Agriculture in North Lapland, Finland: profitableness and trends since World War II

Abstract

In all the industrialized countries recent trends in development have led agriculture into a maze of difficulties. Rapid changes in occupational structure, which have defied the means of restraint and direction at present available, have reduced the demand for labour in country dis­tricts and forced farming people to move elsewhere, while the surplus of foodstuffs has compelled measures to be taken to restrict agricultural production. This in turn has served to accelerate further the drift away from farming, leading to the depopulation and abandonment of many of the remoter districts.

This general trend is also apparent in North Lapland, complicated by an additional local factor, the planned resettlement of Lapland after the war with active government support, which created a mood of optimism about the future of the area. When this development, which had begun so promisingly, came to a halt and turned to a decline, it resulted in considerable difficulties in adaptation, many of which, in the case of North Lapland, have not yet been overcome. It is these problems which the present work sets out to discuss, at the same time taking the opportunity to examine topics concerned with the profitability of agriculture and its various contributory factors in this region situated on the northern extremity of permanent agriculture‑based settlement in Europe.