Netherlands: Farmers’ protest is going global
Dutch farmers have brought the country to a standstill with their fury over the government’s climate plan, said Yvonne Hofs in De Volkskrant (Netherlands). Livestock emit nitrogen in their intestinal gas and their manure, and the new proposed nitrogen emission regulations could lead to the closing of more than a quarter of Dutch livestock farms. The farmers won’t have it. Since the plan was announced in June, some 40,000 of them have been protesting, using their tractors to block major highways, setting fires, and dumping manure on roads. As the protests went on, they grew more extremist, and now farmers have even threatened state construction workers who were sent to remove the hay bales and the upside-down Dutch flags from the roads, doxxing them on social media. Yet through all this, authorities “have looked on idly.” Dutch police aren’t usually meek, but they seem reluctant to go up against the massive farm vehicles—just as Canadian police did little to stop truckers who took over Toronto last winter. If the government caves to the agriculture industry’s demands, it will teach Dutch society that “intimidation pays.”
The farmers’ behavior is “reprehensible and punishable,” said NRC (Netherlands) in an editorial, but you have to understand “the core of rural anger.” Prime Minister Mark Rutte “ignored the nitrogen problem for years” before unveiling several emissions-cutting measures at once. His new policy offers “no vision or perspective for the future of the agricultural sector” but instead leaves that industry—the leader in EU meat exports and the world’s secondlargest exporter of agricultural goods overall—to bear the costs of his climate goals. If this policy goes through, many Dutch farmers will simply be forced to kill off their livestock and sell their land. The far right “sees opportunity” in this clash, said Camille Gijs and Bartosz Brzezinski in Politico (Belgium). Right-wing populists in the Netherlands and abroad have seized on the farmers’ cause as a symbol of working-class anger against “green” policies. French politician Marine Le Pen tweeted in support of the protesters, while Donald Trump told a conference of conservative youth, Turning Point USA, that Dutch farmers were “bravely resisting the climate tyranny of the Dutch government.” Fox News covers the protesters as heroes.
The protest has already gone global, said Samuel Dutschmann in The Spectator (U.K.). The Dutch policy has its roots in EU climate goals, but this summer has seen solidarity marches among farmers not only in Europe but also “as far away as Argentina and Canada.” And the political repercussions are likely to be just as widespread. Rutte is “watching his center-right party lose supporters by the day,” while membership in the populist Farmer Citizen Movement is surging. Just look at Sri Lanka, where the government’s “forceful and devastating” anti-nitrogen regulations caused a food shortage that sparked protests; that whole saga ended in the storming of the presidential palace and the toppling of the government. If governments continue targeting farmers, they are “playing with fire.”