Haarlem's World-First Meat Advert Ban Comes Into Force

From today (Monday, January 1, 2024) the Dutch city of Haarlem will no longer put up adverts for meat on the advertising spaces it owns, making it the first city in the world to actually start taking meat off its streets.

Haarlem sits about 30km outside Amsterdam and is home to more than 160,000 people. Back in November 2021 the city council quietly voted through a motion from the GroenLinks (green left) party to stop advertising meat, vacation flights and fossil fuels in public spaces. The news only went round the world in September 2022, and the ban then had to wait until 2024 so that existing advertising contracts could run out.

Regional broadcaster NH Nieuws reports that from January 1, 2024 no adverts for meat, flights or fossil fuels will be placed on the triangular boards that hang around the city's lampposts. Talks on the bigger contracts for bus shelters and electronic screens are still under way, so the rest will follow in phases. It isn't a total ban either. As NOS explains, it only covers advertising spots the city itself owns, so the local butcher can still put a sign up outside his own shop.

The motion was written by GroenLinks councillor Ziggy Klazes, who told local radio station Haarlem105 when the news broke:

We can't tell people there's a climate crisis and encourage them to buy products that are part of the cause.

It is a signal - if it is picked up nationally, that would only be very nice.

Of course, there are a lot of people who find the decision outrageous and patronising, but there are also a lot of people who think it's fine.

(Those quotes were reported by the Evening Standard.) A spokesman for the meat industry body COV complained at the time that "the authorities are going too far in telling people what's best for them". We'd gently point out that nobody is stopping anyone buying a sausage. The city is just declining to rent out its own lampposts to sell them.

And the signal is being picked up. In November the city council in Utrecht voted for its own ban covering around 850 advertising frames, a motion brought by the Party for the Animals, and nearby Bloemendaal wrote the ban straight into a new advertising contract in October. Zwolle and the province of North Holland are working on the same thing.

Why meat? The UN Food and Agriculture Organization puts livestock at around 14.5% of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions, and the Oxford University study published in PNAS found a global shift to vegan diets would cut food-related emissions by 70% and save 8 million lives by 2050. If the climate crisis is real (it is), advertising the cause of a big chunk of it on public property never made much sense.

We first reported on this when Haarlem became the first city in the world to vote to ban meat adverts. Since then Los Angeles has endorsed the Plant Based Treaty, Edinburgh became the first European capital to sign it, Denmark published the world's first national plant-based action plan and COP28 served world leaders a two-thirds plant-based menu. It all goes back to the day Germany banned meat at official functions.

A happy new year indeed.