Corona crisis: in Belgium, they need to eat fries twice a week
It’s not just the Netherlands—Belgium is also struggling with a huge surplus of potatoes destined for fries. Now what? The chairman of the potato growers’ association knows the answer: ‘Make eating fries twice a week compulsory, then we’ll solve this problem together.’
In Belgium, 750,000 tonnes of potatoes are sitting in cold storage waiting for better times. Just as in the Netherlands, all restaurants in Belgium closed in mid-March. Now that festivals in spring and summer have also been cancelled, Belgian potato farmers can already see their livelihoods going up in smoke. The international market is also at a standstill, so the potatoes cannot be exported.
Twice a week or every day?
In the Netherlands, almost a billion kilos of potatoes are going to waste. Each person would need to eat sixty kilos of fries to get rid of that mountain of potatoes. A small portion of fries weighs 150 grams, which means everyone would have to eat at least one portion of fries every day to help farmers out of trouble. We’re nowhere near that: on average, people in the Netherlands eat 18 kilos of fries a year, according to calculations by Statistics Netherlands in 2014. They include potato slices and rösti in those figures, by the way. Research in Belgium shows that our neighbours enjoy fries more: they eat fries an average of once a week, usually on Sundays.
To the food bank
Flemish Minister of Agriculture Hilde Crevits has arranged for part of Belgium’s potato surplus to be donated to food banks. ‘At least then it will be eaten,’ she tells a Brussels newspaper. ‘It would be a shame to have to throw away this delicious food that the farmers have worked so hard to produce.’ Belgian potato farmers are a little jealous of their Dutch colleagues. According to the farmers, those colleagues receive a subsidy to offset their losses, while not a single euro comes their way from the Flemish government.
