The Green War on Farmers Never Ends

Ideologues are undeterred by mounting evidence that there is no 'nitrogen crisis'

A post on X on Tuesday by Dutch commentator Armand van Westen that has been circulating revisits the nitrogen debate in Dutch agriculture. Responding to a video by physicist and science journalist Arnout Jaspers — author of De Stikstoffuik (The Nitrogen Trap), the 2023 book that became a number-one bestseller in the Netherlands — van Westen makes a point that’s as simple as it is explosive: there is no real stikstofcrisis.

‘Stikstof‘ has become shorthand for this entire heated debate about nitrogen pollution from farming, EU nature rules and the clash between environmental protection and agricultural and economic interests. The Dutch Government aims to reduce nitrogen deposition on ‘nitrogen-sensitive’ Natura 2000 protected areas (part of the EU-wide network of nature sites) so that it falls below ‘critical loads’, with targets set in national law following EU obligations. The subtitle of Jaspers’ book says it plainly: “Politicians in thrall to the eco-lobby.”

As Jaspers painstakingly documents, stikstof (literally meaning ‘choking substance’) is a crisis of defective regulation and runaway litigation masquerading as an ecological emergency. The former minister Ronald Plasterk — a biologist — endorsed Jaspers’s work as “a sensible book full of sober facts that demonstrates the absurdity of the policy”. The Dutch Government, for its part, was so rattled that the Minister for Nature and Nitrogen, Christianne van der Wal-Zeggelink, was formally pressed by parliament to issue a written rebuttal of another critical work on the same file.

That other work was Niemand in de Cockpit (Nobody in the Cockpit), a stikstof case study by Thierry Baudet, the jurist and Forum for Democracy leader, co-authored with biochemist Lidewij de Vos. Their conclusion — reached via publicly available measurements and verifiable data — is that biodiversity in Dutch Natura 2000 areas is broadly stable: trees are healthy, bird populations are in order, air quality is good, and of 521 species associated with the relevant ecosystems, only seven have declined in the past two decades in ways plausibly linked to nitrogen deposition. Those seven, the authors note, “play no crucial role in the relevant ecosystems and are still found in abundance elsewhere in the Netherlands and Europe”.