This afternoon I had a meeting with Gerda Verburg, our Minister of Agriculture. It was her first day after her holiday, and was fully planned from 9 o’clock in the morning until 9 o’clock at night: the budget talks were imminent. I thought I would get straight to the point: “That is convenient, because I also have a few wishes from the horticulture sector.”

Dramatic situation in horticulture
Briefly I informed Verburg about the current situation in horticulture, which is in one word dramatic. Losses are running so high that many companies certainly will need five years to get back on track. Assuming they can keep their heads above water…

The role of the banks was also discussed: high interest rates for short-term loans up to one year. This does not help horticulture!

Question from the minister
I asked the minister how they could help the sector here. Verburg indicated that everything would be OK with the guarantee scheme, but she did not want to discuss this topic at all! The minister had an entirely different question for me! “Who should I go to for a long-term vision of horticulture?” she asked me. “who is the face of horticulture?”. I did not expect that question at all, but I did understand it. The Minister wants to invest in the sector, but in a healthy industry. And not in a sector that will be back at her desk in a few years’ time, because energy prices are too high.
Still I did not expect that question at all. So I thought about it briefly in the car on the way home. What should we do? I contributed to the Greenport vision 2040, but if there is a clear conclusion in that about what must happen…

Too little has been done about marketing
It is quite clear to me what should be done. There is one big problem: you can produce food sustainably, and that was also in the memorandum from the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Netherlands does this already with its Greenport, with its horticulture sector: but no one is paying for it! And how can you continue producing sustainable products if you don’t receive the value of it in the market? And that’s where I think the biggest bottleneck is. Too little has been done about marketing and there is too much division among the growers, so that they can be played by both the wholesale trade and the supermarkets.

So, ultimately, it’s all about marketing.