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Finland Farms and Farmers
Finland's agriculture was based on privately owned
family
farms. This was especially the case after 1922, when the
republic, anxious to reduce rural discontent, implemented
the
first of a series of land reforms that redistributed land
to
tenants and to landless farm workers
(see The Establishment of Finnish Democracy
, ch. 1;
Domestic Developments and Foreign Politics, 1948-66
, ch. 1). After World War II, the
government
resettled some 40,000 farm families displaced from areas
occupied
by the Soviet Union. The postwar resettlement program also
transferred land to farms considered too small for
efficient
operations, many of which had been set up in the interwar
period.
As a result of the resettlement program, Finland was
one of
the few industrialized countries in which the number of
farms
increased after 1945; by 1950 there were about 260,000
farms. The
number of farms started to decline in the 1960s, however,
falling
to about 200,000 by 1981. The decrease in the number of
farms
caused an increase in average farm size, but large farms
still
remained rare. Thus, in the mid-1980s, about 60 percent of
farms
covered less than ten hectares, 25 percent included
between ten
and twenty hectares, and only 15 percent occupied more
than
twenty hectares. At that time, both large and small farms
were
disappearing, leaving an increasing number of farms that
were
between ten and twenty hectares. Observers predicted that
this
trend was likely to continue.
In the late 1980s, the average farm comprised twelve
hectares
of arable land and thirty-five hectares of forest. The
relative
proportions of field holdings to forest holdings varied
from
region to region; in the south, farmers tended to own more
arable
land but less forest, while in the north, the reverse was
true.
Farm families formed the basic production unit. Family
members
provided about 95 percent of farm labor; wage earners
supplied
the remainder. Most farms specialized in one or two
activities,
such as hog production, dairy farming, or grain
cultivation.
Although in the early postwar years most farms produced
some
milk, by the early 1980s only one out of three farms did
so, and
about half of all farms had no farm animals. This tendency
toward
specialization increased the efficiency of Finland's
relatively
small production units.
Farm incomes lagged behind those of the total
population. For
example, according to a 1984 study, the average income of
fulltime farmers totaled only 70 percent of that of industrial
workers. Nevertheless, income disparities between
agriculture and
other sectors were probably less severe than these figures
indicate because many farm families supplemented their
incomes
with earnings from forestry and other occupations. In the
mid1980s , only 62 percent of farmers' incomes came from
agriculture,
while another 26 percent was derived from wages and 12
percent
was earned from forestry.
Farmers had a strong tradition of practical and
political
cooperation. In the late 1980s, some 90 percent of Finnish
farmers belonged to agricultural unions, which were
divided
between those for Finnish speakers and those for Swedish
speakers. More than 330,000 union members belonged to 430
Finnish-language locals or to 80 Swedish-language locals.
Founded
in 1917, the Confederation of Agricultural Producers
(Maataloustuottajain Keskusliitto--MTK) served as an
umbrella
organization for agricultural unions, and it represented
farmers
in agricultural price negotiations with the government and
with
other producer groups.
In addition to joining unions that helped influence
farm
policy, farmers had established cooperative associations
that
provided farm supplies, shared marketing expenses, and
arranged
farm financing. The umbrella organization of farm
cooperatives
was the Pellervo Society, which had more than a million
members.
Each branch of agriculture organized its own cooperatives
to
handle sales of farm products and purchases of supplies.
Cooperative banks provided about half of all money used to
finance farming, and cooperative insurance associations
handled
farm and crop insurance.
Data as of December 1988
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