60 percent of dutch meat is exported, we can do with a whole lot less.

Exported doesn't mean throwing in the trash, somebody is using and depending on it.

I know this meat is still used ofcourse. But with a country as small as ours, there simply are better uses of the space for our country and people.

There is no space. The land belongs to the farmers. It’s not up to you to decide what should be done with it.

Perhaps we can stop their subsidies and see if they're suddenly willing to sell voluntarily.

We can then have "you won an argument" sticker for breakfast.

Most NL farmers are in favor of stopping all subsidies if it means that it also stops in other countries. Because unlike in other countries subsidies in NL come with lots of strings attached.

Also, most of it is only exported for a couple of miles to our nearest neighbors.

Interesting, but that doesn't particularly address why it's important to keep agricultural skils current and land viable.

eg: In a pinch meat animals can be slaughtered and eaten and what they once ate can be fed instead to humans.

It's the insurance of being not far removed from near sufficiency.

Yep, plenty of space to grow food is metaverse.

This is a moot point for about 60 years. Europe, like the US, have massive agricultural overproductions which distort the world markets, due to subsidies. Most of the disastrous monocultures are used to feed bovines, a very inefficient source of protein for the human diet.

Basically, it's a lifestyle and politico-economic choice, not a need.

Indeed, it hasn't been an issue since the last big war in Europe and we can all see how unlikely such a thing is to happen again and that there's no need to have an insurance policy of any sort.

Where does this need for an insurance policy stops? If Europe's trade and defense agreements are insuficient, then perhaps each country should aim for a 3x overproduction, to cover those bad agricultural years? Maybe each city should too? Or perhaps each citizen, we should all retreat to rural homesteads and live on pasture-fed cow meat - a demonstrably unsustainable dystopia that will turn the entire planet into a giant ball of dung and guarantee eventual starvation for every sentient creature inhabiting it? But at least the rural voters would be among the last to die, so there's that.

Now you're just being silly.

The answer lies between your initial zero and your over dramatic 3x imaginary ball of dung.

If your government is sensible and transparent I'm sure there are public domain white papers that cover their discussions and recommendations which might make for an interesting read and put an end to this silly posturing.

>The answer lies between

Where? You are just expressing a political preference and hand-waving to unnamed experts. By all accounts, Europe is overproducing agricultural products and the large part of EU's policies are aimed at limiting this surplus.