ABSTRACT
Introduction While the previous chapter, by Flemming Just, analyses the long-term organizational process of the farming and food sectors in Denmark, Norway and Sweden and emphasizes the importance of the ability to – through the strengthening and involvement of the cooperative movement – form a Scandinavian Sonderveg through the depression and far beyond, this chapter focuses on the relationship between the crisis and the growth of agricultural regulations and its political consequences in Sweden – with some comparisons with Denmark, Finland and Norway. In his chapter Just shows that the co-operatively organized agricultural sectors in the Nordic countries quite successfully managed to organize and regulate markets to the benefit of the agricultural producers and the agricultural industry at large. If the conclusions in this chapter seem gloomier, it is because I focus more on the relationship of the farming industry to the consumers and to other sectors of society. In short, even though the regulation of the agricultural market may have been politically and socially necessary, given the size of the sector, the massive unemployment and agricultural depression, and in particular because of the threat of rural fascism, these measures had a price that someone had to pay. Contrasting with a tendency in earlier historiography on the topic, which has tended to downplay the importance of the crisis for the growth of the regulated agriculture, I will argue that the crisis to a large extent determined the path of agricultural policy and furthermore also influenced the way in which the Swedish (and Nordic) corporative welfare state(s) evolved. I will do so by tracing the construction of the crisis regulations, which signalled the beginning of the transformation from a situation of virtually free trade agriculture to an agricultural economy characterized by negotiation.
