It's endlessly interesting how different countries name their great offices of state. \u00a0Indeed, the USA has a Secretary of State (as we did in Elizabethan days) who heads up the State Department whereas in the UK we make do with a Foreign Secretary in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office which neatly expresses everyone else as other and foreign.<\/p>\n
France has a Department of the Interior with a Minister, whereas we have a Home Secretary in the Home Office. \u00a0But Home<\/em> is an odd word in Britain where we have Home Counties and BBC radio used to have a Home Service before Radio 4, and every great estate used to have a Home Farm.<\/p>\n And so I noted with interest that the Dutch have a Minister for Nature and Nitrogen Policy whose remit is to halve nitrogen emissions by 2030. \u00a0The budget for doing this is \u20ac24bn which will be used to put farmers \u2013 up to 3000 of them \u2013 out of work.<\/p>\n This is deliberate policy unlike in the UK where if farmers go bust it's not by design. The\u00a0Dutch government\u2019s proposal to cut nitrogen emissions is designed to comply with the European Union\u2019s emission-reduction rules. \u00a0An article by Thomas Fazi in Unherd<\/a> notes that<\/p>\n \"agriculture currently accounts for almost half of the country\u2019s output of carbon dioxide, yet the Netherlands is responsible<\/a> for less than 0.4% of the world\u2019s emissions. \u00a0No wonder many Dutch fail to see how such negligible returns justify the complete overhaul of the country\u2019s farming sector, which is already considered one of the most sustainable in the world: over the past two decades, water dependence for key crops has been reduced<\/a> by as much as 90%, and the use of chemical pesticides in greenhouses has been almost completely eliminated.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n