Norwegian Butter Shortage

[JonasSalk]

The forum is suffering from a crazy right-wingers shortage, so we recalled him and KwangTiger. 

Depends on how you define right-wing. Republicans at my school think I'm a lefty. Then again, they're Republicans and almost by definition complete morons.

[Admiral Yi]

How much butter are you allowed to carry if you drive across the border?

[Viking]

How much butter are you allowed to carry if you drive across the border?

The rules say 6000 NOK worth of goods toll free for travel. A 500 gram package of butter should cost about 30 NOK or US$6. Two days ago a Russian was caught with 90 kilos of smuggled butter or jus under the limit at 30 per half kilo at 5400 NOK and had his butter confiscated.

This is what happens when you let the producer own the market...

[Razgovory]

The forum is suffering from a crazy right-wingers shortage, so we recalled him and KwangTiger. 

Depends on how you define right-wing. Republicans at my school think I'm a lefty. Then again, they're Republicans and almost by definition complete morons.

Are you going to Bob Jones University?

[Sheilbh]

I sympathise with the Norwegian approach.  We should have something similar for Euro farmers, ideally on a national or regional level though.

[citizen k]

I sympathise with the Norwegian approach.  We should have something similar for Euro farmers, ideally on a national or regional level though.

The rest of Europe should have shortages of basic foodstuffs like Norway?

[Habbaku]

I sympathise with the Norwegian approach.  We should have something similar for Euro farmers, ideally on a national or regional level though.

The rest of Europe should have shortages of basic foodstuffs like Norway?

I think he means that all Europeans should suffer.  Except for farmers, of course.

[Viking]

I sympathise with the Norwegian approach.  We should have something similar for Euro farmers, ideally on a national or regional level though.

Just imagine.. the UK department of agriculture and rural development empowers the farmers coop in the UK to set production targets for foodstuffs AND set the tolls on the imports of agricultural products. Also, the farmers coop gets an effective monopoly and control over the imports of non-basic agricultural products like bananas and maize. Furthermore, the oversight of this system is run by the MAFF, but the minister is from the Countryside Alliance which was needed to gain the majority in parliament.

The fundamental problem is that to protect the norwegian farmer (the worlds second least efficient farmer after the japanese farmer) from fair competition from other countres high punitive tolls are set on all goods produced by norwegian farmers, the butter toll was 200%, but was reduced to 25% for the duration of the shortage. This means that to keep the system functioning and market mechanics cannot be used planning is required and every year the idiot bureaucrats of the Ministry of Agriculture fuck something up. This year it was butter at christmastime - The Axis of Incompetence opens up another front in the War on Christmas.

Friedrich Hayek is laughing in hell and telling marx "I told you so beeyootch".

I don't think you people have understood how truely massively inefficient norwegian agricultur is. For X NOK of inputs the farmer produces less than X in outputs and the farmer still has not gotten any earnings to feed his family and pay for the electrical bill. The average subsidy per farmer is higher than the average wage per farmer. By working har for a year the average norwegian farmer destroys value.

[Zanza]

I sympathise with the Norwegian approach.  We should have something similar for Euro farmers, ideally on a national or regional level though.

The EU CAP is bad enough. We should liberalize agriculture, not increase protectionism.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I want Britain to import butter from New Zealand free of tariffs and quotas 

[Duque de Bragança]

I want Britain to import butter from New Zealand free of tariffs and quotas 

Vote NO for the incoming Tory referendum on Europe 

[Richard Hakluyt]

They will try and avoid a referendum as there would be a massive vote to leave.

One can't help wondering how much of the behaviour of Merkozy and Cameron at the recent summit was theatre for their electorates.

[Ideologue]

We should withhold American grain and starve the world until our demands our met.

[Valdemar]

All the large danish producers have refused to aid norway. not out of spite, but because they cannot up butter production this fast as they have already planned their productions and fatted milk (or cream) is in short demand.

Also, due to draught both Sweden and Finland have a butter shortage, and seeing they are EU and have no toll limits all excess production is going that way.

Further, Norway only wants to lower toll for a short period and as one producer commented, "Why should we reschedule everything for only 1 months production? If they want us to enter their market we will do it, but only as a strategic initiative, not for 1 month only"

V

[Viking]

I want Britain to import butter from New Zealand free of tariffs and quotas 

In Pre-EU days NZ didn't do much butter exports iirc. A similar thing to what happened in NZ happened in Iceland well before the bank crash. Farm subsidies were slashed and many marginal farms were deserted. The remainin farms now run a much more efficent and environmentally friendly service both supplying the local market in meat and dairy and establishing an export market in lamb and multiplying the business of exporting Icelandic Horses many times over.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3747430.stm

New Zealand's hardy farm spirit
By John Pickford
BBC, New Zealand

Twenty years ago, the New Zealand government announced it was stopping all subsidies for farmers. At the time, those farmers thought the effects would be disastrous, but things panned out rather differently.

When you ask a question as a reporter and get blank silence back it usually means, in my experience, one of two things: either you are heading up the wrong track completely or you are on the threshold of some interesting territory.

It happened to me in Karamea, a remote rain-washed valley facing the Tasman Sea on the north-west coast of the South Island of New Zealand.

I had been talking to Bevan and Caroline, a young farming couple who had just finished the morning milking of their 180 dairy cows.

As we sat round the kitchen table drinking coffee, the conversation turned to the high value New Zealand dollar, which in 2004 has made trading conditions difficult for the country's food exporters.

It was impressive how well informed these young dairy farmers were about the global economy and financial markets, and how developments in the wider world can influence their ability to make a living in remote Karamea.

Alien mindset

This, I thought, would be a good moment to raise the topic of farm subsidies, or rather of their absence in New Zealand.

Twenty years ago a quiet revolution swept through this country when they were abolished.

Subsidies were once as significant a proportion of farm income in New Zealand as they are today in the European Union and the United States.

But since 1984, New Zealand's farmers have had to get along without any direct financial support from the government.

"How do you manage?" was my question to Bevan and Caroline.

"How is it you are able to farm without subsidies, when so many subsidised farmers in a country like Britain are struggling?"

" The older generation had recalled how creative some farmers had been with the government cash on offer "

That was when I became acutely conscious of the hum of the washing machine.

But seeing their nervous glances to one another as they struggled for an answer, it dawned on me that these young New Zealand farmers were not being evasive; they just could not conceptualise what having subsidies might mean.

They could talk fluently about the impact of international currency movements on their markets. But subsidies?

They did not know and they did not want to know.

Creative cash

We got the conversation going again by moving up a generation.

"Oh yes", they said, trying to be helpful, "we remember our parents talking about that, perhaps you should ask them about subsidies."

In fact I had already, over a few beers the previous evening at the small motel they now run in their retirement.

And the older generation had talked and talked, and chuckled quite a bit when they had recalled how creative some farmers had been with the government cash on offer.

" Dairying is now a bigger foreign exchange earner than sheep for New Zealand "

There was what had officially been known as the "livestock incentive scheme" - a direct payment to encourage farmers to increase the size of their flocks - and was soon nicknamed the "skinny sheep scheme".

And there was the case of the farmer who had named his smart new boat SMP, after the "supplementary minimum prices" subsidy, the backbone of the system.

They can laugh about them now, but these and the many other subsidies on offer in the late 70s and early 80s were providing some New Zealand farmers with up to 40% of their income.

Today government financial support for farmers amounts to less than 1% of average farm income across New Zealand.

And most farmers are thriving without the subsidies.

'Revolutionary moment'

Their removal, far from destroying New Zealand agriculture, appears to have re-energised it.

Agriculture contributes slightly more now to the total economy than it did in the era of subsidies and there is plenty of evidence the land is being farmed more creatively.

Twenty years ago the wine industry was too small to be measurable. Today in some areas grapes have replaced sheep as the main source of revenue.

" I met several younger farmers like Bevan and Caroline who could barely get their heads round what subsidies were! "

Dairying is now a bigger foreign exchange earner than sheep for New Zealand and there are more than two million farmed deer across the country.

And the farmers themselves?

Well I did not meet a single one who wanted to go back to subsidies.

But I met several younger farmers like Bevan and Caroline who could barely get their heads round what subsidies were!

The chief architect of New Zealand's quiet revolution - to many nervous farmers at the time he was the revolution's Robespierre - was a politician called Roger (now Sir Roger) Douglas.

Twenty years ago, as finance minister of a new Labour government, Douglas announced the budget that would bring the subsidies era to an end.

In another remote corner of New Zealand's South Island, I was given a vivid child's eye view of that revolutionary moment.

Ewan, an agricultural consultant in his 30s - so too young to have experienced subsidies firsthand - remembers his father emerging gloomily from the sitting room where he had been listening to the "Douglas Budget" on the radio.

"They've just stuffed the farmers," he had said.

Well, 20 years on, far from "stuffing" New Zealand's farmers, the withdrawal of their subsidies turns out to have revived them.

It has restored the "pioneer spirit", I was told on more than one occasion, that helped our great-grandparents build the country.