Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1940, Side 110

THE PRESENT FOOD SUPPLY ÍN FINLAND
By Artturi Lehtinen, M. A.,
General Secretar)' of the Finnish Ministry of Supply.
UP to the middle of the i9th century Finland was almost
entirely self-supporting in the matter of food supplies.
Small quantities of colonial produce had to be imported,
but on the other hand some amount of butter, and in good years
also rye, was exported to countries in the Baltic Sea area, prima-
rily to Sweden. From the 1870’s onward, after cheap American
grain had begun to flow to the European markets, finding its
way also to Finland, the cultivation of cereals declined in Fin-
land, and attention was centred in increasing measure on dairy
farming, which was better suited to Finnish conditions and
yielded produce for which there was a steadily improving market
in Great Britain and Germany. By imposing import duties on
foreign grain it would have been possible to maintain the domestic
output at the required level, but one feature of the policy follow-
ed by the alien rulers of Finland was to maintain the unimpeded
entry of Russian grain to the Finnish market. As production
costs were considerably lower in Russia, the result was a con-
tinuous decline in the degree of self-sufficiency in regard to
grain — and accordingly in regard to food supplies in general —
which proceeded so far that when the Great War broke out in
1914, Finland herself produced only 40 per cent. of the cereals
and about 60 per cent. of the total foodstuffs she consumed.
Taught by the food crisis during the Great War, independent
Finland took steps to regain her former self-sufficiency in the
production of food, and in particular in regard to cereals. During
the i9zo’s the production of cereals was raised, with the aid of
grain duties, to 60 per cent. of the consumption, and during the
1930’s the rate of improvement was accelerated, so that in the
last harvest year before the outbreak of the present great war,
thus the period 1938—39, Finland’s cereal harvest was big enough
to cover approximately 90 per cent. of the domestic consumption.
This considerable improvement was due partly to the spreading
of grain-growing — especially wheat — and to the increased
yield per hectare achieved by improved agricultural methods,
partly to the extensive breaking in of new land that had been
going on and had resulted in a growth of the total arable area
from 2,000,000 hectares in 1920 to 2,600,000 ha. in 1938.