Finns attack food surpluses with fines on farmers

Press, 28 July 1987, Page 20

Finns attack food surpluses with fines on farmers

Paul Routledge,

■■■■■■■MlM■■■■■■\ . y r 5 , of the “Observer,” reports on economic upset in Finland

FINLAND’S CONSERVATIVE Prime Minister, Mr Harry Holkeri, and his Cabinet, in which Social Democrats are the largest party, are working on plans to reduce costly overproductions on the farms and to attack the “stomach salary” of business executives.

The fanners will scream the most. Despite its inhospitable climate, Finland is producing more food than its five million people can eat A 10 per cent cut in agricultural output is envisaged, leading to a loss of 18,000 jobs on the land.

A stiff “fine" of 30,000 Finnish marks (about $11,000) has already been slapped on every hectare of unpermitted cultivation, and Helsinki is chuckling over stories of Board of Agriculture policemen raiding the farms for pigs and hens in excess of quota. “It will be a hard period,” the Finance Minister, Mr Erkki Liikanen, said recently. “This will cause problems. But the surpluses in agriculture are a very big burden on the State Budget.”

Subsidies to the farmers swallow up 4 per cent of G.D.P., double the target for research and development in a country

desperate to stay on the leading edge of technology. The Left-Right coalition, which brough the Conservatives back into power three months ago after more than 20 years in the political wilderness, initially raised many eyebrows. It is now accepted as a fact of life, another manifestation of the practical Finns’ desire to safeguard the social cohesion that is at the root of the country’s economic success.

The real loser in the General Election in March was the Centre Party, which marginally Increased its share of the vote but lost three seats, and was excluded from Government by the unexpected coalition of political opposites, the Social Democrates and the Conservatives.

The Centre Party draws its main strength from the rural areas, which are now facing the brunt of the "city-bourgeois” coalition which more accurately reflects Finnish demography and feels strong enough to take on the farmers.

“It will be very difficult for the Centre Party to regain its previous influence in Finnish politics,” says a leading employer. “Let us hope that it will; but in the longer perspective I

don’t think it will.” It is a complaint often heard in industrial and business circles. Employers, who were so taken aback by the coalition of opposites that they held a “secret” policy summit which leaked out and made them something of a laughing stock, argue that the Conservatives do not listen enough to the voice of enterprise, and too much to the voice of the unions.

Indeed, the Holkeri Cabinet has promised to bring forward in the autumn new legislation to protect the rights of workers facing rapid technological change and giving them seats on the supervisory boards of companies. The employers are playing a wait-and-see game, while, observing: “The two main political parties are becoming more and more alike. It is becoming difficult to distinguish them. Perhaps we avoid conflict too much; it is becoming a motive in itself, to avoid conflicts and look for compromise.” The Finance Minister, who is 40, an outspoken Social Democrat and a former general secretary of the party, is characteristic of the new generation of politicians coming to power in Helsinki.

He smiles at the surprise created in business circles by the Red-Blue cohabitation. “The start has been rather encouraging. This will be a very pragmatic Government” “We have a long history of consensus, which has been criticised from the Left and the Right I am a socialist; my ideological background is turned in that direction.

“But'in today’s world, Finland is an open economy, and we have some common interests, with the Conservatives: the need to keep the inflation rate down, and to keep our technological level of production very high. We must be able to co-operate, and a : recognition of that realism is pretty deep in this country. We had a civil war in 1918 and nobody wants to go back there.”