Which country do you think is the second largest food exporter in the world behind the US? I guess the title of the article is a hint, but yes, the Netherlands, and they are the largest exporter of potatoes in the world also. This sound almost impossible taking into account they are so small they had to build dams to gain terrain, but it is true, and on this article, we will talk about both sides of the story.

You may be wondering why I’m writing about this topic since it is something that is not common to talk about, I found out about it on the YouTube channel VisualPolitik two years ago or so, you can either watch their English or Spanish channel, the video was about how the Netherlands became an agricultural superpower, which was really interesting and I’ll show some of the data about it later on the article. I have to admit that all I got was one side of the history and I thought everything was perfect and I did not consider the other perspective until this October, on a trip to the Highlands in Scotland, where I met, on the hostel me and my friends were staying at, the owner of a consultancy firm about organic agriculture on the Netherlands, who explained me the negative effects of such incredible agricultural progress.

This made me really question my opinion on many topics and I realized how important is to dive a little bit deeper in order to have a more realistic perspective, on that moment, we had already talked about creating this platform so I wrote it down on my post ideas list because I wanted to do research on the impacts of agriculture on our planet, health and how this sector needs to increase production in the following years to feed the growing population.

Population numbers are going to greatly increase in the near future and we, as humans, have the huge challenge of doubling the production of food without deteriorating the environment. We have been improving our farming techniques for the last two thousand years and farm surplus gradually increased allowing people to do something else and specializing creating the economy in which we live nowadays. The greatest breakthrough was undoubtedly in the early 20th century when the Haber-Bosch method for synthesizing ammonium nitrate was developed, which allowed as to provide nutrients to the soil relying less on crop rotation and animal manures and greatly increasing production, it is estimated that around half of the food produced today is thanks to this invention.

One term that crystalizes what needs to be done would be “sustainable intensification” which means producing more food from the same area of land while reducing environmental impact by the following measures: (1) Stopping the expansion of agriculture in pristine areas, (2) closing yield gaps on underperforming existing agricultural lands, (3) increasing agricultural resource use efficiencies and (4) changing human diets and reducing food waste.

In the future, I may write about this and how to tackle each issue, but let’s get back on track and talk about how the Netherlands became such agricultural superpower. Agriculture is one of the most subsidized sectors and the European Union has the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which gets over 35% of the European Union budget, which is much lower than the 73% of the budget that used to be in 1985. You may be thinking that the Netherlands may produce such large quantities of food thanks to this subsidies, but that could not be further from the truth since their subsidies are insignificant compared to the ones of Spain or France