News Nitrogen
Farmers do not want to give way to Schiphol
On Monday morning, a large group of farmers drove tractors to Schiphol to offer a preliminary purchase contract to financial director Robert Carsouw. Schiphol should not buy up farmers to get an environmental permit, but the farmers would be better off buying the major polluter Schiphol, they argue.
Last week it became painfully clear that Schiphol needs an environmental permit just as much as many agricultural companies and that arranging such a permit is extremely difficult. The cabinet spoke about it last Friday, but does not yet know how to solve this problem. A number of politicians suggested buying up additional farms. This upset many farmers. They therefore organized a playful campaign, with a deadly serious undertone. Their message: Schiphol should not buy out more farmers, but farmers should buy out Schiphol.
In a Facebook video The North Holland dairy farmer René Staal mockingly states that Schiphol would be very suitable as a farmyard. "After a bit of roughening, cows can walk beautifully in the hangars and departure halls." According to him, the planes are also easy to reuse. "Just exchange that old iron and buy phosphate rights with it."
When the purchase contract is presented to Carsouw it suddenly showed itself very connecting. He looked - somewhat hesitantly - for the similarities in position between the farmers and Schiphol: both 'extremely important for the Netherlands', both champions. However, the Schiphol director did not want to sign for the sale.
The situation around Schiphol gained momentum last week when the court annulled the nature permit of the Amercentrale, through the deployment of the organization Mobilization for the Environment (MOB). Schiphol then came under fire. The cabinet had already stated in 2019 that Schiphol must also apply for a nature permit, but nothing was done about it. The airport's defense was that it thought it had regulated its own nature and environmental obligations through the Habitats and Birds Directive, and that a nature permit was not necessary, 'because such a nature permit did not exist when Schiphol was opened more than a hundred years ago. was founded'.
Nature organizations have now threatened to take legal action if a proper nature permit is not obtained. There is a chance that the number of flights per year will have to be reduced to achieve this. Without drastic measures, according to lawyers, a permit could be issued for at least 400.000 flight movements per year, a decrease of 20%. That is something the government does not like to see happen.
In the near future, the caretaker, or the new cabinet to be formed, will have to consider a solution to the new legal nitrogen problems.
Klaas van der Horst
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