RVN: The Dutch farmer does not export pineapples
The argument always comes back.
Dutch agriculture is too big. We export most of it. As if that were wrong by definition.
Then the extra move: it is not even ours. Fruit into the port, twelve hours later the truck to Germany. And that counts as exports.
The last part is true in part.
Just not the way it is told.
Three flows
Transit: the kiwi stays with a foreign owner and does not count. Re-exports: a Dutch trader takes title without meaningful processing and sends it on — that does count. Dutch make: grown here or substantially processed here. Milk, flowers, meat. Chocolate from imported cocoa belongs with the last: the bean is from elsewhere, the processing is from here.
CBS and Wageningen, 2025 estimate: agricultural exports 137.5 billion.
88.4 billion Dutch make.
49.1 billion re-exports.
So almost two thirds really is from here.
A little under 36 percent is the port statistic.
About 73 percent of agricultural imports eventually cross the border again.
That is the “70 percent” people hear: imports that leave. Not the farmer who exports 70 percent of his milk.
Where the money sits
On that whole export the Netherlands is estimated to earn 49.1 billion.
43.5 billion of that comes from Dutch make.
5.7 billion from re-exports.
The pineapple inflates the headline.
The barn fills the ledger.
And the toastie war
Then comes the other sum.
We import animal feed. Animals turn many calories into little steak. So: shrink the herd for food security, especially if the border closes.
Part of that is true. Beef is calorically expensive. Compound feed comes partly from abroad. In a real shutdown the country would have to be arranged differently.
It is just not the same 70 percent.
And it is not proof that the farmer is the pineapple.
Grassland is not automatically a wheat field.
Calories are not the same as protein, fat and a winter store.
Diesel and fertiliser close the border too — slaughtering changes nothing about that.
Re-exports are the port.
Food security is an emergency plan.
Both are used to close the same barn. The table first.
The pattern
First the percentage.
Then the moral: too much, too intensive, too much export.
Then the table is no longer needed.
The same translation as Budget Day.
A large number becomes a story.
The small number — what we keep from it — stays in the annex.
Export is not a sin.
It is specialisation plus a transit port.
Anyone who piles those two together turns a trading country into an indictment of the farmer.
OIM way out
Do not canonise the sector.
Do split.
What is make.
What is re-export.
What is transit.
What we earn on which part.
Only then the rest of the conversation.
Question for you
When you hear “we export 70 percent”…
do they mean the cow, or the container?
#Agriculture #Export #Farmers #RealityVsNarrative #RVN #OpenInternetManifest
https://openinternetmanifest.org
This post is 100% authentic and verifiable via:
https://openinternetmanifest.org/nl/hash-verifier
Comments
Want to comment? Log in with GitHub.
You can always read without an account.