Dutch Farmer Protests: How Reduction Politics Threatens the Rule of Law

This week, the world’s leaders are gathering in Bali for the G20 summit. Top of the agenda: addressing climate change and championing green energy. And Indonesia is putting on quite the show! While the government flaunts electric cop cars, solar farms, coal plant bans, and a $20 billion climate financing deal, they’re also permitting the construction of new coal plants that support “national strategic projects” and requiring all coal mining companies to sell a designated amount to the state-owned utility company below market value—distorting the energy market against renewable sources.

We’re witnessing overly ambitious government officials rush to meet arbitrary ideological goals all around the world today—often at the expense of their citizens’ livelihoods and the rule of law.

Sociologist and Common Sense Society–The Netherlands alumnus Dr. Eric Hendriks shares what he’s seeing in his home country. Let us know what you think! 

— Liz Stiff

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So what’s going on in The Netherlands? When news reached America that Dutch farmers were protesting the government’s plan to reduce nitrogen emissions, The Netherlands even briefly trended in the culture war. The protests were quite something. Tractors blocked highways for months, hay bales were set on fire, and Dutch flags were waved upside down, signaling that many Dutch citizens, myself included, can no longer identify with what the country has become.

The government’s plan is to reduce nitrogen emissions drastically before 2035 and to do so by putting draconian reduction targets on livestock farming. The Netherlands is Europe’s largest livestock producer. If enacted, the government’s policy could eradicate half or more of this economic sector. Just the government’s announcement triggered market turmoil: damages are estimated at twenty-eight billion euros (Source: Financieel Dagblad, 2 Oct. 2022). And the great slaughter (pun intended) has yet to begin.

This policy catastrophe has a complex history. Dutch officials, spurred on by activists, saw to it that many small parks and forest areas spread throughout Dutch agricultural regions received protected status. At a later stage, Dutch bureaucrats and judges interpreted E.U. regulations for these protected areas in a stringent, purist way. They determined that the detection of very low nitrogen concentrations in one of those designated areas should trigger the closure of nearby nitrogen-emitting farms. But when you do the math, it turns out that these closures would affect not just a few farms, but most of the livestock industry. The government presented this to citizens as a fait accompli.

What’s strange is that the urgent nitrogen problem the government argues warrants this dramatic government intervention doesn’t actually exist. It’s true that high nitrogen concentrations can reduce biodiversity in an area where plant species are adapted to a low-nitrogen environment, but nitrogen emissions have reduced in recent decades. As recently as the 1990s, they were three times higher than today. These reduction rates are the result of new, eco-friendly technologies.

The government’s sudden intervention is so disproportionate to the threat that critics speculate that auxiliary motives are driving the policy. It’s possible that urban-based policymakers want to break the Dutch livestock industry over animal welfare concerns or to free up land for housing. It is hard not to be suspicious.

The Dutch case is just a preview of the coming clash between climate policy and the rule of law. The Dutch nitrogen crisis is about local nitrogen fallout, not about the global climate and carbon dioxide, but it collides with the rule of law in ways that future climate policies might too, on a larger, international scale.

The rule of law has come under pressure in a few ways. Legal scholar Paul Bovend’Eert of Radboud University Nijmegen, for example, observed in an op-ed in the Dutch newspaper NRC that the government is trying to expropriate livestock farmers without having passed the proper enabling legislation. This is a technical-yet-telling story about legislation errors that parliament could fix by passing new legislation.

On a more fundamental level, rule of law is the idea that the law should protect citizens from the state’s abuse of power. That the state obeys its own laws (rule by law) does not sufficiently protect liberty because laws can be manipulative in form. In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek explains that above all rule of law is the standard that laws have a sufficiently general character, that citizens can know what they are, and that laws do not have a manipulative, hidden motive. The classic example of a rule of law violation is government parties passing a law targeting opposition members. The overarching principle is that unreasonably specific laws violate the rule of law. A law that says, “All people named Marion Smith living in Washington will be fined double for every traffic violation,” for example, would be unreasonable. If the law limits the scope of application, it has to make sense in the context. To give another example, a traffic law may apply only to car users and not also to cyclists, if that limitation is reasonable. Finally, a law must not be so vague that officials can interpret it to fit their selfish purposes. Vague laws open to selfish interpretations expose citizens to the executive’s arbitrary exercise of power.

Let’s look at Dutch nitrogen policy from this perspective. Parts of the nitrogen reduction act apply to farmers specifically, which means that the government does not apply the same emission maximum to other economic sectors such as the chemical industry. This implies that the law is illegitimate because it is unreasonably specific in its domain of application. 

At the same time, the policy plan is still too vague in its demands on farmers. In fact, everything about it is unclear or merely preliminary except the final, national reduction rate (discussions are ongoing about standards for measuring nitrogen concentrations and emissions). We don’t even know yet which regions are to play what role in reducing overall emissions. As a result, farmers cannot know whether they personally, one of their neighbors, farmers in other parts of the country, or other types of livestock farmers will have to close or downsize to reduce emissions overall. 

The root cause of this precarious situation can be attributed to the government’s willingness to legally commit itself to abstract reduction targets that reduced emissions by certain percentages each year before working out a plan to reach those targets. It has, by the way, also become commonplace in international climate policy for politicians to commit to an abstract emission reduction target without formulating anything that approximates a policy plan and passing the painful implementation task to the next batch of administrators.

The Netherlands has a strong legal tradition; that nitrogen reduction policy has nonetheless collided with rule-of-law principles is a bad omen for international climate policy. Over the next few decades, over a hundred countries—many of which have much weaker rule-of-law traditions than The Netherlands—will be implementing large-scale carbon dioxide reduction policies. It’s likely that this will lead to rule of law violations in countless cases, especially considering how poorly this relatively minor test run has already gone.

I am someone who believes that global atmospheric carbon dioxide is actually a very pressing issue (unlike nitrogen in The Netherlands). That is what makes the situation so tragic. The most important political issue of our generation, climate change policy, is on a collision course with one of the central achievements of Western civilization, the rule of law.

Dr. Eric Hendriks is a sociologist.