes farmers only feel unheard and neglected. And feeling unheard and neglected resonates very strongly with those outside of the urban areas.

Keep in mind how far Dutch farmers have already gone through in making their farms as best as they could in terms of following animal welfare guidelines, reducing nitrogen, reducing waste.

They follow some of the most strict rules in the world and these rules have not only come at the cost of their income but it has also taken a toll on them just having to even follow these rules. But farmers do it not just because they have to but because they genuinely care about nature. They have been raised around nature and animals all their lives. And what are they told as thanks? That they’re murderers, polluters, that they haven’t done enough, that they’re terrorists, that they’re low educated, that they have to be forcefully bought out.

And that’s where the farmer’s party got their victory from. Because it’s not just the farmers who votes for them. They make up such a small percentage of the population in fact that at most they are worth 1 seat. No this is mass solidarity from all rural and even suburban people who understand their plight because they know how it feels. Neglected, misunderstood and demonized by elites from The Hague and Amsterdam.

To give two examples: In Groningen one of the northern provinces gas drillings caused massive damages of homes which to this day have not been compensated, and victims of a “welfare fraud” scandal where the government falsely accused people of committing welfare fraud on shoddy algorithms. Our disgusting prime minister who has bankrupted, and I mean absolutely financially ruined, thousands of people like these victims continues to be prime minister to this very day because enough people in the urban areas making a rich salary vote for him to stay in power. That is where their anger comes from and the farmers were the first people that had the guts to tell the government that enough is enough.

Ultimately the farmer protests and the nitrogen policies that so inexcusably wants to tear down thousands of farmers were simply the voice of a people who have too long been neglected and looked down on because they’re not part of the progressive cosmopolitan urbanite class.

I wanted to write this because when I see people like Russell Brand or PeterSweden go “They are seizing the farms for the great reset so that the WEF can control the food population and depopulate humanity” it just gets me frustrated because these protests deserve a better and more nuanced explanation than this cartoonish BS.

Don’t get me wrong I fully back the international solidarity that has been shown to the farmer protests. However the foreign narrative about this entire ordeal has either been surface level at best and wrong at worst.

While I agree that the protests are part of a bigger fundamental political and cultural divide in the west I simply do not buy this simplistic narrative of the farmers, pensioner’s protesters, truckers and any other nitpicked anti-government protests as being part of some anti-WEF revolt.

This is ultimately about a group of farmers feeling unheard and unwelcome in spite of all they have done to improve humanity, farmers who simply want to maintain their way of life, and a government dominated by out of touch urban people who have refused to understand this. And that urban-rural divide is only going to escalate. The Netherlands is merely the canary in the coalmine because we were the first country that had these climate activists go to court. It’s only a matter of time before it’s going to get really global.