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Comment by mosselman | Hacker News Reader

The agricultural land use in the Netherlands always triggers me.

More than 50% of the Netherlands is used for agriculture, yet it only makes up about 1.5% of our GDP. At the same time we are the world’s second biggest exporter of agricultural goods in the world. Mainly meat to Germany, Italy and China.

All that environmental sacrifice for a few farmers and food for other countries. Instead we could have better air, nicer and bigger pieces of nature, etc.

Another fun fact is that one tile is solar panels which are more than all of the solar panels in the whole of Africa.

Sources: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332329/leading-countrie...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/276713/distribution-of-g...

https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2021/25/the-netherlands-is-the...

https://decorrespondent.nl/14856/goed-nieuws-de-groene-trans....

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Zeg ken jij de mosselman? (Dit hoor ik nu de hele dag op Spotify, mijn peuter is er dol op).)

I wasn't aware of the numbers you mentioned, that really puts things in perspective (and makes that upside down flag even more annoying to me).

Nee, maar ik ken de muffinman.

(Mijn hele Nederlandse taal heb ik via Google geleerd.)

You're not counting in the tulip industry, which googling returns a whooping 10% of the GDP.

Flowers + greenhouses is still barely 1.5%

Still, why is one of the most densely populated countries in the EU designating so much of its land to agriculture?

Maybe they don't want to fully give up that part of their industries.

Also cheesemaking is big in the Netherlands, so I wouldn't be surprised that lots of it is for feeding cattle.

Pretty much all of the food for our cattle is imported, I.e soy from Brasil etc. Capitalism combined with a lack of environmental taxes results in some crazy wasteful situations like this. It also results in the related cattle food etc industries subsidizing political parties and thus manipulating our government to let it keep on going and duck any responsibilities, like we have to the EU, that would risk stopping it.

That's crazy but makes sense too.

When I biked from Amsterdam to Antwerp in ~2014, it was difficult to not run into a village every few km.

I guess there's no cheap enough real estate left to grow the massive amounts of soy, cow corn, and hay to feed the animals.

Since it's such a huge source of climate change GHGs, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and air, water, and soil pollution, perhaps globally we need to scale back dairy and meat agriculture.

A better question is why is any government anywhere designating any of its land for anything? Leave land use as broadly defined as possible (ie you want some regulation to stop a steel smelter or high density pork barn operation in high density residential, but not much regulation beyond that type of thing) and get out of the way. Stop subsidizing everybody while you are at it too (defined as a tax code with almost no carve outs that broadly applies to all business equally) and if farming is a bad idea it will go away on its own.

I guess you should save up your eurosand buy some farm land to convert to nature.

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