The Dutch fairground industry wants an excise duty cut. Carousel and ride operators are warning they’ll bring the country to a standstill unless the government steps in on high diesel prices. It’s a familiar ritual: when the pain gets bad enough, businesses knock on the government’s door for relief.
TLN (the Dutch road transport federation) has not ruled out an excise reduction to ease pressure on the transport sector and is also pushing for broader short-term support for operators. The legitimate concern at the heart of this is that the stacking of costs ( wages, the new truck toll, and rising diesel prices) is becoming unsustainable. Doing nothing doesn’t seem like an option, does it?
These are tense days, caught somewhere between hope and despair.
The problem isn’t the price. It’s the dependency.
Trucks consume between 40 and 50 percent of all diesel used in the Netherlands. That’s not a statistic to be proud of. It’s a strategic vulnerability of the highest order. And while the debate circles around excise duties, something more serious may be approaching: scarcity. When fuel runs out, no surcharge will fix it. It’s simply gone. Providing energy subsidies? Tread carefully, says the IMF: “There simply isn’t enough energy.” The same logic applies to grid congestion and electricity supply.
The transport sector knows this. The signals from physical oil infrastructure and geopolitical uncertainty (the real long-term indicators) have been unambiguous for years. Yet the reflex remains the same: give us breathing room, and we’ll weather this spike too. For now, diesel prices remain high.
Simon Loos CEO, Peter Appel is right that the consumer ultimately foots the bill. But the solution is not to distribute the pain through a fuel surcharge clause or an excise cut. The solution is to eliminate the pain by breaking the dependency. The trouble is that it takes time. And time is running out for many transport operators.
Productivity, not subsidies.
Economist Mathijs Bouman put it sharply this week in the Financieele Dagblad: “Forget excise cuts. It’s time to reduce energy demand.” This isn’t a sustainability problem; it’s a productivity problem. When resources are scarce, we need to do more with less.
The sectors most exposed to diesel and energy scarcity, labor shortages, and price volatility (such as agrifood, groceries, construction materials, containers, and chemicals) are precisely the sectors with the most to gain from more efficient logistics. Fewer empty kilometers. Larger vehicles. Better load factors. Smarter networks. Fewer supply chain links.
Excise cuts actually blunt the incentive to tackle any of that. Cheap diesel gives operators less reason to drive more efficiently, plan more intelligently, or invest in alternatives. It’s a genuine dilemma: do you give laggards more room to breathe, or do you back the growing group of frontrunners already working on sustainability together with their shippers? The energy transition will completely reshape the competitive landscape. And there will be no room for those who fall behind.
What we actually need.
No cuts? Perhaps temporarily unavoidable. But what is needed is a sector-wide action plan in which shippers and carriers in each sector jointly develop an implementation agenda and align it with government policy, including, for example, the deployment of revenue recycling schemes (linked to the Dutch truck toll). Not as a non-binding declaration of intent, but as a firm commitment with measurable targets: efficiency gains per tonne-kilometer, reduced diesel dependency, and an investment roadmap for alternatives.
The government has a legitimate role to play here. But that role is not to muffle market price signals. It is to accelerate the transition: setting standards, rewarding innovation, and giving the sector’s frontrunners the space to demonstrate that sustainable logistics is also profitable logistics.
Walther Ploos van Amstel