Just food transition in Finland : developing transformative capacity of beef & dairy farmers to adopt climate-smart peatland management

Abstract

A plant-based dietary transition is required to reduce the climate impact of the current agrifood regime characterised by high production and consumption of livestock-based products. In Finland the plant-based dietary transition is forecasted to most adversely affect beef & dairy farmers engaged in carbon-intensive grass fodder production on drained peatlands in Central and Northern Finland due to lack of jobs outside agriculture and unfavourable climatic conditions for food crop cultivation. While social justice claims have been strategically used by incumbents to stall the transition, securing justice for vulnerable transition actors by strengthening their capacity to respond to transition demands (i.e., transformative capacity) can accelerate the sustainability transition. Given that plant-based dietary transition in Finland will reduce the need for forage grass cultivation on drained peatlands, alternative climate-smart land use options for organic soils would need to be developed. Ensuring justice for beef & dairy farmers thus translates into the need to implement policy measures targeting development of actors’ transformative capacity to adopt climate-smart peatland management (e.g., wetland farming). This thesis examined whether Finnish agricultural policy adequately fosters said capacity and, if not, how the design of a policy mix aimed at building it could look like.

To address the complex research problem the study adopted an iterative research design which combined three qualitative research methods: a series of narrative literature reviews, a semi-structured focus group interview and an analysis of agri-environmental policy documents.

The results demonstrate that peatland protection has been poorly integrated into the Finnish agricultural policy and at present robust measures aimed at strengthening the transformative capacity of beef & dairy farmers to shift towards wet use of peat fields are largely missing from the policy landscape. A reform of the Finnish subsidy regime under the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that currently promotes drainage-based agricultural production on peatlands is required to foster the adoption of climate-smart peatland management practices. To this end, Finland needs to strengthen the implementation of the GAEC 2 conditionality standard for protecting carbon-rich soils, render paludiculture crops explicitly eligible for CAP payments, offer productive investment support to cover the costs of peat field rewetting for the purposes of wetland cultivation and make better use of voluntary incentive-based instruments (i.e., eco-schemes & agri-environment-climate measures) to boost the uptake of paludiculture.

In addition to strengthening integration of peatland protection into Finnish agricultural policy, building farmers’ transformative capacity will require directly involving farmers in the planning of transition policy, promoting cooperation and coordination among transition actors, as well as reforming basic and vocational education and implementing regional skills development programmes. Establishment of a functioning paludicrop market and farmers’ access to private finance are required to ensure economic viability of climate-smart peatland management in Finland. Currently, the lack of policy coherence and political will to change the status quo remain key barriers to implementation of effective capacity building policies.