At the monthly LNV ministers' meeting, Minister Piet Adema accused him of unnecessarily keeping Dutch farmers in suspense about their operations for the coming year.
Wojciechowski said he would discuss the Dutch approach on Tuesday (December 13) during the weekly plenary meeting of the EU commissioners, but immediately added that he would propose approving the Dutch NSP. He did not explain why this could not have been done a few months earlier.
In doing so, Wojciechowski had to tacitly admit that there was little substantive criticism of the Dutch implementation rules. He is not available to the press on Tuesday to provide an explanation about what he will raise during the commissioners' meeting.
It is known that Wojciechowski believes the number of animals in Dutch agriculture and livestock farming is too large for the limited land area, and that the Netherlands does too little to combat the environmental damage that, according to him, results from this.
In an interview with Nieuwe Oogst earlier this year, he hinted that the Netherlands could use the arguments of “animal welfare” and “more living space in barns” to apply for EU subsidies to reduce the livestock population. However, despite many official pre-consultations regarding the Dutch NSP, the Netherlands chose not to include “reduction of the livestock population” in any form in the NSP.
Minister Adema was given the floor first immediately upon the opening of the discussions in Brussels and reminded Wojciechowski that the Dutch approach aims to comply with the agreements in the CAP, and that he did not want it to be stalled over details. Earlier, the Netherlands had already decided to make the first year of the CAP, 2023, a “transition year” because farmers only learned about their prospects for the following year so late due to the Brussels delays.
Several other EU ministers also expressed their surprise in polite, veiled terms about the Brussels delays regarding the Dutch rules (about which everyone in The Hague and Brussels had already agreed by the end of September).