We always remember summers. But when summer 2022 is recalled by the Dutch it won’t be because of airport chaos or the baking weather. It’ll be because of motorways jammed with tractors, manure dumped on the streets, flaming bales of hay and, symbolically, the ubiquitous inverted national flag.
For those who muse more deeply, summer 2022 will be recalled as the one when many young Dutch farmers became radicalised at the idea that the livestock industry, from which families had made a good living for generations, suddenly stood on the verge of extinction.
The situation, as put to them by Mark Rutte’s government, goes more or less like this: biodiversity is disappearing in the Netherlands at a faster rate than anywhere else in Europe, according to the national environmental assessment agency. It’s both a domestic and a global crisis.
In May 2019, the Council of State, the country’s most influential expert advisory body, warned that the government’s strategy for reducing the harmful nitrogen oxide emissions that damage biodiversity was not nearly radical enough and said the issue had been sidelined for too long.
Pressed to take a tougher view, the public health institute identified livestock farming as directly responsible for about 50 per cent of all Dutch nitrogen emissions. Pig and poultry producers were by far the worst culprits.
QED, you are the biggest polluters, the farmers were told.
To make matters worse, the government’s revised proposals overcompensated for their earlier soft-pedalling by recommending a dramatic cut in the national livestock herd — which would see 11,200 farms closing down permanently and another 17,600 forced to scale back and become “greener”.
A survey at around that time showed that 60 per cent of farmers — 66 per cent in the case of pig farmers — doubted the viability of their farms in the medium term. Forty per cent went further, saying they would abandon their businesses on the spot if offered the right compensation.
It was to reflect that mood of desperation that the farmers adopted the inverted Dutch flag as their symbol of resistance — just as in a maritime setting an inverted flag signals a ship in distress, probably one that’s been abandoned and not worth much more than the salvage.
There are darker forces at work too, warned Caroline van der Plas, founder and leader of the farmer-citizen party BBB, which has been enjoying a summer surge in the polls fuelled by more than 100 arrests during the farmers’ protests in recent weeks, including a number for attempted murder and attempted manslaughter where lives were deemed to have been put at risk.
Most of those arrested and charged have been under 30, according to the police.
Small groups of angry and frustrated farmers are being radicalised on social media, van der Plas claims, and manipulated by far-right politicians who see any form of active social dissent as grist to their ideological mill.
“I understand their anger,” she said. “So I want the government to start listening to these farmers and really hearing them or things will get a whole lot worse. Primarily, we want the entire nitrogen policy that’s on the table now to be put on hold while we look for workable alternatives.”
While defending the farmers’ right to protest, Rutte, the prime minister, has condemned those raising the temperature by “wilfully endangering others, damaging our infrastructure and threatening people who help with the clean-up”.
It’s a measure of how seriously he believes the confrontation is becoming that Rutte recently appointed one of his most trusted mediators, Johann Remkes (71) — a solid former deputy prime minister most recently involved in forming the current coalition — to try to bring the sides together.
Remkes has already met the farmers, commenting tactically afterwards on “a long-term lack of trust in government” on their part, based on an accumulation of red tape, failure to acknowledge advances towards sustainability already made and a general disinterest in their political role.
Next Monday he will meet environmental organisations, who say they are implacably opposed to any dilution of the government’s emissions targets, particularly its headline aim to reduce nitrogen pollution in some areas by 70 per cent by 2030.
Ironically, the harder the environmentalists press the government to insist on substantial cuts in emissions, the more the government will have to be prepared to compensate the farmers for what undoubtedly amounts to a wholesale transformation of their industry and lifestyles.
Farmers who’ve already had enough — and there are many — will have their fingers crossed that the environmentalists’ negotiators are at their most persuasive on behalf of the planet.
