New agreement with the Netherlands Overseas Trust

The British chronology of the war records under 30 June 1916 a further agreement between the British government and the Netherlands Overseas Trust (NOT) on the rationing of the Netherlands. The British official history of the blockade, written by Archibald Bell, dates this agreement to 28 June. It supplemented the agreement of September 1915, which had limited imports of fodder, fats, oils and wool into the Netherlands to the quantities needed by the country itself. Now the list of goods rationed by the Trust was extended to include cocoa beans, tin, raw and tanned hides, tanning agents (PL), asbestos and paraffin wax. All these goods, needed by German industry and German consumers, could now reach the Netherlands only in quantities corresponding to its own consumption.

Butter and bacon instead of fodder

The British also needed the Trust for another reason. The Netherlands imported fodder and fertilisers, while at the same time sending almost its entire surplus of meat, butter and cheese to Germany. According to Bell, from September 1915 to February 1916 more than 98 per cent of the pork exported from the Netherlands, more than 90 per cent of the butter and nearly 87 per cent of the cheese went to Germany, and only small quantities to Great Britain. London invoked an article of the agreement with the Trust under which the guarantee that goods would stay in the country also covered everything produced from them. In this reading, meat or butter were products of imported fodder. The Trust wanted to avoid recalculating the rations from scratch, so it helped the British in another way. On 16 May the British agricultural expert Henry Rew arrived in The Hague, and talks with him were conducted by the Trust’s directors and representatives of Dutch farmers. An Agricultural Export Bureau (Landbouw Export Bureau) was set up, through which the British were to buy part of the Dutch food. The agreement was signed on 16 June. Bell observed that the Trust’s directors had no doubt that they could direct Dutch exports wherever they wished.

Dispute with the Americans

The power of the Trust worried the United States. In May complaints reached the State Department that the NOT was refusing to accept coffee from New York while accepting it from London and Le Havre. The minister in The Hague, Henry van Dyke, protested and demanded that the Dutch foreign ministry explain the government’s relationship with the Trust. On 30 June he forwarded to Washington the reply of the Foreign Minister, John Loudon, dated 19 June. The Dutch government maintained that the NOT was a private company and that the government was not really responsible for how it conducted its business. Van Dyke took this reply as an admission that the Trust operated under Dutch law but was in practice controlled by the British government. He considered further protests in The Hague pointless.

The new agreements did not take effect at once. According to Bell, in the summer of 1916 Great Britain received from the Netherlands much less food than the agricultural agreement had provided for, because the Dutch government was still keeping aloof from these arrangements. When the time came to negotiate a new agricultural agreement, the British therefore warned the government in The Hague itself that without its participation they might withdraw the facilities for supplies of bunker coal, jute and lubricants. The Trust’s rationing was extended further: in September 1916 it came to cover rice.