Finnish regions take lead in northern organic farming

The two Finnish regions have a clear lead when it comes to organic agriculture in the Barents region. The latter, with its 26,145 hectares of land used for organic farming, constitutes more than half of the total area for vegetal organic food production in the Barents region. While the total organically cultivated area in Kainuu is smaller, it accounts for close to 25 percent of the regions total agricultural land, making it one of the provinces that has already exceeded Finland’s national target of transforming 20 percent of the agricultural land to organic farmland by 2020.

Except these two forerunners, other northern regions perform significantly worse in comparison with the national record of organic land use. The most extreme example is the Norwegian county of Finnmark, where only 0.1 percent of the cultivated land is organically certified compared to 4.8 percent at a national level.

In Troms county, a coalition of local producers seek to change this trend in the north by introducing a food subscription scheme where local organic products are distributed to consumers in the region. The project, which is funded by the Norwegian Agriculture Agency, started up with 100 subscriptions in 2014 and hopes to reach the double by the end of the year.

The dairy production is another sector which has seen regional attempts to stimulate organic farming in the north. The Norwegian diary product cooperative TINE initiated a project in 2011, focusing specifically on increasing the production of organic milk in the northern regions of Norway. Since the start of the project, the share of organic milk produced in the northern regions has increased from 2.2 to 2.9 percent, while the local consumption has grown by 257,000 liters in the same period. Similarly, the Swedish dairy producer Norrmejerier, operating in the three northernmost regions, introduced economic incentives to its farmers earlier this year, seeking to increase the production of organic milk, which currently does not meet the high demand.

In addition to the regional difference within the countries, it is also evident that impact of the recent global upswing for organic production has had various impacts in the Nordic countries. According to a worldwide survey, published by FiBL and IFOAM earlier this year, Sweden has the world’s fourth largest percentage of organic farmland as part of total agricultural land, amounting to 16.3 percent. But it nevertheless failed to reach the national goal of certifying 20 percent of the agricultural land by 2014. On the other side of the spectra is Russia, where organic farmland only represents 0.1 percent of the cultivated land and where the expansion of organic certification showed a negative rate in the latest data.

The demand for organic food has risen globally during the last decade and, among in the Barents countries, Denmark and Sweden have the largest shares of the world market for organic food, amounting to 2 percent each according to a report published by Ekoweb.nu earlier this year.

“The organic trend is not as far developed in Norway as in Sweden, but it has recently started to take off”, says Philip Aru from Business Sweden Norway in the report. Norway is identified as one of the next booms on the organic food market and in 2014 the sales increased with 20-30 percent. Russia is also mentioned as a market with large potential for consumption as well as production of organic food products, however the predominance of imported products makes the prices 100-600 percent more expensive than its domestically produced equivalent. 

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Data on organic farming is available on Patchwork Barents, the regional data portal.