Earlier quoted context omitted.
>- Independence from other countries. Very important for small ones like Denmark that wouldn't have alternative to planting on their own soil. This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of. It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad
> This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of. Quite the contrary: at least in Norway politicians have been busily pushing your side of the story for decades and only stopped pushing it earlier this year. > It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad If you said this last year many would have agr…
It grew in political importance as the national-romanticism movement grew, and then blew up massively in political importance after World War II demonstrated just how little it took to disrupt external supplies.
One might reasonably argue it's the reason Norway isn't in the EU - Norwegian agriculture and fishery policy is based very strongly on a view on self-sufficiency that includes high subsidies not originally for the sake of farmers, but for the sake of national security. It's also behind a lot of the push for retaining rural settlements.
It's first in relatively recent time (last 30 years or so) that this has receded in importance.