Imagine that as a motorist you receive a note from the government: instead of the 15,000 kilometers you drive annually, from now on you are only allowed to drive 5000 kilometers per year. Or not at all.
“Then the country would be too small. But that is how farmers feel about what awaits them,” says ‘nitrogen professor’ Wim de Vries of Wageningen University.
Last week, plans from the cabinet leaked out, which would show that emissions must be drastically reduced of nitrogen that is harmful to nature. Along protected nature reserves such as the Veluwe, the decrease should be as much as 100 percent, in the agricultural area of the Gelderse Vallei between Ede and Barneveld between 70 and 80 percent. Farmers reacted furiously.