Viking Economics (12 page)

The governmental program worked: nearly a quarter of Norwegians still live outside towns and cities. Most of the agricultural land itself is still worked, absorbed by the remaining farms. The law requires that agricultural land must continue to be used for farming, and the owner of the farm has to live there; this protects farming from developers. The result is that the agricultural story of Norway is still one of family farms.

Mechanization and fertilizer have meant increasing output, and Norwegian farms keep their country self-sufficient in animal products, although not in cereals. Switching to organic farming is a growing trend.
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Farmers hire help from wherever they can get it—Poland, Turkey, even as far as Vietnam. Farming “internships” offer American students and others the chance to experience Norway, with free room and board, in exchange for bringing in the harvest.

Globalization and agribusiness have decimated the family farm in some countries, so Norwegian farmers feel themselves under threat and count on pro-farm government policies. They deeply distrust the European Union. Norwegian farmers get a larger proportion of their income from government subsidies
than any other country in the OECD, which reflects the national importance given to food security and tradition despite the challenges of a short growing season and international competition.

Still, there’s lively debate about how much subsidy is the right amount. Agricultural subsidies amounted to nearly 7 percent of the national budget in 1980 but declined to 1.3 percent by 2010, according to the newspaper
Nationen
.
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A majority of farmers do something else to supplement their income, like fishing or logging. From farming alone, the average income is only $22,000. That average, however, includes what Norwegians call “hobbying” farmers with little production.
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Farmers also have unions—two of them. Together they negotiate with the government about the annual agricultural marketing agreement. The larger of the two, with 61,000 members, is
Norges Bondelag
, the Norwegian Agrarian Association. Founded in 1896, it created its own political party in 1920, then called the Agrarian Party and now called the Centre Party. Today called the Centre Party, it is now independent of the union, although largely composed of farmers still, and it joined the Socialist Left and Labor Party to form the government in 2005.

The Norwegian Farmers and Smallholders Union (Norsk Bonde-og Småbrukarlag) was started in 1913 and has about 7,000 members. It’s not affiliated with a political party and states that its primary values are solidarity and equality. It practices solidarity through programs with farmers in the global south.

This younger, more aggressive farmers union is willing to resort to nonviolent direct action when the government acts against farmers’ needs. In 2005, the NFU protested the breakdown of negotiations with the government by emptying milk into streets, blocking entrances to flour mills to stop bread production,
dumping manure, placing cows in front of government buildings, blockading motorways with tractors, and temporarily kidnapping county mayors.

In Sweden, too, the government has a role in supporting the viability of agriculture. It ensures that farmers have a chance to maintain equal income with other population groups. The government bargains with a farmers’ trade union of some 150,000 members.

Farmers are fiercely loyal to the cooperative way of doing business. Back in 1915, Norwegian farmers formed a credit union to get a new source of loans; it has grown to about 12,000 members.

Most Norwegian farmers—about 50,000 of them—own cooperatives that process and market their products. Co-ops produce nearly all the milk, half the cheese, and 70 percent of the eggs in Norway. Timber is still one of Norway’s major industries, and timber co-ops produce 80 percent of the timber. The co-ops have 17,000 employees to handle the processing and marketing of the farmers’ production.
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Swedish farmers also built co-ops to process and market their products. 75 percent of Swedish agricultural output goes through their co-ops.
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Most Swedish farms are medium-sized family farms; the average is 66 acres that can be cultivated.

Many countries buy dairy products from Denmark, but consumers may not realize they are buying from cooperative dairies that acquire 97 percent of Danish farmers’ milk.
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Agricultural cooperatives in Denmark have roots in the fourteenth century, and they were given fresh impetus by Bishop Grundtvik and the folk high school movement. While the Danish consumer co-op sector may have lost its dynamism, the hugely important agricultural sector of the economy remains a triumph of cooperativism.

When I reflect on the Nordic model’s role for cooperatives and farming, I see a careful balancing act in which the needs of the whole are weighed along with the needs of the parts. That shows up in the local cooperative societies, and also in the debates of the national parliament. It’s very pluralistic—farmers are members of a union, one or more co-ops, and a political party, all of which weigh in on the hot-button issue of the moment. Urban dwellers are likewise members of one or more co-ops and benefit from an unpolluted natural environment and delicious local food that wouldn’t be there if greed were their bottom line.

The Vikings’ descendants can be stubborn. That’s what the German Nazis learned when they occupied Norway and Denmark during World War II. It will help us understand the determination postwar Vikings brought to the task of abolishing poverty if we first look at examples of how Danes and Norwegians resisted enemy occupation.

When Norwegians wore small potatoes in their lapels to symbolize their resistance, Nazi authorities outlawed the practice. Then Norwegians substituted a pair of paperclips. The Germans faced a dilemma: how do you arrest tens of thousands of people for wearing paperclips in their lapels without looking utterly foolish?

In Denmark, across the open water of the
Skaggerak
, workers began to hold protest strikes. The occupiers outlawed strikes. Danish workers then left the factories early, insisting they weren’t on strike—they just needed to go home while there was still daylight, to water their gardens. Do you arrest tens of thousands of workers
for watering their gardens when what you most want is high productivity to harness for Hitler’s faltering war effort?

The Danes became masters of the art of low productivity. They generated an epidemic of low-key industrial accidents that hurt no one. They insisted on working according by the rule book even though it created bottlenecks. Germany, previously counting on the skilled Danish ship workers to produce ships for its war effort, ended up towing half-finished ships back to German yards for completion.

The Danes also frustrated the Nazi plan to wipe out the Jewish population. The Danish resistance to occupation was largely nonviolent, which may have encouraged the leak that revealed when the round-up of the Jews was to take place. Forewarned, nearly all the Danish Jews joined the “underground railroad” that took them under cover of night to points along the Danish coast where fishermen’s boats lay in wait. More than 7,000 Jews crowded into the boats and were taken across the Øresund strait to safety in neutral Sweden.

In Norway, the schoolteachers could see what was coming when the Nazis began by using “salami tactics”: changes imposed one slice at a time. One move put Quisling’s portrait on the wall of each classroom. Another increased the role of the German language in the curriculum.

Among themselves, the teachers drew a line in the sand: when their own union was shut down in favor of a Nazi association, they would resist. When that day came, nearly all the eleven thousand teachers wrote to the ministry of education, refusing to join the new association.

A colleague in the Oslo school where I taught was a teacher during the occupation. He told me what happened after the teachers
wrote their defiant letters. Police were instructed to arrest a couple of teachers at each public school as an example, and send them to a new prison camp in southern Norway. My colleague said that the faculty had a hurried meeting and talked candidly about who would be most suited to be arrested: young, physically fit, without children. Such teachers volunteered. Police were quietly told the way to meet their quota should be by arresting the volunteers.

The arrests didn’t achieve compliance from the mass of teachers who remained free, so Norwegian Nazi leader Vidkun Quisling closed the schools. Teachers then met their classes in the homes of the parents, while communities banded together to meet the basic needs of the teachers.

Quisling increased the pressure by sending the imprisoned teachers to a concentration camp north of the Arctic Circle to do hard work in desperately cold conditions with little food. Some died. Each day the suffering teachers were offered the chance to go home if they simply pledged to join the Nazi teachers association. Almost none of them signed the pledge.

Quisling’s goal of converting the school system into a building block for the new Nazi society became the reverse: a cause that increased the level of Norwegian resistance. He realized his mistake, reopened the schools, and brought the teachers back to teach.

Even though the German army had one soldier per ten Norwegians in the country, Quisling got nowhere in his four-year effort to Nazify the country.

Even while confronting overwhelming force, Norwegians and Danes acted as if they had agency. Rather than bow to inevitability, they rolled up their sleeves and tackled the threat. After the war, they took that same attitude toward the “inevitability” of poverty.
In common with their Swedish and Icelandic cousins, they had a new vision: the abolition of poverty.

The postwar Nordic attack on the causes of poverty required the determination and sense of agency they’d shown during the war. In addition to challenging mainstream notions like the free market, they found that they needed to innovate on many levels. They found no panacea, no one economic policy that did the trick. In effect, they created a laboratory for testing multiple interventions for poverty prevention, and in the process came up with a set of “best practices” that set today’s global standard.

Two very different definitions of “poverty” live side by side in social statistics: “relative” and “absolute.”

Journalist Nina Berglund reported an example of relative poverty when she described a Norwegian family of three. The mom can’t work and relies on social assistance. For her and her two children, the income covers the costs of rent, utilities, clothes and food, but it does not leave much for recreation.

Many international statistical comparisons use the relative definition of poverty. Researchers identify the median income, calculate what 50 percent (sometimes 60 percent) of that would be, and consider that result the poverty line.

Using this relative definition, UNICEF’s 2012 table of child poverty among rich countries shows the following percentages:

UNICEF offers this relative definition of poor: “those whose resources (material, cultural and social) are so limited as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life in the Member States in which they live.”
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When people are excluded from the acceptable way of life, their children are marginalized. They are less likely to graduate from school, get a good job; they are more likely to fall into drugs and crime. Yes, “relative poverty” is partly a matter of perception, but it has real consequences. The measure has the advantage that it can compare different countries at different periods.

The problem with the procedure for arriving at the statistic, however, is that a lot depends on the amount and distribution of incomes that are in that population. The measure can be misleading. In Sweden, for example,
relative
poverty grew dramatically between 2003 and 2012 because of changes in the distribution of incomes, but
absolute
poverty remained the same or dropped a bit!
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The usual definition of absolute poverty is the one used in the United States, which focuses on the actual degree of material need, regardless of what a society’s range and distribution of incomes is. The official poverty line in the United States is based on the amount it cost in 1964 to feed a family of three or more with economical
food, multiplied by three. The purpose of the multiplier was for rent, heat, clothing, and other needs. The total is adjusted annually by the price of food inflation. People whose income is below this total are considered poor.
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In this book, I lean toward the absolute definition, because I think of someone who can’t reliably afford the necessities of life as poor. In the metropolitan area where I live, Philadelphia, a growing number of people go to bed hungry at night, and a steady percentage don’t even have a bed of their own. I know personally a dad who for a period had to swap with his teenage son the one pair of good shoes they had between them. Because I see that reality, the absolute definition speaks to me, especially as reflected in hunger and homelessness.

The Norwegian family that Nina Berglund described has little income beyond that needed for food, rent, and utilities. By that relative definition the family is poor, even though they do have enough food and a home. They also have free health care, childcare, education through grad school, old-age pension, highly subsidized transit, and many other services that many poor American families don’t have.
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