Vibrant Villages

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Finland's villages face new challenges as the nation enters the European Union. The traditionally generous government support offered to farmers will be slashed as a result of directives from the EU and a change of government in Helsinki last spring. Leena Manner, chief information officer for Finland's Ministry of Agriculture, says, 'Half of the farmers will be out of business in five years.'

The U.S. farm crisis of the 1980s sent thousands of farm families packing for cities, where they were pitted against urban workers for a shrinking supply of jobs, but Finland is committed to finding new livelihoods for rural people. The consensus among Finnish politicians is that it's more economical to find a way to allow farm families to stay in the countryside than to pick up the tab for the welfare and infrastructure cost of their moving to the city.

Tourism, cottage industries, handicrafts, sustainable agriculture, forestry, telecommuting, and new businesses are all seen as areas of growth and will qualify for funding as part of the government's new rural program. A family with a reputation for making great bread and cakes, for instance, might get a start-up loan to open a bakery. Farmers can get five years of incentives to make the transition to organic agriculture.

It's anyone's guess if these new enterprises will be able to compensate for the losses in rural Finland's traditional agricultural economy. As welcome as supportive policies in Helsinki are, the work of the Village Action committees in thousands of villages like Ramsoo shows that what's more important is people's collective determination to protect and improve their rural communities--a determination that can actually prove stronger than the global economic forces that devalue and destroy village life.

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