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PARMA, Italy — Frans Timmermans sure seemed like a classic EU technocrat, crafting its Green Deal agenda that so elated environmentalists and infuriated farmers. In reality, however, he was a Dutch nationalist, looking to decimate Europe’s agriculture to benefit his native land.
That’s according to Italian Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida, speaking on Tuesday at a panel event in Parma organized by the country’s largest farmer union, Coldiretti. Talking about the greening of European farming, Lollobrigida stated that Timmermans, who was climate commissioner from 2019 to 2023, was a smart man.
“If I was Dutch, I’d reflect on my history and I’d say ‘I’m a small nation, not like you. If I create rules so rigid that they reduce European production to what it was in the 1600s, wouldn’t Europe have to import foreign goods to feed its people?’” asked the far-right politician, whose partner is the sister of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
“And maybe they arrive through my ports as they once did and maybe I can rebuild an economic force that I can’t build with my country’s strength alone,” he mused. “I don’t think Timmermans is crazy. I think he coldly calculated in the interest of the Netherlands and not in the interest of Europe.”
A spokesperson for Timmermans, who stood down last August to run in national elections, declined to comment on the Italian farm minister’s broadside.
Lollobrigida doubled down on his claims in an interview with POLITICO.
“If you reduce internal production, Europe’s food would be imported through Rotterdam,” he insisted, shaking his head as he munched Roman cheese. “It’s what happened from the 1600s to the 1750s in Europe, when the Netherlands became an empire with the East India company.”
“Some things aren’t coincidences.”
The bizarre statement was merely the latest by Lollobrigida, who was in Parma to open the CIBUS food fair, Italy’s largest agricultural show. His opening speech rambled from the birth of Italian food in the first millennium to the culinary devastation wreaked by northern barbarians.
“We absorbed the Mediterranean cultures, we absorbed the Arab cultures … through our explorers, we had the opportunity to have within this Italy of ours a little of everything created in the world,” he proclaimed, before asserting the inherent superiority of his national cuisine.
“[We’re] lucky to have been born in Italy.”
