Farmers Forum staff
NETHERLANDS — Ontario farmers standing with protesting Dutch farmers over draconian plans to limit farming in the Netherlands are now fearing the worst.
Six hundred Dutch farmers face the forced sale of their farms to their unmoved national government in the next year, according to a recent report by GBNews.
In an interview with the UK-based news organization, commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek highlighted Dutch farmers’ continued outrage with their leaders in the wake of the recently announced farm buy-up plan. It’s a key measure in a new environmental report released by the Dutch state in reaction to farmer protests that have roiled Holland since the spring, after a precursor report sparked great upset in the ag sector.
“The outcome of the new program is worse. They’re going to expropriate, forcefully buy out, 600 farms in the next year,” Amsterdam-based Vlaardingerbroek tells GBNews host Mark Steyn in the online broadcast, adding dismissively, “but it sounds a little nicer in the way that it’s written in the little text.”
“Instead of changing anything, they just changed the tone,” she said.
By forcibly cutting the number of cattle and farms, as well as fertilizer used in agriculture, the Dutch government aims to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions from agriculture — all in pursuit of controversial climate change goals.
The plight of Dutch farmers prompted a number of Ontario farmers to roll tractors in solidarity last July. Many expressed concern that Ottawa may be inspired to impose similar fertilizer cuts on Canadian agriculture. In fact, the Trudeau government is formulating a plan to curtail nitrogen usage here, although, unlike Holland, it insists the measures will be voluntary. (It’s not yet clear if the feds are prepared to rejig Canada’s agricultural support and subsidy programs to ensure ‘voluntary’ compliance — but it’s worth noting the country’s recently renewed Agricultural Policy Framework for the first time ranks climate change and environment as top priority.)
Vlaardingerbroek described the Dutch plan as “theft.”
She added, “They are taking away these people’s property, they are taking away their lives, they are taking away businesses that have been in Dutch families for centuries sometimes.”
The situation has become desperate, she said, noting a 43-year-old farmer killed himself a week earlier, a development Steyn called “heartbreaking,”
“A 43-year-old farmer kills himself because of the government’s determination to kill Dutch farming,” Steyn ruefully observed.
“Driven to suicide by these lunatics.”
With 100,000 economic migrants arriving in tiny Holland annually, Vlaardingerbroek pointed to the Dutch housing crisis, not a nitrogen crisis, as the government’s actual motivation. The elites want housing built on farmland for the expanding population, want to give up independent Dutch control over food supply, “and they obviously don’t want us to eat meat,” she said.
