We occasionally feature the writings of Ronald Rovers, a Dutch commenter on sustainability. A recent post focused on whether, in a spirit of fairness, EU countries should grow grapes, soybeans, or solar panels. It’s a question for us as well.
You can read it here. It begins:
“I’m sitting on a terrace on the borders of the Moselle, tasting some local wine. And looking out over the slopes along the Mosel, I come to a rather confrontational observation: we have deforested an enormous area, in order to be able to grow our wine… All the southern slopes here are filled with vines. As far as Germany is concerned, its about 100,000 hectares. But not only in Germany, of course. In all southern European countries, Spain as much as 900,000 ha, France 800,000, Italy 700,000 ha.
And by the way, large amounts of wine grapes are also grown more north these days. To a total of 3.2 million hectares in the EU (about the same size as the land area of the Netherlands).
And we love it here along the Mosel and elsewhere, enjoying the view of those slopes with their wine castles. But then to realize that at the same time we are protesting and agitating against deforestation for soy beans in South America grown elsewhere for our meat and related products.
The largest wine countries in the EU happen to be also the largest soy importers, not coincidentally perhaps, their own fertile land has already been taken over by wine. The Netherlands is the exception, they are the largest importer, as far as soy imports are concerned. In 2021, 6.7 million tons of soybeans, soybean meal and soybean oil entered the ports of Rotterdam and Amsterdam alone. Based on average global harvests, this volume of soy required about 2.4 million hectares (Mha) of agricultural land, (for reference, the Netherlands has about 1.6 million ha of agricultural land). For the EU as a whole, that it was 20 million tons of imports in 2020, the result of 7.5 million hectares of production land, twice as much as for wine.
So it would be a lot fairer if we would grow the soybeans here, and at least half could already be grown on previously deforested land here. Perhaps a bit far-fetched but I must think of slavery, where people worked for us before, cultivating land, that is we made (forced) others to work for us. While currently we are still making “other land ” work for us. So while we have abolished human slavery, we are still ‘enslaved’ to the land on which they worked. And still work, only now ‘voluntarily’. We do not force anything or anyone, but merely throw money around. …”
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EU citizens (or us) are unlikely ever to face a referendum on solar / soy / wine, but such decisions are regularly made locally through the planning system. It’s a debate for school eco groups to have, maybe, and would make a good topic for a simulation exercise on land use – not that simulations are all that popular these days.