Farmer’s income, Agricultural settlement | New agricultural policy action rule

Debate is fine, but why should what we spend from the state’s funds on food production and agriculture across the country be determined based on the income level of farmers and other groups?

One reason is that it has been almost like this for “all” years with different variants of the income target, well described by the Grytten committee. The agricultural policy’s “rule of action” has been something like this: Set the framework in an agricultural settlement so that agriculture is given the opportunity for at least the same income development as other groups. The Storting has chosen this course of action, and the industry has fought for income development to be measured in kroner, not just percentages. Now we agree on that.

The Grytten Committee states that “Business income cannot be compared to wages in principle” (p. 7), but the debate about how to measure income from capital and labor continues unabated in the government, Storting and in the newspaper columns. It is agreed that you can compare “apples and pears”, because money is, after all, money. No one asks: Do we need this discussion? Do we have to determine support for food production based on a target for the income of food producers? Is it the case that our ability to be self-sufficient is determined by whether the farmer’s annual work is counted as 1,840 or 1,700 hours, or by which part-time farmers are counted in the income average?

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The problem is not income comparison in itself, but that income comparison should determine society’s willingness to pay for food production. The Grytten committee wrote that it will be “a discretionary political assessment [hvilke bruk] which must be included in the comparison” of the income (p. 9). They could have usefully written: What politicians think about the norming is irrelevant for measuring society’s right willingness to pay for food production and other adopted agricultural policy goals. It could have helped the Storting to determine the support level completely independently of income calculation and comparison, number of hours and rationing factor!

The question then is whether a new rule of action can be developed that goes directly to agriculture’s social mission instead of income. As an illustration and gross simplification, let us assume that agricultural policy aimed to maintain a critical amount of agricultural land, e.g. 10 million then. A rule of action could then look like this: Set the subsidy rates so that the agricultural area in operation is at least 10 million daa.

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With such a rule of thumb, there is no need to measure or compare income. The level of support becomes a function of what it costs to maintain the politically determined amount of agricultural land. The farmer’s income is the result of the farmer’s allocations and the required level of subsidy. How much other income part-time farmer Jon Almaas uses to finance his own farming operation is uninteresting in such a context. What matters, and what he should be rewarded for, is that he maintains his territory.

An operational target of agricultural area in operation can be the subject of political discussions in the same way as an income target. Such uncertainty is part of the nature of politics, which agriculture will always have to live with, regardless of which rule of action is used as a basis. The difference, and the advantage, however, is that our proposal for a new code of conduct is much closer to agriculture’s actual social mission and that unnecessary discussions about numerical bases and income measurement are avoided.