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Changes Underway with Dutch Farming

There have been some announcements over the last few months regarding changes to Dutch agriculture. These are not only important to people living in the Netherlands, but all over the world, since The Netherlands is the second largest agricultural exporter by value in the world, after the United States.

The goals of these changes have partly been to transition for agriculture based on as high production as possible, to more sustainable methods with fewer greenhouse gas emissions and less impact on the environment. The need to increase farmers’ income is also being addressed.

The politics of these types of changes is they often start in The Netherlands, then get adapted into EU legislation. After this, they often require countries exporting to the EU to comply with the same regulations, so the changes propagate around the world via EU trade agreements. On the surface these changes seem very positive, so this might be a very good thing.

Environmental Changes

Money is being made available to farmers who work in sensitive areas to take care of their own environments. Money is also being made available to experiment with more sustainable methods. In addition, the number of pigs in the country is being reduced.

More Money for Farmers

Of course the emphasis on farmers earning more money is being placed on consumers being willing to pay more. This is of course true, but there are many other aspects. In addition to possible higher prices for consumers:

  • There should be reasonable direct subsidies available to farmers paid for by higher taxes on wealthy individuals.
  • Subsidies for wealthier farmers should be capped.
  • There should be fewer taxes on the consumer.
  • Farmers should have complete sovereignty over their seeds. They should have no administrative burden. They should be free to choose any seeds they want. Unless they purchase commercial seeds and come to an agreement with the breeder or seller, there should be no royalty payments or restriction on their use, including saving, breeding and regrowing the seed.
  • Farmers should be free from unreasonable regulations and inspections.
  • Farmers should provide more quality, artisan made products, with a high regard for nature and biodiversity.
  • There should be more opportunities for the consumer to purchase directly from the farmer, or through less formal channels like street markets.
  • There should be more emphasis on local, regional and seasonal products.

If we have these things, I think many consumers would consider paying more for what they buy.

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Tripadvisor and Fake Reviews

I’ve just been on holiday to India.  Trying to use TripAdvisor for hotels and other information was a completely new experience this time.  Normally I prefer TripAdvisor over booking.com, because while both generally let you say anything you want, booking.com mixes so much marketing with the reviews that it’s too hard to identify places with significant numbers of negative reviews.  Even if I end up booking hotels with booking.com because it’s cheaper, I have been using TripAdvisor to actually choose the places.

The Fake Reviews and Profiles

Of course both TripAdvisor and booking.com are loaded with fake reviews, and it’s always been an issue identifying them.  Booking.com requires a booking before you leave a review, but if you are the owner of a particular hotel, it’s no problem to generate fake bookings, and then leave fake reviews.  Booking.com doesn’t seem to care about this kind of fake review, because of course they get a commission for every fake booking.  TripAdvisor has always been a bit of a sandbox, but since every user has a profile with a history of reviews, it’s a lot of work to create a credible profile to go along with every fake review.  Reviews where the user has only ever placed less than 5 reviews can easily be identified as probably fake, and any property that has a pattern of suspected fake reviews can also be identified as suspect.

Cheap Computer and English Skills

Visiting India was a whole new ballgame.  This is a country where many people have above average computer and English language skills, and labor is very cheap.  Unskilled labor costs about US$4 per day, and for a little more you can pay for full time fake review writing.  Also, if you’re a hotel and your staff isn’t very busy, you can ask them to create fake reviews in their spare time.

As I was planning my trip to India I encountered elaborately made profiles, with an extensive history of reviews.  There were positive reviews left by owners on their own properties, and negative reviews on competing properties.  I think everyone understands a new hotel may feel they need to write a few positive reviews about themselves to get started, but what I saw mostly went far beyond this.

In general I had to look for patterns like writing style that was the same, or possibly existing profiles with exactly the same number of previous reviews.  Sometimes cultural or language mistakes in reviews from countries I was familiar with.  In general, it just wasn’t possible to tell, and the sheer volume of fake reviews was often overwhelming.

Reviews About Fake Reviews

One of the only ways you can identify a property with fake reviews, is to actually go there and see for yourself it doesn’t match the other reviews.  It follows that you can then express this in your own review for that property, right?  Not so.

By way of fake reviews, I found myself staying at the Wood Castle Grand in Delhi, which at the time of making this post had 245 reviews on TripAdvisor and was ranked #9 out of 892 hotels in Delhi.  This hotel was not great, but okay.  Even though I am of the opinion that probably all 245 reviews are fake, I understand that the hotel is getting started, can’t do that without any reviews, and so has to write the first few reviews themselves.  In fact, as far as I was able to see, the hotel only had 2 functioning rooms, and simply didn’t have the traffic justifying 245 reviews anywhere.  I was there for 4 nights, and only saw one other visitor who was leaving just as I arrived.  I was there during what should have been the busy season for them.

In my review of this hotel, I didn’t want to be overly hostile, but I mentioned you should consider some of the reviews don’t seem right to me and may be faked.  TripAdvisor was very clear about this.  They rejected my review saying:

We don’t allow accusations that reviews are biased, suspicious or fake.

If you feel a review is suspicious, please use the flag / “Problem with Review” link, located at the bottom of each review, to alert our investigation team.

Flagged Reviews

Okay, if we’re supposed to flag suspicious reviews, let’s have a look at one of the things I’ve flagged in the past:  La Pizzateca Madrid

This place has no reason for a positive review.  There is just nothing here, and no reason for anyone to visit.  When we were there, they had only a few types of pizza slices, none of which were vegetarian.  We ordered a pizza, and it was disgusting.  Plastic chairs and tables.  They only have a few customers.

This is not rocket science, all anyone has to do is walk in there and have a look.  There are few more obvious examples of abuse on TripAdvisor.

At the time of writing this post they are #97 out of 10285 restaurants in Madrid, based solely on fake reviews.  After I left a 1-star review, there was a flurry of fake 5-star reviews, mostly from people who had only ever written one review in their lives, to compensate and bring them back up to what was at the time the 50th or so best restaurant in Madrid.

If this place is still there years after I flagged it, how seriously are we supposed to take TripAdvisor’s request to flag suspicious reviews?

End of an Era

While I can understand TripAdvisor’s position, not wanting to risk removing someone’s real review and claim it’s fake.  The one thing they used to have going for them was they never censored legitimate reviews.  That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

I’m really going to be in a quandary when it comes to my next trip.  Anyone have any suggestions on what should come next, after TripAdvisor?

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Demands by Indian Farmers

I was in India recently on holiday and happened to read in a newspaper about demands being made by Indian farmers to their government:

1. The right to be free from debt
2. Because now many of their products are sold below the cost of production, they would like the government to establish the cost of production for all commercial crops, then establish a minimum sale price of 150% of this cost.

Obviously there are details to be worked out, but it makes you wonder why the world has such a hard time agreeing to demands like these that seem so reasonable.

Surely there’s some room for compromise here?

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Fake News: CRISPR-Cas9

Here in Europe attempts are being made to get around GMO legislation by redefining what genetic engineering is.  In particular, even after the EU Court of Justice ruled that such attempts are illegal, the same arguments are being tried here in the Netherlands.

GMO ‘light’

It’s completely absurd to say this is somehow a different kind of genetic engineering.  The only ‘light’ thing about this technique is the cost and simplicity.  It used to be there was considerable cost and research behind each new genetically engineered variety, but this method can cost as little as US$75 and is much faster and easier to execute.  That means more corporate profits, but all of the other issues surrounding GMOs remain.

It’s absolutely silly to say that since this method only ‘turns off’ small parts of the genome, that this is somehow fundamentally different.

‘The question is: do you want potatoes that need to be sprayed 15 times or do you want potatoes that can do without this amount of spraying because of this technology?’

This is a ridiculous question, completely rhetorical and grounded in fake news.

For one thing, in Europe the chemicals you might spray a potato with are being phased out.  There isn’t a question of spraying a potato 15 times anymore.

There are also traditional breeding efforts underway, including F1 hybrids and organic breeding, which all show promise.

While it might seem very exciting to use genetic engineering to modify potatoes to resist blight, this has also been described as ‘gene mining’.  That is you take all the currently known genes that resist blight and put them into a single potato, something that would be very difficult with traditional breeding.  The problem with this is you can also overlook other gene ‘markers’ (combinations of genes that also resist blight), and once blight has evolved it will overcome even this resistance.  This is the same mentality behind spraying crops with chemicals, thinking even after the chemicals stop working, it will always be possible to develop new and stronger chemicals.

In fact with all GMO varieties to date promising to resist diseases or pests and reduce the need for chemicals, they have all failed in their promises.  The diseases or pests simply develop resistance, and the need for chemicals returns.  There’s no reason to think GMO potatoes will be any different.  In the case of for example bt based GMOs, these crops have seriously interfered with organic efforts.  There’s no reason to think GM potatoes won’t also interfere with organic efforts in a similar way.

A better approach is a combination of stopping with the use of chemicals, traditional breeding, permaculture techniques and improving the environment through reducing greenhouse gases and other environmental pollutants.  This will reduce the disease pressure in agriculture, and allow the potato genome to evolve and create it’s own resistance to potato blight.  In the longer term this will be a sustainable process.

Competing with Centuries of Evolution

All GMO techniques are competing with centuries of evolution.  While you might be able to find some short term quick fixes with GMOs, there’s not likely to be any major breakthroughs with genetic engineering.  It’s not likely to speed evolution.

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) are Too Strong

Especially over the last few decades, IPR have become too strong.  These have mostly been implemented in undemocratic ways, with very unpopular trade agreements or rules put into place by international institutions inaccessible through democratic principles.

There are direct rights like patents, and indirect rights like what the Convention on Biological Diversity convey.

The economic driving power behind GMOs is too strong, and severely limits any sort of reasonable public debate.

Everyone would benefit if this sort of science existed in the public domain, and independent (amateur) scientists also had an opportunity to demonstrate what they can offer.

Nothing for the Consumer

Things like improving yields, or resistance to pests, are fine for farmers and corporate interests.  No agricultural GMO has ever been marketed according to consumer demand.  Nothing.  If science has nothing but fake news to address consumer demand with, they should accept there is nothing to put on the market.

Lack of Functioning Democracy

I guess there are problems with democracy almost everywhere, but since this post was specifically intended to address the situation in The Netherlands, let me say something about democracy here.

There is a serious deficiency of free expression here.  I understand this is a problem for many people, but it’s particularly acute for people with a foreign background or those unable to communicate fully and fluently in Dutch.  While there have been some very public examples of this recently, there’s very little acceptance this is a common problem, also in smaller less dramatic ways.

A government can simply not say there is a public consultation on an issue like this, if there is no truly democratic forum in which to express and freely discuss opinions.

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Bayer Needs an Aspirin

Bayer 1-year share price
One year share price of Bayer

Bayer seems to be wrapping up their purchase of Monsanto, but investors are not impressed.

$289 Million Verdict

The first in a series of lawsuits over Monsanto’s glyphosate based weedkiller Round Up has resulted in an award of $289 million for the plaintiff.  Like Bayer is quick to point out this is only one jury and one verdict, which is subject to review and appeal.  There are many reasons to believe this amount could be reduced or eliminated altogether.  It’s clearly enough to make investors nervous, but might not be a serious issue for Bayer in the long run.  We’ll have to wait and see how this develops.

Divestment of Assets to BASF

Bayer themselves identify the unexpectedly large sale of $9 billion in assets to BASF as one of the reasons for falling earnings.   In part this probably comes out of their ‘fake news’ Glyphosate ECI here in Europe.

In the lead up to Monsanto-Bayer merger, a suspiciously funded European Citizens’ Initiative was launched to remove glyphosate as an unpatented product from the EU market.  Through the ways I describe in the link above, I was able to see it was completely staged.

The issue was Bayer had a competing patented product called glufosinate, marketed under the name Liberty or Basta.  Bayer was trying to remove glyphosate because it was cheap and generic formulations were available.

I wrote some letters to Dutch and EU politicians, alerting them to these things.  After I wrote these letters, the EU launched an investigation into the then pending merger between Monsanto and Bayer.  As a result of this investigation, it emerged Bayer had an entire agricultural chemicals unit dedicated to making chemical analogues of glyphosate, and glufosinate was one of these.  Bayer was clearly planning to combine Round Up Ready technologies of Monsanto with their own chemical variations of Round Up, and create even more herbicides and herbicide resistant crops.

The EU then required Bayer to sell it’s entire agricultural chemical unit to BASF, as a condition of the merger between Monsanto and Bayer.  The US justice department later required even more assets be sold to BASF.

The announcement that glyphosate was to be removed from the EU market was also pretty sudden, and farmers did not have enough time to plan for this.  This would have created an unusually high demand for Bayer’s alternative patented herbicide products.  It was agreed to extend the licensing of glyphosate for a few more years, in order to reduce the impact on farmers and allow competing organic products to be developed.

This is really how politics is supposed to work.  It’s an example of politicians being responsive to citizens, and doing what they can within the rule of law to make things better.  It’s the kind of thing that happens behind the scenes, that we don’t always hear about.  We should all be very happy with the way this turned out.

Bayer’s Shareholders

What reason do the Bayer shareholders give for loss of confidence in the company?  Some are pointing to a lack of direction in the company.  Bayer has been unable to give a clear statement on the way forward, and what their new products will be.  It seems at least in the short term their business model has been disrupted.

Other Comments

EU Parliamentary elections are around the corner.  Everything that transpired above was with ‘normal’ politicians.  If I had to deal with politicians from populist parties, it would have probably all been a lot harder.  I think mainstream politicians in Europe have learned a hard lesson from the last parliamentary elections, Brexit and the populist parties that are coming into power around Europe.  I think they are trying harder now.

I want to work constructively with whomever comes to power, and never choose one party over another.  I hope however that when readers of this blog vote, they choose candidates with a constructive agenda.