Dutch farmers are fighting heroically for our global food system

“F***, what’s happened?” was the startled exclamation wrung from Caroline van der Plas, leader of the BBB party in the Netherlands, when the recent election results were projected. Her four-year-old party, the BoerBurgerBeweging (Farmer-Citizen Movement), which previously had no seats in the Dutch senate, won 17 seats in the 75-seat chamber, becoming the largest party, with the potential to block the extremist “environmental” legislation being proposed by prime minister Mark Rutte.

Although this month’s elections in the Netherlands were technically local, under the Dutch constitution they also determined the membership of the senate. BBB came out top in every one of the Netherlands’ 12 provinces. The BBB lived up to its name, “farmer-citizen”, since the results proved that this rural party, to which city dwellers were initially indifferent, had succeeded in making its case to the urban electorate which also lent its support.

And no wonder. Although the pro-EU, pro-globalist mainstream media, both in the Netherlands and abroad, have either whitewashed the Dutch government’s activities or ignored the rural revolt, the policies being pursued by Rutte and the metropolitan establishment are so perverse and damaging as to pose a serious threat to world food security, at a time when it is already endangered by the Ukraine war and post-pandemic supply chain disruption.

Firstly, consider the situation of the Netherlands. It is a small country, with much of its terrain wrested from the sea and consolidated behind protective dykes. Yet 80 per cent of its land surface is devoted to agriculture. Dutch farmers have for long been the most innovative and successful in the world, exploiting high-tech methods such as vertical farming, to maximise production.

The Netherlands keeps 100 million chickens, 11.4 million pigs and 3.8 million cows (of which 1.6 million are for dairy). The output from this huge concentration of farming means that the Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products – i.e. food – its meat and dairy exports totalling €18 billion last year.

Clearly, during the recent and continuing concern over global food supplies, the Netherlands is a crucial player, its contribution as the second largest food exporter absolutely vital to the global agricultural supply chain. Any disruption or reduction of that major source of nutrition would have serious consequences for world food security.

So, even in the La-La Land of current Western politics, in which the lunatics have taken over the asylum, it beggars belief that Mark Rutte’s government is dedicatedly attempting to eradicate much of the Dutch agriculture industry. The pretext is an alleged “nitrogen crisis”: the Netherlands is the only country in the world to have a Minister for Nitrogen. Previously, the government tried to manufacture a “crisis” over phosphates, but that was unsuccessful; so, the latest Grande Peur is focused on nitrogen.

The government has rolled ammonia emissions (caused by cattle urine and faeces) into nitrogen emissions in its modelled calculations and accused farmers of producing 85 per cent of ammonia emissions and up to 45 per cent of nitrogen emissions. The farmers claim that the models are inaccurate (which would not be surprising), but have offered full cooperation in reducing emissions.

Their sincerity is demonstrated by the fact that, over the past 30 years, they have reduced emissions by 65 per cent. Water dependence for key crops has been cut by 90 per cent and chemical pesticides in greenhouses almost eliminated. Dutch farmers are no Luddites.

Not good enough, claims the government, despite farmers cooperating by experimenting with filters, robots and even “cow lavatories”. The fact is that nothing the farmers might do would satisfy the government, since its real agenda is to put them out of business. While that objective in itself is immoral and insane, the motivation behind it is even more unhinged, to the point where the Dutch government has been shielded from much international criticism not only by its complicit media, but by the downright implausibility of the notion that any government would behave in such a kamikaze fashion.

The real issue is twofold: the government’s commitment to EU-designated Natura 2000 nature reserves and its desire to take over agricultural land to build housing. As an exercise in grandstanding, the government went overboard in promoting nature reserves, as demanded by the EU: as a result, a country whose land surface is just 41,850 square kilometres is covered with 162 nature reserves. In these protected areas, nothing is allowed to change: the rule is that each reserve must look exactly as it did 25 years ago.

This is the outcome of pseudo-environmentalists’ obsession with “wilding”. The folly of taking so many areas out of practical use is compounded by the effect on farming. Farms often stand adjacent to Natura 2000 reserves and are accused of polluting them through nitrogen emissions which may damage existing plant life and cause other species to flourish. So, the government’s solution is that highly productive farms must be closed down so that totally unproductive reserved areas may be kept in a state of stasis.

That is the incredible priority of the Rutte government, in hock to extreme environmentalist parties. Half a million dairy cows – one third of the total Netherlands stock – are threatened with culling under EU regulations. Farmers themselves are under similar threat: the government is planning to expropriate by compulsory purchase the 3,000 “worst polluters”, since farmers have resisted state blandishments to sell up. The government would like to eliminate half of all Dutch farms; the consequences for the food chain do not seem to enter into its calculations.

Vandalism such as this is unprecedented. For a government to set about destroying the jewel in the crown of its social and economic system is extraordinary. The other issue is the state’s desire to grab farmland for house-building, as there is a serious housing shortage. The Netherlands had a declining birth rate from 1994 to 2018, but lately it has risen. The cause is not far to seek: an average of 400,000 immigrants enter the country each year.

So, farmers whose families have farmed the same land for centuries are to be expropriated, reducing food production, and houses are to be built on now unproductive land for hundreds of thousands of extra imported mouths – there is an equation that illustrates the intelligence of this policy. The Dutch government has capitulated like every other European state, except Hungary and Poland, to the demographic insanity of mass immigration.

All of that sounds bad enough, but the core motivation behind this destructive policy is even worse. Dutch farmers, subjected to relentless government harassment in which a single farm may receive five regulatory visits in one week, with the intention of pressuring them into giving up their property, and crushed by deliberately proliferating red tape know the source of their woes is not just The Hague or Brussels – ultimately it is Davos.

The World Economic Forum has declared war on agriculture, seen as an obstacle to net zero. Beyond that, solid national blocs of farming communities, such as exists in the Netherlands, represent a dangerous culture of independence of thought and action that does not fit into the WEF vision of an AI-dominated, synthetic food-consuming, computer-bound passive population of conformist consumers, dutifully eating three square meals of insects per day.

Mark Rutte is an Agenda Contributor of the WEF and two members of his cabinet are similarly Davos Men. Net zero is the pretext for the WEF’s and the UN’s war on agriculture, their desire being to exterminate much of the world’s farm animals because their emissions impede a net zero target neither remotely attainable nor necessary. Not all farming is frowned upon by the Dutch government: four insect farms have already been opened there.

This is incredibly serious. The ambition of the EU/WEF/UN cartel is to force the entire world to destroy its modern farming systems, which alone can support the present large global population, and abandon meat in favour of plant-based foods, laboratory-grown synthetic rubbish and insects. These clowns – Klaus Schwab, Mark Rutte et al. – are set on destabilising the sensitive supply chains on which many nations depend for survival: they risk triggering a global catastrophe in the shape of a massive famine.

The Ukraine war served as a warning not to decommission our traditional energy resources: what will it take to persuade the pompous idiots in the EU, WEF and UN to leave our food supplies alone? Fortunately, the wheels are fast coming off the net zero bandwagon, the latest blow being Germany’s insistence on a reprieve for the combustion engine.

All across Europe, so-called “populist” parties – i.e. parties that presume to represent the wishes of the population rather than the Davos elites – are approaching ever closer to government. Italy already has a prime minister in that mould; in France, Marine Le Pen is poised to succeed a “Jupiter” Macron whose lightning bolts appear to have short-circuited; even Sweden has woken up from its social democratic fantasy. In the Netherlands, where beleaguered farmers have successfully fought back against the Brussels/Davos insanity, their position in the global food chain means they are struggling against deluded ideologues not just in their own interests, but in those of the world community. Their slogan is a truism: “No farms, no food.”

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