SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC MARTTI AHTISAARI AT A CELEBRATION
OF THE CENTENARY OF THE FINNISH NATIONAL CENTRE FOR AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH ON 11.8.1998

Amid great changes, small people feel that their circumstances and lives are uncertain and threatened. Today, farmers are justifiably concerned about their future. The environment in which they work has undergone a major transformation in recent years, and the spate of changes is continuing.

Decisions with significant effects from the perspectives of Finnish agriculture, our rural areas and the entire economy will be made within the European Union during the year that lies ahead. Arrangements reached within the Agenda 2000 process will change both the Union and the whole of Europe. The totality of issues that has prompted most debate is reform of the Common Agricultural Policy.

CAP reform is as such necessary and inescapable for the Union's positive development and enlargement. However, the special problems of Finnish farming must be solved in a manner that satisfies us. It must be possible to practise agriculture throughout the territory of the Union.

Farmers are entitled to expect that uncertainty will not continue to the point of unreasonableness. What is at issue is the future of every holding, every farmer and the entire livelihood. Now, if ever, we need a firm faith in the future and confidence in our own possibilities, but - if we are realists - we also need to be prepared for decisions taking time to emerge.

The matter is a problematic one in the framework of the Union as a whole. All member states have their own special difficulties. Within the EU, difficult matters are often resolved only when the final deadline has passed. It is part of the nature of EU decision making that no one member state can force the others to observe its timetables, but each and every member state can alone delay any decision at all. The EU is not a federal state, but rather a community of independent states.

The Finnish Government is acting resolutely in relation to Agenda 2000 questions. Its goal is to safeguard the future of food production and the vitality of the countryside.

A nation can succeed only if the citizens - farmers, workers, salaried employees, entrepreneurs and companies - are confident of their own prospects of succeeding through their own work. Indeed, the challenge that we share is that of finding also for Finnish farmers a path of development of the kind that will strengthen their faith in the future and their confidence in their own prospects as we go through a transition that we cannot avoid.

The centenary of the Finnish National Centre for Agricultural Research is an appropriate occasion on which to emphasise the importance of research as a builder of the future. Already a century ago, it was recognised that Finland needed independent research of a high standard to enable her to develop her agricultural sector. Our country's northern, problematic circumstances called for special solutions for use in farming. There is room in a century for many kinds of national and international changes. Finnish agriculture has undergone several major metamorphoses in that time. In the course of many generations, cooperation between research, training and practical agriculture has made it possible, through a succession of small steps, to raise the level of expertise and achieve the present high standard. The Nobel Prize awarded to A I Virtanen was an important international recognition of the quality of Finnish research in this field.

In the ongoing transition, the importance of research is even further accentuated. Only by relying on knowledge and skill can we find workable long-term solutions that will safeguard the future of farming and the countryside. It is my firm conviction that the independent, successful and enthusiastic farmer who is not afraid of work will continue to be a key factor in the future, both for the countryside and also from the point of view of the nation as a whole.

When they are producing the same staple foodstuffs - grain, meat and milk - as their counterparts in regions further south, Finnish farmers are put in a much more disadvantaged situation by the natural conditions in which they operate. Efforts have been made to redress this drawback by means of subsidies and similar measures, but our agricultural sector has the added disadvantage, besides natural circumstances, of a structure with a preponderance of small holdings, which also weakens its competitiveness. In the short term, competitive disadvantages can be balanced out only with the aid of subsidies, but it would be inadvisable to rely solely on them in the long run. As the European Union enlarges, countries that are a good deal poorer than us will be joining our number and subsidy funds will have to be channelled to them. The biggest contributors of subsidies, especially Germany, have already become quite critical and want to reduce their payments burden. Besides that, one can ask how well for example a direct income subsidy accords with the Finnish farmer's age-old culture of enterprise.

Given this difficult starting position, there is a need to find a new direction for research. The goal should be to find means and solutions that will make it possible to help the Finnish farmer in his important work, and to do so sustainably. In the future, scarcity of subsidy funds will lead to a situation in which there may be a lot fewer recipients than at present. Then support will also have to be channelled more selectively to the farmers with the best prospects of success in Union-wide competition. How will we be able to help the smallholdings that do not fit into this category?

Recent years have brought a gratifying development in that completely new lines of production in which smallholdings can engage are beginning to emerge. Rapid development of biosciences - and especially the fact that Finnish research in this field has reached the highest international level - has created faith in great new opportunities. The European Union's Single Market provides excellent sales prospects for even very narrow niche sectors. Could we, therefore, use the means with which research provides us to find new production potential and improve the competitive advantages of our older segments of production?

Competitive advantages spring either from the special conditions that nature provides or from abilities of a kind that competitors do not possess. Nature has not favoured us where conditions for producing staple foodstuffs are concerned, but could our natural conditions confer some special advantage in other areas of production? What superior advantages might, for example, our long summer days offer us in relation to, say, growing herbs and berries or in other new kinds of production? How can we better exploit the resources of our thousands of lakes or make more use of our special wood species?

Knowing the needs of customers better than others has been the key to success in many sectors. Has research been able to give the Finnish farmer a vision of what the consumer's expectations, wishes or downright demands will be in ten or twenty years' time? By looking around, one can see, for example, various allergies and other illnesses that require special diets increasing at such a pace that even without visionary properties one can guess that the demand for food in twenty years' time will be quite different from what it is today. Rapid growth in the popularity of organic produce and Benecol® convincingly demonstrates that consumers appreciate pure and healthy food. Could we be the world's best in this area? Could research cooperation help to harness our high-level medical expertise and put it at the service of agriculture? It can be assumed that products resulting from expertise like that would command a good price.

And what could research give us in environmental matters? We have talked a lot about our clean nature, but have we been making a serious effort to maintain this competitive trump? Have we studied how it could be exploited in marketing? Could the Finnish farmer and the entire Finnish foodstuffs chain be a pioneer in environment-friendliness even in a global context and thereby gain a competitive advantage to be availed of in marketing its products? Could it be possible, using research and training as aids, to develop a superior quality system, which would give the consumer a guarantee of top quality throughout the Finnish foodstuffs chain whatever aspect was in question, be it good care of livestock or of nature?

The achievement of a competitive advantage of this kind is the outcome of a protracted effort. It requires changes in attitude and the conversion of mistrust into open cooperation. Through joint projects research in the fields of agriculture and foodstuffs, forestry, the environment and medicine and especially in economics - not least the marketing aspect - could create new kinds of competitive advantages for Finnish agricultural producers. Now determined work must begin in order to plan a national strategy to enable the necessary resources to be assembled and managed in the best possible way.

The road to be travelled is long and demanding, but in my view worth trying. It would mean a reorientation of research and bold pilot programmes. At the same time, naturally, it would presuppose new financing arrangements and the assumption of risks also on the national level. The experience that TEKES has gained in creating and developing new high-tech industry is good and encouraging. In the development of new forms of agriculture, consideration could be given to TEKES-type experiments to find new items that could be produced on farms.

Correspondingly, consideration must also be given to putting the experience that we have gained with raising venture capital to use both in launching new production and, especially, in marketing. Most important of all would be to get actions that create a new kind of faith in the future rapidly under way. Owing to the high level of investment involved, agriculture's adjustment as well as its reform will take a long time to complete.

The Finnish countryside has over the past century produced a large number of innovative and successful people in many sectors of business. A new richness of ideas and enterprise are now needed so that agriculture can be developed to meet the challenges of the coming century. It is a national project and our shared interest. Our common goal is to find the means by which agriculture and the vitality of the countryside can be safeguarded in the pressure of change. The continuity of the millennia-old traditions of the farmer, the cultivator must not be jeopardised in any part of this our native land.

In this work the Finnish National Centre for Agricultural Research will have a central role. To safeguard the continuity of the Finnish food economy, let us develop it into one that is environment-friendly, self-renewing and competitive. At the same time, we shall preserve the vitality of the countryside and the enjoyableness and health of the whole environment in which we live. To the Finnish National Centre for Agricultural Research and its staff I extend my best greetings and wishes for success.

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