The Netherlands: Template for Ecomodernism’s Brave New World? 

Guest Post by Colin Todhunter

Disaster capitalism and crisis narratives are currently being used to manipulate popular sentiment and push through a set of unpalatable policies that would otherwise lack sufficient political support.

These policies are being promoted by wealthy interests that stand to make billions of dollars from what is being proposed. They seek to gain full control of food and how it is produced. Their vision is tied to a wider agenda aimed at shaping how humanity lives, thinks and acts.

Throughout much of 2022, protests by Dutch farmers have grabbed the headlines. Plans to reduce the Netherlands’ nitrogen output by half come 2030 have led to mass protests. The government talks of the need to move away from animal-based agriculture and its climate-impacting emissions.

This ‘food transition’ often goes hand-in-hand with the promotion of ‘precision’ agriculture, genetic engineering, fewer farmers and farms and lab-made synthetic food. This transition is sold under the banner of ‘climate-friendly’ and piggybacks on the ‘climate emergency’ narrative.

Campaigner Willem Engel claims the Dutch government is not seeking to eliminate farmers from the landscape for environmental reasons. Instead, it is about the construction of Tristate City, a megalopolis with a population of around 45 million extending to areas of Germany and Belgium.

Engel suggests the ‘nitrogen crisis’ is being manipulated to drive through policies that will result in reshaping the country’s landscape. He argues that the main nitrogen emitter in the Netherlands is not agriculture but industry. However, land currently occupied by farms is strategically important to industry and housing.

The tristate concept is based on a giant unified ‘green’ urban region linked by ‘smart’ technologies that can economically compete with the massive metropolises we see in Asia, especially in China.

The Dutch government recently announced plans to buy out up to 3,000 farms in a bid to comply with controversial targets to reduce run-off from synthetic nitrogen fertilisers. Dutch nitrogen minister Christianne van der Wal says farmers are to be offered more than 100 per cent of the value of their farms. But there are plans to enforce buyouts in 2023 if voluntary measures fail.

Is what we see happening in the Netherlands the initial step in trying to get the public to accept GM crops, lab-engineered ‘food’ and 90 per cent of humanity being crammed into mega-cities?

And is it just a coincidence that the following ecomodernist vision of the future appears in Dutch on the Netherlands-based RePlanet.nl?

It says that by 2100, there will be ten billion people on the planet:

More than 90 per cent of these live and work in the city, compared to 50 per cent in 2000. Around the city are large farms full of genetically modified crops that achieve four times as high a yield as at the beginning of the 21st century.”

It also states that beyond the farmland begins nature, which now occupies most of the surface of our planet. Whereas in 2000 half of the earth’s surface was still in use by humans, by 2100 it is only a quarter. The rest has been returned to nature, biodiversity and CO2 emissions are back to pre-1850 levels and hardly anyone is in extreme poverty anymore.

So, there you have it. Drive farmers out of farming, grab their land for urbanisation and rewilding, and we will all live happily ever after on genetically engineered crops and synthetic food created in giant vats. In this techno make belief land, no one is poor, and everyone is fed.

A technocratic vision where the stranglehold of the current food conglomerates remains intact and is further entrenched, and politics is reduced to decisions about how best to tweak the system for optimal gains (profit).

In this future, digital platforms will control everything, the brain of the economy. E-commerce platforms will become permanently embedded once artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms plan and determine what will be produced and how it will be produced and distributed.

We will be reduced to little more than serfdom as a handful of digitally enabled megacorporations control everything. Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, Cargill and the like will work with Microsoft, Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate AI-driven farmerless farms and e-commerce retail dominated by the likes of Amazon and Walmart. A cartel of data owners, proprietary input suppliers and retail concerns at the commanding heights of the economy, peddling toxic industrial (fake) food.

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