Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1938, Page 165

INTER-NORTHERN COMMERCE
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of dairy produce, especially condensed milk, but also cheese and
butter. Her condensed milk finds a readier market in many tro-
pical and sub-tropical countries than the corresponding Danish
article. There is no appreciable market for Danish dairy produce
in Norway at present, and it is unlikely that under normal con-
ditions there will ever be one.
Nor is there any chance of marketing Danish eggs in Nor-
way: on the contrary, Norway is one of our many competitors
on the British and German markets as regards this article.
As regards meat, Norway cannot quite supply her own re-
quirements. The meat she imports is, however, not of the type
produced in Denmark, but Icelandic mutton, reindeer meat from
Sweden and Finland, and pork from America.
Finland plays an important part in world trade owing to her
richness in forests and her wood-working industry, but it must
not be forgotten that two thirds of her population are agricul-
turists. The cultivated area is increasing rapidly, owing to the
utilization of waste lands, the rate of increase between 1920 and
1934 being 22.5 per cent. To be sure, it is as yet less extensive
than that of Denmark, and consists largely of cultivated mea-
dows, but in the Southern and Western parts of the country there
are nevertheless not a few parishes more than 30 per cent. of
whose area is under the plough. In these districts agriculture in-
volves an intensive system of animal husbandry and dairying.
Finland has a considerable export trade in butter, cheese, and eggs,
and is one of our competitors on the British and German markets.
Like the other dairying countries of North-Western Europe, Fin-
land has to import corn and feedstuffs, and some of the latter
she buys from Denmark. The most important article among our
exports to Finland is soy meal, but of the products of Danish
agriculture she buys next to nothing.
Iceland is the only one of the Northern countries in whose
economy the importation of Danish agricultural produce plays
any appreciable part, her imports of Danish rye flour and other
products of the Danish milling industry amounting to an annual
value of a little over half a million kroner. But she has naturally
no need of our animal produce, seeing that her own agriculture
almost exclusively takes the form of animal husbandry and dairy-
ing. Iceland even exports one kind of dairy produce, viz. cheese,
which especially finds its way to the German market.
Even if Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Danish agriculture