The Dutch fur farmers' last stand

The Netherlands is one of the biggest mink farming nations in the world but the industry is under attack.

Hundreds of brown glittery mink eyes gaze out from their wire mesh cages at a mink farm in Ederveen in the eastern province of Gelderland. On top of the cages lies their food, an evil-smelling brown mess of meat. Every now and again one of the animals takes a bite or nibbles at a straw sticking through the wire. Mink are solitary hunters but these animals spend their entire lives in a box measuring 85 by 30 centimetres.

A farm-bred mink’s life lasts about six months. Then the animal is gassed, its pelt destined for the fashion industry while the rest goes into a waste incinerator. In the Netherland, any animal not slaughtered under supervision cannot be eaten. Annually, the Netherlands produces over four million gleaming pelts and ten million kilos of mink meat which is classified as waste, says Wim Verhagen, director of the Dutch fur farmers’ federation

Anti-fur campaigns

Years of anti-fur campaigning have brought results. Fox and chinchilla farming were banned during the 1990s and the import of cat and dog fur as well as seal fur will soon be illegal too. Mink farming is the last remaining bastion of the fur industry.

A draft law by Labour and the Socialist Party may now also outlaw mink farming. It seems to have a good chance of success. According to a 2006 poll, 72 percent of the Dutch population support a complete ban on fur farming while 86 percent condemn the wearing of fur.

Parliamentarians Krista van Velzen (SP) and Harm Evert Waalkens (Labour) think it is morally wrong to farm animals solely for their pelts. To be held in captivity and then killed obviously endangers the animals’ welfare, they say. Moreover, fur coats are not among the first necessities in life.

Cheap ploy

The proposed ban is “a cheap political ploy at the expense of a small group of businesses,” Verhagen says. “This is a case of left-wing parties telling people what they can and cannot buy. What difference does it make if you farm an animal for meat or use its pelt to make something which will last you twenty years?”

The Netherlands is the world’s third biggest mink-producing country after Denmark and China. Its 163 fur farmers produce 4.5 million pelts a year, almost one tenth of the 50 million pelts produced globally. Leather tanning plants went out a long time ago in the Netherlands and all pelts are sent abroad to be cured.

According to the national statistics office CBS, the total value of both fur and fake fur products (not including fur collars) has halved over the last ten years to three million euros a year. This is small fry compared with the total annual turnover of over 100 million euros generated by the Dutch export of pelts.

Moreover, fur farming is a growth industry, Verhagen says. Three quarters of all fur is mink and the world-wide production of pelts has doubled since 2000.

Dutch fur farmers are partly responsible for the growth in production. Existing farms have increased the number of breeding mink from 630,000 to 840,000 over the last four years, according to figures from Wageningen University’s institute of agricultural economics.

Phase-out

Waalkens and Van Velzen want the industry to be phased out in ten years’ time, giving the farmers time to switch to alternative ways of farming. But they prefer to be bought out, cash in hand. In November the institute calculated that an immediate ban would cost the government 500 million euros in compensation.

And now the economic downturn could cause parliament to reject a scheme that kills off a profitable economic sector and may rob over a thousand people of their jobs.

Some fur farmers have decided not to await developments and have set up shop abroad. Poland with its cheap land and cheap labour is proving a particularly popular destination. “In Poland you can farm twice as many animals for the same money and under worse conditions [ than in the Netherlands],” Christian Democrat parliamentarian Ger Koopmans said during a debate on the proposed ban in October.

The Christian Democrats have always been among the most stalwart defenders of intensive animal farming. “Should we also stop keeping horses or dogs? Or are these luxury items as well?”, Koopmans said at the time.