The protesting farmers, who are they anyway? How and why did they come to their irreconcilable position? Whence their fanaticism? And how do they operate? What is their battle plan and where do they actually want to go?
Although there are no sharp boundaries, the hard core of the current protest movement can certainly be identified. It is, ironically enough, the agricultural entrepreneurs who have most followed the agricultural policy discourse of the past decades. More than others, they have modeled their companies on the ideal portrayed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Wageningen University, the agricultural industry and Rabobank.
About this author
Jan Douwe van der Ploeg is emeritus professor of rural sociology at Wageningen University.
This is reflected in their companies: they are large-scale, highly specialized and highly productive companies, which are constantly expanding and carrying heavy debts. These companies are also distinguished by a high use of fossil energy and industrial resources (such as fertilizer, concentrates, medicines) and therefore also by a relatively high environmental pressure. Because of the route they have taken, many of these agricultural entrepreneurs consider themselves ‘the best students in the class’. After all, they did everything that needed to be done and they did it more and better than many other farmers.
run off
Precisely those ‘others’ had to make way (discharge) so that there would be room for development for the ‘good entrepreneurs’. The latter, they feel, have acquired a birthright, as it were. In addition, they must (she has been repeatedly told) ‘feed the world’.
It is precisely this group that has become deeply frustrated, if not bitter. Precisely their business model (‘their pride’) turned out to be increasingly failing at the boundaries of nature and society. It clashes with the environment, climate, landscape, biodiversity, but in many places also with the quality of life in the countryside, the quality of food and now also with house building and infrastructural works elsewhere.
For some of these farmers this has led to a hardening: to a stubborn defense of the chosen route and the associated partial interests. They themselves, they believe, are in the right – it is precisely the others who are wrong. They often have no other choice: the high debts require continued growth.
The results of the previous wave of protests are significant in this regard: no forced company closures, no restrictions on company growth and no government interventions in business operations (the latter point focused on limiting the protein content of concentrates). In this way the ‘right’ to continued expansion was secured – at least for the time being.
Account with others
At the same time, the bill was placed with others. For those farmers who are much less or even not at all responsible for the nitrogen crisis and young people who are now unable to take over or start a business. They must bleed. Then some get carried away in the radical protest movement.
The hard core has been radicalized when animal activists started occupying stables. Then the first ‘networks for self-defense’ arose. Current government policy has also contributed to radicalisation. The activists have learned that looking for and crossing boundaries pays off. They have, as it were, ‘tasted blood’ and now want the full pound. What certainly also helps is the support of the animal feed industry, the populist parties and the vacillation of the VVD and CDA.
Just as South African farmers once placed their bullock carts in a circle and fired from there at anything that seemed a threat, so today’s radical farmers have their own bubble in which only their own right counts. The opinion and the right to speak of others, the results of scientific research, it is all ignored. People are blind to the absurdities in their own position. The run-off (or remediation) of farms used to be regarded as a great asset, but now it is taboo. People were never averse to expropriation: it yielded a lot of money with which a new and much larger company could be purchased elsewhere. Billions are now being made available, but the house is suddenly too small.
And perhaps most strikingly: it has been known for thirty years that nitrogen emissions can be greatly reduced with a series of well-thought-out adjustments in operational management, so that more money is earned at the same time. In the bubble, however, people are willfully blind to this.
make-believe world
The outlined misjudgment, frustration, anger and self-created imaginary world form an extremely dangerous mix. In particular also by consistently contrasting against the other and the other. Previously, the other was the smaller farmer: he or she had to make way for the self-righteousness of the expanding agricultural entrepreneur. Now the other is a brace for a broad world that includes media, political parties, concerned citizens, environmentalism, bird conservation and what not already. They have no understanding of it, they have no right to speak. They may therefore be set aside.
The Farmers Defense Force’s approach is partly based on the former movement of angry pig farmers who at the time, led by Wien van den Brink, opposed the reduction of the pig population and did not shy away from violence. Programmatically, this movement revolved around the interests of large, intensive pig farming. But care was taken to show this. On the contrary: smaller pig farmers and the crying farmers’ wives were pushed forward. For example, pig farming appeared in public opinion as a victim – the victim of a completely wrong policy. This characteristic reversal is now repeated again.
Consistently opting for a continuous increase in scale in agriculture (and at the same time ignoring possible alternatives) has created a protest movement in which reasonableness is lost – a movement in which people believe they can force others to accept their own partial interest. Where there is no bending; the others just have to burst.
Fortunately, Dutch agriculture does indeed have an opposite pole: a wide range of farms that operate in harmony with nature and society. The problem is that this polar opposite has no voice and is not represented. Precisely here lies an important socio-political challenge. It is precisely the alternative that is actually available that must be prominently highlighted and actually supported. At the same time, there is no question of giving in to unreason.