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Netherlands to Shut Down Thousands of Farms to Comply With EU Climate Demands

Netherlands to Shut Down Thousands of Farms to Comply With EU Climate Demands

“The Dutch government plans to buy and close down up to 3,000 farms near environmentally sensitive areas to comply with EU nature preservation rules.”

Despite massive nationwide farmers’ protests almost five months ago, the Dutch government plans to shut down thousands of farms to comply with the European Union’s demands. “The Dutch government plans to buy and close down up to 3,000 farms near environmentally sensitive areas to comply with EU nature preservation rules,” the British daily Telegraph confirmed on Monday.

In July, thousands of Dutch farmers protested by building Freedom Convoys on the highways. They blockaded supermarket warehouses, leaving shelves stands empty across the country. The police acted heavy-handedly in quelling the protests and, in one instance, even fired shots at a farmers’ convoy.

The state-backed “emission reduction” drive in the Netherlands is part of a more extensive EU climate campaign as Brussels doubles down on its radical globalist agenda despite a record rise in food and fuel prices across the Continent.

The UK’s Telegraph further reported:

The Netherlands is attempting to cut down its nitrogen pollution and will push ahead with compulsory purchases if not enough farms take up the offer voluntarily.

Farmers will be offered a deal “well over” the worth of the farm, according to the government plan that is targeting the closure of 2,000 to 3,000 farms or other major polluting businesses.

Earlier leaked versions of the plan put the figure at 120 per cent of the farm’s value but that figure has not yet been confirmed by ministers.

“There is no better offer coming,” Christianne van der Wal, nitrogen minister, told MPs on Friday. She said compulsory purchases would be made with “pain in the heart”, if necessary.

The Netherlands needs to reduce its emissions to comply with EU conservation rules and agriculture is responsible for almost half the nitrogen emitted in the proud farming nation. (…)

But the new plan looks set to reignite tensions with farmers over nitrogen reduction. (…)

Farmers fear that the plan to slash emissions by 2030 will cost them their livelihoods, oppose any compulsory purchases and argue farming is unfairly targeted while other sectors such as aviation are not.

Farmers’ lobby group LTO Nederland said trust in the government “has been very low for a long time”. It accused the Government of drafting “restrictions without perspective”.

The Netherlands’ government is presenting the plans as a buyout bid, which farmers fear could be the first step towards forcible “expropriation” of their farms.

The news outlet Dutch News reported on October 6:

Farmers’ activists have warned disruptive protests will return if the government goes ahead with plans to force hundreds of businesses to give up in order to cut nitrogen pollution.

‘The expropriation of farmers must be taken off the table,’ Mark van den Oever of Farmers’ Defence Force said after the government-appointed negotiator, Johan Remkes, published his recommendations on Wednesday.

‘We will not allow enforced buyouts to happen.’ Van den Oever said he would wait to see if the ministerial council adopts Remkes’s plan to include compulsory purchases among its options for reducing the number of farms by between 500 to 600. Remkes argued there was no other way to meet the target of cutting nitrogen compound emissions by 50% before 2030.

Defiant Dutch Farmers Form “Boer” Party

Faced with a government-backed climate onslaught, Dutch farmers are organizing themselves politically. They have fielded a new political party called the Boer Burger Beweging (BBB), or the Farmer-Citizen Movement.

Founded in 2019, the BBB has succeeded in creating a nationwide footprint. “In next year’s provincial elections, which will also decide representation in the Dutch senate, or Eerste Kamer, the BBB is fielding more than 300 candidates in all 12 provinces. In recent polls, the party ranks fourth of the 17 leading parties in the Netherlands,” the UK-based Guardian newspaper reported earlier this month.

The leftwing British daily worried that the new Dutch party could inspire farmers in other European countries to fight back politically. “But the rapid rise of a pro-farming party, in a country where desperate attempts are under way to cut pollution from livestock farming, illustrates a political development that could be replicated elsewhere, observers say,” The Guardian feared.

The leftist fears are well-founded. This year’s Dutch protests were backed by farmers in neighboring Germany, with German Freedom Convoys blocking motorways in the Rhein region.

Video: Dutch farmers’ protests, July 2022:

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Comments

Fat_Freddys_Cat | November 29, 2022 at 1:05 pm

So, how do the geniuses at the EU plan to feed their people?

What kind of truly deranged people cut the throats of their own country?

Well, Bill Clinton started the trend, and Obama and Biden finished it. So why not the corrupt progs of the Netherlands.

Follow the money and you’ll find – just like Clinton, Obama and Biden – the money leads to Communist China and George Soros.

So, the earth’s atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. How exactly is this a pollutant?

surfcitylawyer | November 29, 2022 at 2:06 pm

On August 23, 2022, my wife and I visited a cheese maker in Holland. I noticed that many farmers had the Dutch flag flying upside down.
I commented to one guy that many farmers in the Corona California area are moving to Arizona because of California regulations. He properly pointed out that moving will do nothing. Many of those farmers came from Holland and set up dairy farms and organized the cities of Dairy Land and Dairy Valley. They are now mostly homes and are called Cerritos, Cypress, and La Palma.

I’ll bet they won’t be randomly selected, but will be on land the government wants to use for something else. Climate is just an excuse for a land grab.

How about destroying the economy, infrastructure and cohesion of the metro areas instead? Perhaps limit the availability of electricity in apartments? Shutter bloated govt departments with consequent power savings? Close the airports and rely upon rail from Belgium or GER?

Nah the bureaucracy will work to destroy the rural population instead. Good luck with that. Lots of farmland in the USA and generational turnover as the last of the family farms don’t have so many willing takers within their offspring who want to become farmers/ranchers.

    They want us on the new “reservations”, confined in cities where they will have total control and surveillance.
    Agenda 2030 and The “Great” Reset.
    Do not submit!

Time to lock your leaders in a small cage
Be sure to give them plenty of water-and no food whatsoever
I mean, they’ll still die off eventually, ut they may see the error of their ways on the way out

    Concise in reply to rduke007. | November 29, 2022 at 8:50 pm

    That’s a little to cruel for me and they do tend to be a bit too fat to flush down the toilet. Too bad we seem to have eliminated those biennial /quadrennial events we used to call “elections.”

      DaveGinOly in reply to Concise. | November 30, 2022 at 6:18 pm

      They could be put into cloth bags, and thrown off bridges into rivers, preferably rivers that had their hydropower dams removed for the benefit of spawning fish.

War is coming to Europe, as it always does.

    Don’t think the Europeans actually want to fight a war and the only way the Russians would fight a larger conflict would be with tactical nuclear weapons so I hope not.

N and C are now pollutants.

There are no words…

    DaveGinOly in reply to Massinsanity. | November 30, 2022 at 6:21 pm

    Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, left that organization when it began considering a demand for a ban on chlorine, an element. It was at that point he realized the loonies had taken control.

Those really are Nether Lands!

The Gentle Grizzly | November 29, 2022 at 2:58 pm

It’s a good thing they are not armed; someone might get hurt.

If you’re offering above-market for the land, you don’t have to force people to sell it.

    alaskabob in reply to BierceAmbrose. | November 29, 2022 at 3:30 pm

    Trading land for money…. they don’t make land anymore, but they do print aa much as they want.

    henrybowman in reply to BierceAmbrose. | November 29, 2022 at 9:51 pm

    To bankers, land is an an asset.
    To farmers, land is a career.
    Once they sell it, what do they do with their lives?

      BierceAmbrose in reply to henrybowman. | November 30, 2022 at 3:38 pm

      Well, exactly. A proper price is the net present value of projected future operations. “No more land being made.” and “You gotta work.” would be factored in, in a free market.

      I conventionally use “homestead” vs. “housing” for exactly this reason. A homestead assembles resources that you use to live. “Housing” is a file cabinet shelf to store your meat sack between bouts of wage-hand labor, and consumption of stuff you didn’t make.

At a certain point across the world all these politicians and corporations will upset enough of the people they are suppose to serve and each of the countries will riot and fall. The politicians will try to use the military on the people, but that does not work when there is no food, power, and the military are also local residents. This leads to politicians and corporates CEOs running for the hills as they are hunted.

You’d think the Dutch ruling class would have learned a thing or two from five years of Nazi occupation.

Obviously not.

Good argument for a robust 2nd amendment.

ScottTheEngineer | November 29, 2022 at 5:25 pm

I see the government buying a bunch of farmland at a premium price then dumping it all into the hands of their ner-do-well cousins for pennies on the dollar when they change their minds.
Same thing that happened with Solindra when the corrupt senile degenerate in office now was vice president and sold off that company to china after we paid for it. I’ll bet he got a hell of a payday off that.
Oh wait… hey look at the trannies!!

The following is strictly theoretical and not an endorsement of any non peaceable solution.

Until the cost either in personal, political, or monetary terms becomes too high for those making such rules and passing such laws nothing will change. It is all the same to them whether the peasants are grinded into dust now or become so years from now in their coffins. Any benevolence towards them will only be granted should they agree to have their ashes used to fertilize Mother Gaia. Meanwhile they are in the way.

The question is how to make the cost too high. Body counts can put a damper on the most enthusiastic of tyrants but that goes both ways. Asking please just means you are already supine when the boots come down. What must be realized is even if no shots are fired or battles fought we are at war. That reality must color any solution explored.

    henrybowman in reply to JRaeL. | November 29, 2022 at 10:13 pm

    In another thread, someone makes the observation that today’s corporations act the way that they do because if they stiff rightists, they will be badmouthed; but if they stiff leftists, they will be firebombed. Nothing is truer.

    What makes the tactic intransitive is that the government is also ruled by the same rubric: the right will be punished for pushing back, while the left… well, some mostly peaceful people did some things, what difference at this time could it possibly make? Why do they take this slant? For exactly the same reason.

    Until we come to terms with all the distasteful implications of the realization that there is no voting our way out of this type of situation, we will continue to lose ground… until we have lost all of it.

      CommoChief in reply to henrybowman. | November 30, 2022 at 8:54 am

      True to a large extent. Another potential option is to go Galt, just walk away from the rat race if one is in a position to do so. Obviously not everyone can do so. Some of us have been more prudent with our financial decisions than others. Some of us had better options along the way.

      I maintain that for those in a Blue State and especially a Blue metro enclave the better part of valor is moving to a safer, friendlier area. Retired service members and govt employees as well as other retired folks can do so much easier than a 35 year old. This with ‘laptop economy’ skills can do it as well by working remotely. Teachers are in demand nearly everywhere as are healthcare workers.

      The point is people have more options than they might realize to pack up and move. Doing so isn’t easy. It does starve the blue state and blue enclave of your tax dollars, your spending to support their economy and of the political power in Congress at the next census and reallocation of CD.

      BierceAmbrose in reply to henrybowman. | November 30, 2022 at 3:43 pm

      So much this:

      “… if they stiff rightists, they will be badmouthed; but if they stiff leftists, they will be firebombed.”

      Better not bother the wrong people, Elon. Or how you gonna pay for that forever-investigation of everydamnthing you’ve ever done, while Apple throttles your app sales? BTW, 30% transaction fee is on the face of it sufficient evidence of both “monopoly power” and “harm to customers.”

Subotai Bahadur | November 29, 2022 at 6:48 pm

The EU has deliberately chosen freezing and famine as how their civilization will end. We cannot stop them, any more than we can bring our own government under the rule of law. So be it. Remember in the 1950’s and 1960’s they had ads on TV, when it was black and white, trying to get people to send money for CARE Packages for starving people? Expect to see them again.

Except we saved Europe from itself 3 times in a century at great cost to ourselves. We ourselves are going to be facing cold and hungry times. So they should be left on their own. They can deal with their rulers as they will.

Subotai Bahadur

That Germany and the Netherlands — two of the strongest engineering cultures in Europe — have fallen totally in sway to “green”/environmental fanaticism, in defiance of rationality, economics and common sense, says a lot about how powerfully seductive “green” ideology is to Leftist apparatchiks.

These villains don’t care how many bodies line the road to their chimeric “green” utopia.

    henrybowman in reply to guyjones. | November 29, 2022 at 10:18 pm

    Or alternatively, it simply says a lot about how the typical survival tactics of the parasite class have no rational relationship whatsoever with the intelligence of the productive class.

    “Nice place you’ve got here, shame if something happened to it” can be uttered just as effectively in a refinery as it can in a refectory.

    BierceAmbrose in reply to guyjones. | November 30, 2022 at 3:53 pm

    Engineers are effectively trained to serve, not decide. Goals and meaning are given them by somebody else. They work the subtleties of reality the moralizers can’t handle without requiring that the goals given them make the same kind of sense. Sad, really.

    That engineers statistically tend to be socially awkward and politically naive just makes it easy. They actually tend to be a bit more big-5 trait”agreeable” than the population as a whole. Way more “agreeable” than politicians, like Nobody Messes With a Biden-guy, for example.

    One would like some disagreeable, big-brained environmentalists, but hard and subtle work, most of which is happening anyway, isn’t nearly as easy to sell as shallow righteousness, bolstered by 100-billions of rake-off for the grifters.

A couple of points come to mind:
1. Earth’s atmosphere is nearly 79% Nitrogen. And I do know what runoff does. See point 2.
2. Where do these Government idiots think food comes from?

The day is coming when many around the world who have mocked ours will wish they’d had a Second Amendment in their ‘constitution’. We do. Guard it. Protect it

It seems insanity prevails in governments across the globe. It’s time for the people to take over governments and restore common sense governance by ridding ourselves of the progressive control freaks that come up with these ridiculous policies.

I guess they plan on feeding the people plants grown on Bill Gates’ farms. After all he wants to be master of the world including growing what you eat.

After the Dutch helped to round up and deport 75% of their Jews to the death camps in WW2, all I can say is that the more they suffer, the better.

One of the predictions of one global warming model is that the arctic ice cap melts. This would then mean that the Gulf Stream waters no longer flow from the area Gulf of Mexico north towards Europe, bringing Europe a lot of heat energy. Without this heat Europe freezes over. I always hope this model is accurate.

    DaveGinOly in reply to Stuytown. | November 30, 2022 at 6:54 pm

    Maybe that will make North Africa greener, and then the Europeans can migrate there en masse. Then we can see how welcoming the Muslims are to an invasion of erstwhile Christians.