Creative accounting LNV elevated to an art

Hocus pocus with numbers, the POV calls Minister Carola Schouten's sudden change of course in the plans for nitrogen reduction for this year. LNV policy is indeed starting to resemble that more and more.

Now that the ministerial feed measure cannot go ahead (due to the drought, extra protein supply via concentrate is needed), the pig farming seems to have to give up. The nitrogen space that the warm remediation of pig farming will provide in 2021 is already partly being used this year. To meet this year's targets and to get road construction and road construction underway.

Flight forward
Do MOB leader Johan Vollenbroek and the Council of State, which blew up the PAS because no advance may be made for alleged nitrogen reduction in the future, agree with this flight to the front? That is hardly imaginable. Moreover, the minister himself indicates that the shift in attention towards pig farming is anything but perfect, as the warm remediation mainly has an effect in the south of the Netherlands. While road construction and housing will benefit from nitrogen reduction throughout the Netherlands and especially in the Randstad conurbation.

Stacking paper and big data
Over the years, the (computer) juggling with numbers by the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality has apparently grown into their most important competence. The pile of papers, computer software and big data in databases and spreadsheets is growing rapidly. From PAS legislation to alleged calf fraud, from manure fraud and phosphate rights system to the national phosphate and nitrogen ceiling and the latest low point: the ministerial feed measure. And at the same time an explosively grown number of lawsuits.

Hexagon Level
The Ministry of LNV seems to have come to live in an inimitable legal reality for ordinary people. The question is not whether there is actually a demonstrable reduction in nitrogen deposition at hexagon level throughout the Netherlands, but whether the courts cannot make holes in their policy approach. Just take the concept of hexagon, which can hardly be explained to normal Dutch people. Originating from the world of computer programmers who created the AERIUS model, the honeycomb shape on a (converted) square kilometer scale determines the future and the value development of livestock farms.

Minister in splits
In the meantime, few people distrust agriculture minister Schouten when she says, almost desperately, that she struggles with implementing short-term government policy on the one hand and doing justice to the people and companies it concerns on the other.

She gave impressive evidence of that struggle last Sunday evening in the television program Zomergasten. The word splits was used, although it was used in the program to indicate the imbalance between agriculture and nature in the policy. "Am I good enough?" she asked herself. Leaving in the middle what exactly she meant.

Waiting for truce
This flight forward via the warm remediation of pig farming is in any case not good enough. Perhaps to prevent successful claims by the livestock industry in court. Because claiming the theft of nitrogen rights that formally do not yet exist (as the POV argues) is a lot more difficult to challenge in court than the ministerial feed measure.

The minister's flight to the front via the warm remediation of pig farming is certainly not good enough to restore calm to livestock farming. There is nothing better than a ceasefire for the time being. That is not long in coming, as this government will be resigned within a few months because of the approaching elections in March next year.

Eric Colenbrander

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