The policy in question is the National Protein Strategy, or NPS, published in December 2020. It emerged from a request by the European Commission for member states to develop national protein strategies within their Common Agricultural Policy plans, amid rising geopolitical tensions, supply chain disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and competition for feed commodities. Europe’s so-called protein deficit, its lack of strategic autonomy in vegetable proteins, had become a key geopolitical concern, and national strategies were expected to stimulate the growth of protein-rich crops while contributing to environmental, climate, and health goals. Boterman analyzed the NPS report itself, along with 211 policy documents and parliamentary debates from 2018 to 2025, using qualitative frame analysis to trace how the strategy frames the future of Dutch food.

The concept at the heart of the analysis is the promissory narrative: the forward-looking claims and visions that advocate for alternative food technologies and practices as solutions to current environmental, ethical, and health challenges. Drawing on scholarship on alternative proteins, Boterman identifies three central functions of such narratives. They foreground specific technological pathways as solutions to urgent problems, legitimating investment and political commitment. They mask uncertainties and trade-offs, overselling techno-fixes while obscuring contested political and ecological landscapes. And they reshape cultural expectations about what future food systems should look like, often privileging technologically intensive solutions over systemic socio-political change. Applied to the Dutch strategy, these functions reveal a document that promises to resolve nearly every crisis at once, while quietly leaving the underlying structure of intensive livestock farming untouched.

The NPS organizes its solutions into five tracks: growing more local protein-rich crops, innovating alternative proteins, scaling up insect farming, optimizing waste flows, and shifting consumption toward more plant-based diets. A pie chart in the report suggests rough contributions from each track, with about 20 percent of the protein gap assigned to domestic legume cultivation, another 20 percent to novel protein innovations, 15 percent to insects, 20 percent to waste circularity, and only 15 percent to dietary change. Notably, no official quantitative target is published, and the report contains no calculations of how each track would actually contribute. The overall picture, however, is clear: the strategy is overwhelmingly oriented toward the production side, with technological innovation as the dominant imaginary running through nearly every element.

That techno-optimism takes many forms. The second track envisions new plant-based protein sources such as beet leaves and duckweed, cultivated meat developed by Dutch companies Mosa Meat and Meatable, seaweed grown alongside North Sea wind turbine parks, expanded shellfish production, and single-cell proteins generated by microbial fermentation. According to the report, this last category is an important protein source for the future, for which substantial growth can already be realized within current legal frameworks. The first track proposes expanding protein-rich crops from roughly 20,000 hectares in 2020 to 100,000 hectares by 2030, with space ultimately for up to 125,000 hectares, suggesting a return to a more diversified and self-sufficient agriculture. Yet the report itself concedes that, under current regulations, alternative plant sources cannot compete with soy on price, and that the amino-acid composition of European soy and native legumes is less favorable for compound feed.

Perhaps the most striking enthusiasm is reserved for insects, which the NPS presents as a genuine panacea for the protein puzzle. Citing reports from Wageningen University, the strategy estimated that insect-based proteins could replace 10 percent of animal-based proteins in animal feed and 20 percent in human food by 2025. Insects, the report claims, bring the food chain back into balance with nature and fit seamlessly with circular agriculture, recycling valuable nutrients, providing suitable amino acids for livestock feed, and expanding the Dutch insect business and research cluster. Closely connected is the promise of circularity: the fourth track envisions Dutch livestock farming becoming entirely circular, which would require re-legalizing kitchen waste as pig feed and reintroducing processed animal proteins such as bone meal, banned since the BSE outbreak. The Dutch government has consistently lobbied the European Commission to readmit these flows, and by 2022 it could report that bone meal had been re-permitted under strict conditions, with insect proteins also admitted for non-ruminant feed.

What these promises share, Boterman argues, is a systematic downplaying of uncertainty. Insect farming was still a niche sector when the plan was drafted, and meeting the promised goals would require enormous upscaling, large-scale capital investment, and developed commodity chains. Cultivated meat holds promise, but its chances of success remain unclear, and its mass market introduction is still pending in major markets. Potential consumer resistance to eating insects, which is well documented in the research literature, is not even mentioned in the strategy, nor is the political polarization emerging around cultivated meat in several European countries. Regulatory, technological, financial, and political conditions on which these promises depend are often not yet crystallized and not stable over time, yet the NPS focuses almost exclusively on opportunities.

The treatment of dietary change reveals the strategy’s deepest ambivalence. Consumption was added to the NPS only late in the drafting process, after stakeholders and several political parties pushed for its inclusion, and the half-heartedness still shows. The strategy oscillates between optimistic frames that everything starts with consumption and more negative frames that it is very hard to change consumption habits, combined with a general reluctance to interfere with consumer freedom. The stated ambition, in line with recommendations from the Dutch Food Centre, is to shift from 60 percent animal-sourced protein in Dutch diets to 50 percent by 2030, through measures such as offering more plant-based proteins in government buildings and investigating a meat levy. In the years after publication, the government recommitted to this target and framed the protein transition as an economic opportunity for farmers, signing a Bean Deal in 2022 to build full legume supply chains from soil to mouth. Yet when the National Health Council advised moving to 60 percent plant-based protein, the minister postponed any decision and delegated it to a new government.

That new government, which includes the agro-populist Farmer Citizen Movement, or BBB, marks a decisive shift in the political narrative. The BBB, founded by agribusiness consultants in 2019 in response to criticism of intensive livestock farming, won a landslide victory in the provincial elections and joined the national coalition in 2024, delivering the agriculture minister. The ministry was renamed from Agriculture, Food Quality and Nature to Agriculture, Fishery, Food Security and Nature, a change Boterman describes as an omen of how the winds have shifted. In recent debates, animal-based proteins are now presented as indispensable to national crisis preparedness, while reducing livestock farming is framed as economic and geopolitical folly and dietary change as an elite urban project. Narratives about the detrimental effects of livestock farming on climate, biodiversity, and human health are being drowned out by narratives of food security and strategic autonomy.

The study’s conclusion is pointed: the National Protein Strategy functions less as a roadmap toward a post-livestock protein future than as a strategic effort to secure the Dutch agro-industrial complex against geopolitical uncertainty and environmental regulation. The strategy never entertains reducing the capacity of meat and dairy production for export, even though the literature on protein transitions argues that meaningful transformation requires reductions in animal production and consumption, not merely the addition of novel protein sources. Instead, promissory narratives of legume dreams, insect game changers, cultivated meat, and circular waste valorization sustain an imaginary in which intensification and sustainability are mutually compatible, masking the tensions between remedying the protein deficit and sustaining feed-intensive production, between circularity and the biological limits of waste-based systems, and between techno-optimism and the political and cultural barriers to dietary change. In the Netherlands, the land of the protein hub, the future of protein, at least officially, looks remarkably like the present.

Subject of Research: Promissory narratives in the Dutch National Protein Strategy and the politics of the protein transition

Article Title: The promissory narratives of the Dutch National Protein Strategy

Article References: Boterman, W. R. (2026). The promissory narratives of the Dutch National Protein Strategy. Geographica Helvetica, 81(2), 311-323. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-311-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-311-2026

Keywords: protein transition, Netherlands, National Protein Strategy, alternative proteins, intensive livestock farming, techno-optimism, food security, circular agriculture, insect farming, cultivated meat, nitrogen crisis, agro-populism