Tractors blocking government buildings. Manure piled on highways. The birth of a populist political party. In the Netherlands, government regulations on agriculture’s nitrogen emissions have sparked backlash from Dutch farmers. In Episode 2 of Barbecue Earth, we tell the story of this quarrel. It holds lessons for all countries, in Europe and beyond, that are facing rising agricultural populism as they begin to implement stricter environmental regulations on farming.
Transcript
This transcript was not edited prior to publication.
HEEWON PARK: It was January of 2023. Johan Vollenbroek tore open his mail and found a mysterious powder inside.
NOAH GORDON: He immediately called the police. They determined that the powder was harmless, but the letter was menacing and was clearly meant to frighten.
HEEWON PARK: It didn’t faze him, though, because at that point he was used to receiving death threats.
NOAH GORDON: But why? Why would a Dutch chemist in his mid-70s be the target of death threats?
HEEWON PARK: This is the story of Johan Vollenbroek’s fight for climate regulations, and the birth of a right-wing farmers’ movement, and what it can tell us about the future of agricultural regulations globally. From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I’m Heewon Park –
NOAH GORDON: – and I’m Noah Gordon –
HEEWON PARK: – and you’re listening to Barbecue Earth.
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NOAH GORDON: Episode 2 — The Farmers Strike Back
JOHAN VOLLENBROEK: My name is Johan Vollenbroek. I’m a chemist by profession, but it was a long time ago.
HEEWON PARK: Vollenbroek is now 73 years old and an environmental activist. His story was reported to an international audience by Karl Mathiesen at Politico Europe. We chatted with the chemist in late 2023.
HEEWON PARK: Vollenbroek is the founder of an organization called Mobilisation for the Environment, or MOB. MOB has been at the forefront of various legal battles that have forced the Dutch government to stick to its environmental commitments and follow EU regulations on pollution. Many of these legal battles had to do with the agricultural industry in the Netherlands.
HEEWON PARK: But Vollenbroek’s relationship with agriculture extends back further than his founding of MOB. He grew up on his parents’ farm.
JOHAN VOLLENBROEK: Of course, when I was a small boy, I saw a lot of wildlife on the farm and around the farm where I grew up in the Netherlands. And gradually all this wildlife has disappeared. Of course, when you are a young boy, you don’t realize that this is very precious, what you see, because it is there. You don’t have to do anything for it. You don’t have to cultivate these wild animals. They are just there. But gradually they disappeared.
HEEWON PARK: As Vollenbroek watched, the wildlife and biodiversity he grew up with was slipping away. He started to question his way of life, his religion, and even the practice of farming. The first time he saw the inside of an industrial farm, he felt disgusted. Eventually, he left home and set off on his own in his adolescence.
HEEWON PARK: In the 1990s, Vollenbroek started MOB. According to a Politico article, “the idea was simple. When the government fails to adhere to the law, MOB sues.” MOB’s initial work focused mostly on fossil fuel companies, but eventually it moved on to the agricultural industry.
NOAH GORDON: The Dutch agricultural system faces many of the same environmental issues that we do here in the US like greenhouse gas emissions, local air and water pollution near livestock farms, and widespread public health consequences.
HEEWON PARK: That was Noah Gordon, co-director of the Climate, Sustainability and Geopolitics Program at the Carnegie Endowment.
NOAH GORDON: since 2019, the Dutch have been especially struggling with something they call the stikstofcrisis, or the nitrogen crisis in English.
HEEWON PARK: Milou Dirkx explains. She’s the Journalism Network Manager for the environmental news organization Clean Energy Wire.
MILOU DIRKX: The biggest environmental problem that the Netherlands is facing today really comes from nitrogen pollution. And what is important to note about nitrogen is that in itself, it’s not harmful. It’s all around us, but where it becomes harmful is when there are nitrogen compounds.
HEEWON PARK: Nitrogen is actually an essential nutrient for plants and a key element in the fertilizers that have enabled our population to grow to 8 billion. But when excess nitrogen turns into harmful compounds, it can lead to a slew of negative environmental impacts. Here’s Gordon again.
NOAH GORDON: Excess nitrogen in our ecosystems can lead to toxic air and cause aquatic dead zones. Harmful nitrogen compounds like ammonia or nitrous oxide come from fuel burning, fertilizer use, and animal manure in the livestock industry.
HEEWON PARK: These harmful forms of nitrogen can also change the makeup of soil, making it more acidic and reducing the amount of minerals like calcium.
NOAH GORDON: This might not sound like a big deal, but in practice, it does result in fundamental changes in soil that can kill off entire plant species. This then can then have a domino effect of reducing the number of insects that depend on certain plants, which then has a number of other downstream effects on the ecology of entire natural habitats. So, nitrogen pollution can end up threatening the nature and biodiversity of an entire country.
HEEWON PARK: The harmful nature of excess nitrogen is nothing new. Since 1991, the European Union has had something called the Nitrates Directive in place. This directive essentially aims to prevent nitrate pollution in waters and promote good farming practices.
NOAH GORDON: Dutch government data shows that for a while after the Directive passed, the situation did improve. Starting in the 1990s, nitrogen deposition declined steadily. But from around 2010, the improvement started to stagnate.
HEEWON PARK: Government policy was one reason that progress stalled. Dirkx explains that in 2015, the Dutch government created something called the Integrated Approach to Nitrogen, also known as the PAS system.
MILOU DIRKX: And basically what the policy meant is that for every project emitting nitrogen, so, for instance, construction or expansion of farms, a nitrogen reducing measure also had to be implemented. And an example that you can then think of is filtering the air in barns.
HEEWON PARK: In other words, the PAS system often allowed farms and companies to emit excess nitrogen now, as long as they promised to make up for these emissions sometime down the road.
MILOU DIRKX: And at the same time, when the PAS was implemented, it was still very clear that nature areas were deteriorating. And one of the reasons was that these nitrogen reducing measures were often much better on paper than they were in practice.
HEEWON PARK: Lawyers at Vollenbroek’s organization MOB decided to legally challenge this permit system. In May 2019 -
MILOU DIRKX: The Council of State ruled that the PAS did not work, and also that it was in violation of European rules. And that meant that much of the Dutch economy came to a standstill. 18,000 construction projects had to stop.
HEEWON PARK: The summer of 2019 turned out to be the calm before the storm. For a few months, the court decision didn’t get much attention, and many farmers and companies didn’t realize what the new ruling meant for their businesses. Life went on as usual. But then, the government asked a body called the Advisory Council to help find solutions to address the nitrogen crisis. It was led by a man named Johan Remkes.
MILOU DIRKX: So Johan Remkes is quite a big figure in the whole nitrogen debate and in the whole nitrogen crisis. So he is a Dutch administrator and politician. And in 2019, he became the chairman of the advisory Committee on Nitrogen Problems.
HEEWON PARK: Remkes and his Advisory Council then released a report and a public announcement. They stated that the government would need to take “drastic measures” to reduce nitrogen emissions and protect Dutch land and Dutch lungs. He said the primary target should be livestock farming.
NOAH GORDON: Remkes’s report pointed out that in the Netherlands, animal agriculture accounted for less than 2 percent of GDP in 2019. And yet it was responsible for nearly half of the nitrogen pollution in rural areas.
HEEWON PARK: Remkes advised that governments should start looking at which farms could be “bought out and closed” so that the Netherlands had a chance of hitting its climate targets. It wasn’t exactly clear whether the buyouts would be a choice farmers could make, or something the government would force them into. According to one Guardian article, Remke’s logic seemed to suggest — at least to many farmers — that “cutting back on production [of animal and dairy farming] wouldn’t be such a great sacrifice for the country.”
HEEWON PARK: Dutch farmers were infuriated. Protests erupted throughout the country.
AUDIO (AL JAZEERA): Not an unusual site in the Netherlands these days. Tractors on the streets of the Hague, joining a protest. As the police try to block them, it becomes clear that stoppin a tractor isn’t easy.
NOAH GORDON: In late 2019, over 2,000 tractors caused the worst traffic jam in Dutch history. Farmers and their allies were gathering to protest against Remkes’s announcement. They feared that the government was trying to quietly kill their farms – or worse, kill the entire animal farming industry altogether.
HEEWON PARK: And this protest was just the first of many. Gordon and Dirkx say the backlash only escalated.
NOAH GORDON: Although the farmers’ backlash weren’t always synonymous with conservative politics, they did often attract support from right-wing populists.
MILOU DIRKX: The Dutch far right are sort of using the anger and protest by farmers to build support for their own causes. And these parties are also populist parties. And I think in a way it sort of very neatly fits into this, like populist narrative of, you know, the common people against a sort of globalist elite.
HEEWON PARK: The farmers’ backlash even led to the birth of a new right-wing political party in the Netherlands. This new party is called the Farmer-Citizen Movement, or the BBB. It all started out with one woman named Caroline van der Plas.
MAX VAN DER SLEEN: When she was elected, she arrived driving a tractor onto the parking place of our politicians. And from that moment on, the media has not left her.
HEEWON PARK: That was Max Van der Sleen, an economist at MOB who works with Vollenbroek. He says that the BBB and Caroline van der Plas appeal to something beyond just pro-farmer sentiment.
MAX VAN DER SLEEN: She appeals also to people who are fed up with the government, who don't trust the government.
HEEWON PARK: The BBB came out of seemingly nowhere and quickly became a political force to be reckoned with. In the March 2023 Provincial Council elections, Caroline van der Plas and her party would be at the forefront of what the Brussels Times called a “shock electoral shift.”
AUDIO (FRANCE 24): Unbridled joy for Caroline van der Plas as her party shook up the Dutch political landscape on Wednesday evening. The BBB is now projected to be the largest party in the Senate.
HEEWON PARK: The BBB won a fifth of Senate seats and became one of the most popular parties in the country. And Gordon says the party doesn’t seem to be going away.
NOAH GORDON: When a farm has been in your family for generations, you don’t give it up without a fight. The BBB is even in talks to join the coalition led by the Party for Freedom, this is the party that came in first in the November, 2023 Dutch elections.
HEEWON PARK: The BBB has also gotten support from controversial right-wing politicians like Donald Trump, who once claimed Dutch farmers were opposing the “climate tyranny of the Dutch government.” The Dutch nitrogen crisis has even reached Fox News, where Tucker Carlson once interviewed conservative Dutch commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek.
AUDIO (FOX): It’s very clear that the government is not doing this because of a nitrogen crisis. They are doing this because they want these farmers’ land, and they want it to house new immigrants.
HEEWON PARK: Of course, not all of the farmers fall into this far-right populist category. A lot of them just want to protect their livelihood and their way of life. But according to Vollenbroek, the unfortunate reality is that the climate crisis is forcing our hand, and the Netherlands has needed to cut back on its agricultural industry for a long time.
JOHAN VOLLENBROEK: A lot of farmers are quite angry with us because they consider us causing the problem. But this is, of course, quite a short sighted vision, I would say, because they're creating the problem and also their organizations are creating the problem because they have been lobbying so hard that we got stuck in this situation.
HEEWON PARK: Van der Sleen adds that, in his estimation, the cost of agriculture’s environmental harms far outweighs the cost of simply enforcing the EU’s nitrogen restrictions. He points out that agriculture contributes only a small share to Dutch and EU GDP.
MAX VAN DER SLEEN: So the agricultural sector is very small and the dairy sector is very small, but in terms of pollution, whether it's nitrogen or whether it's one of the others, it is a very big player. And because it is also a relatively low cost sector. It is by far the cheapest sector to plunder if you want to reduce this air pollution.
HEEWON PARK: For Vollenbroek, van der Sleen, and many other environmentalists, the stakes of nitrogen pollution feel high: global climate catastrophe. Here’s Gordon:
NOAH GORDON: It’s not just that these nitrogen compounds pollute the local air and cause lung cancer. Nitrous oxides are also responsible for about 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions. So changing how we eat, how we raise animals, could save lives. Of course, it’s also good for animal welfare.
HEEWON PARK: But for the farmers on the other side, it’s not so simple. Van der Sleen says that for many, farming is more than just a job. Like Americans, the Dutch also have a deep cultural relationship with farming.
MAX VAN DER SLEEN: It starts, of course, with songs when you're in your cradle. It's about the small boys who pick flowers and things like that… so if you ask people how many people live in the rural areas, they will say 40%. In practice, it's something like 7 or 8%. So it's enormous in the mind, it is enormous.
HEEWON PARK: Farming is a point of pride in Dutch history and identity.
MAX VAN DER SLEEN: The idea of agriculture is something romantic and something that we cherish and part of our culture. And that is why it's important.
HEEWON PARK: Dutch farmers have even been called a “national treasure.” And the Netherlands has garnered the nickname of “the tiny country [that] feeds the world.” So how is it that this small European nation developed this big agricultural identity? That’s coming up next, after this short break.
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HEEWON PARK: The Netherlands is a small country, not much bigger than the state of Maryland. And yet, it’s the world’s second largest exporter of agriculture in terms of value, second only to the US. How is this possible? Noah Gordon explains.
NOAH GORDON: The Netherlands became an agricultural powerhouse in part by pioneering and perfecting high-tech farming methods. They use technology to create high-quality crop seeds, they use robots to do the harvest, and they use approaches like indoor vertical farming, which can be more reliable than traditional outdoor farming.
HEEWON PARK: But technological advances only tell one part of the story. As detailed in a Guardian article called “Nitrogen Wars,” government policy also played a large role in proactively expanding the agricultural industry.
HEEWON PARK: Back in the 1950s, the Netherlands had just emerged from five years of Nazi occupation and the infamous Dutch Famine of 1944 - 45. This became a flashpoint in the Dutch people’s collective memory. Times were hard, and the country was poor and hungry.
NOAH GORDON: In the post-war years, the Dutch agricultural ministry really invested in improving the farming system. The goal was for the country to produce enough food for its people without relying on imports. The government decided to pursue a system of specialization: it paid small farmers to quit the industry, while instructing larger farmers to specialize in one product and increase production. This policy is one reason why the number of farms has fallen by over 85 percent since 1950.
HEEWON PARK: As the number of farms has shrunk, the remaining farms have become larger and more productive. Small farmers who wanted to stick to traditional farming approaches were met with challenges: they ran the risk of lower profit margins, and many banks were unwilling to lend them money. This served to push Dutch farmers into expanding and intensifying their operations.
NOAH GORDON: For a while, the Dutch government was happy. More food is good. Farming productivity shot up, and the Netherlands was outperforming neighboring countries. It seemed like government investments into agricultural colleges and food production research were paying off.
HEEWON PARK: But in the 1990s, things started to shift. The government acknowledged that agriculture also had serious environmental consequences, and started to discuss the need to reduce nitrogen emissions. Dutch Farmers did make some progress toward this goal. Here’s Wim de Vries, an environmental systems expert from Wageningen University in an interview with the Financial Times.
AUDIO (FT): Since the ‘80s, the amount of emissions have been reduced by 50, 60 percent.1 But still, we are above critical levels of nature protection.
HEEWON PARK: Overall, not enough was done. Gordon says the government kept postponing the politically difficult process of creating clear legislation to reduce nitrogen. By 2020, the Netherlands had the densest livestock population in the EU.
NOAH GORDON: Farmers were angry. For decades, the government had pressured farmers to expand production. But from the 1990s, the government started telling them to keep producing more but pollute less, and they weren’t offering much financial support.
HEEWON PARK: According to the Guardian, by the time the Remkes report came around, farmers were “already feeling mistreated.” So when Remkes announced that drastic measures needed to be taken to reduce livestock farming, many of them felt betrayed by their government.
HEEWON PARK: For some, the 2019 nitrogen ruling represents much-needed progress on climate policy. But, for others, it marked the beginning of a battle between the working class and what right-wing politicians like Marine Le Pen have dubbed “climate terrorism”.
HEEWON PARK: In the years following the 2019 nitrogen ruling, the government has pursued discussions with the farming community. But tensions kept rising.
AUDIO (WION): The Dutch government decided to slash 50 percent of its nitrogen emissions by 2030 and has set aside an extra fund of 25.6 billion US dollars to make the necessary changes.
HEEWON PARK: The government also planned to cut the livestock industry by a third. Gordon explains:
NOAH GORDON: They also announced a list of over 2,000 “peak polluter” companies, most of which were farms. The government offered to buy out these peak polluting farms for over 100 percent of their actual value. And farmers who refused this offer could possibly be forced to sell their farms.
HEEWON PARK: Milou Dirkx says that this news exacerbated pro-farmer demonstrations.
MILOU DIRKX: So there were a lot of farmers on tractors going to different locations within the Netherlands. These protests often were quite grim. They would, for instance, block infrastructure. They would dump manure and rubbish on the streets and highways. And in the worst case, even asbestos. And when people came to clean that up, they were actually attacked. They would also go to individual politicians houses, which, as you can imagine, is just very threatening. I think the most extreme part of these protests sort of come into shape of an organization called the Farmers Defense Force. And they deny altogether that there is a nitrogen problem.
HEEWON PARK: But despite the Dutch government’s ambitious plans and the increased backlash from farmers, Johan Vollenbroek and Noah Gordon say that not much has changed yet.
JOHAN VOLLENBROEK: I mean, the Dutch government, there's a lot of blah, blah, blah, but in practice, nothing happens.
NOAH GORDON: Contrary to the government’s hopes, the numbers of beef and dairy cows haven’t decreased much since the 2019 nitrogen ruling. Plus, the government’s voluntary buyout schemes have been a hard sell. The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant said that the government was hoping to buy out some 500 farmers by the end of 2022, but had only managed to finalize purchases with 31 farmers. More farmers did sign up for buyouts in 2023.
HEEWON PARK: It’s difficult to see what the future of the Dutch nitrogen crisis looks like. Nitrogen minister van der Wal is honest about the tradeoffs involved in climate progress. In an interview with Politico, she says, “it’s not possible without pain, for the farmers especially, because they live and work for generations from the same place. It’s their way of living.” But even so, Gordon says that reducing livestock numbers is an essential pillar of climate policy.
NOAH GORDON: It’s true that there are ways to somewhat reduce emissions associated with meat production. But on the other hand, agricultural emissions alone could take global warming past the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold. And raising livestock–especially beef—has a massive carbon footprint. On average, producing a gram of beef protein warms the planet 100 times as much as producing a gram of pea protein. So it’s hard to imagine that we can hit our climate goals if we keep raising more and more livestock.
HEEWON PARK: It’s clear the Dutch government’s handling of the nitrogen crisis has been no walk in the park. But it’s notable that the Netherlands is actually willing to require farmers to make changes for environmental reasons. In fact, it’s part of a vanguard of countries taking steps to reduce how many cows and pigs are raised for meat.
NOAH GORDON: Next door in Belgium, the government of Flanders has a fund to buy out pig farmers, and Ireland has also considered paying farmers to cull cows. These governments want to eliminate what are in a sense polluting machines–it’s sort of like paying a company to shut down a coal power plant. And many farmers are protesting like coal miners have–just look at how aggressively German farmers are responding to plans to cut subsidies for agricultural diesel in early 2024.
HEEWON PARK: Europe may be a harbinger, a window into the future. But this is happening around the world.
NOAH GORDON: The government of New Zealand is introducing a methane tax. The US is putting new restrictions on how much antibiotics farmers can feed to animals, and the California government is regulating the cages in which pigs are kept. These measures can make it more expensive to raise that additional pig or cow–and can help avoid the emissions that come with them.
HEEWON PARK: Of course, systemic change and new regulations like the ones we see in the Netherlands are never easy. They will inevitably cause some controversy. But Dirkx and Gordon argue that putting off necessary policy changes can create even larger problems down the road.
MILOU DIRKX: There is a Dutch saying: “soft healers make stinking wounds.” And this is basically, half measures make matters worse. And I think it's a very good summary basically of the nitrogen policies happening in the Netherlands. So by now, draconic measures are needed, and a lot of politicians and political parties do not seem to want to burn their fingers on this because they know it can cause a political backlash. There's still not a really clear idea on how to solve this crisis.
NOAH GORDON: But the longer a government waits to address agriculture’s climate impacts, the worse the long-term effects will be. And the longer we delay the creation of effective and enforceable environmental regulations, the worse the backlash will be.
HEEWON PARK: The US is still stuck at the early stages of acknowledging many agricultural climate issues. It’s clear we still have a long way to go before creating ambitious emissions regulations like in the Netherlands.
NOAH GORDON: But in both countries, one thing rings true: meat is an important force in shaping both domestic politics and climate policy. We shouldn’t ignore or underestimate it.
HEEWON PARK: Coming up next in Episode 3, the story of one Brazilian company’s covert entanglement with cattle laundering in the Amazon and a deep dive into how big meat companies around the world exploit their power to undermine pro-climate initiatives. From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I’m Heewon Park –
NOAH GORDON: – and I’m Noah Gordon –
HEEWON PARK: – and you’ve been listening to Barbecue Earth.
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HEEWON PARK: This episode was written by Noah Gordon and me, Heewon Park, and produced by me with assistance from Emily Hardy, Daniel Helmeci, and Tim Martin. Theme music was composed by me, and additional music by the band Odd Suns and artists on Pixabay and Mixkit. Legal review was done by Korieh Duodu and Kate Logan, and fact checking by Ryan DeVries. Thank you to Megan Wiegand and Lindsay Maizland for editing support, Emily Hardy and Daniel Helmeci for research support, and Amy Mellon, Jocelyn Soly, and Amanda Branom for their graphic design work.
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Notes
1 Depositions of oxidized nitrogen emissions decreased from 920 moles per hectare in 1990 to 366.91 moles per hectare in 2019.
