Security of supply and sustainability on the same budget

Two documents published this year have rarely been read side by side: the Finnish Greens’ party programme for 2027–2031, adopted in May, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s civil service paper for the next government term. On the surface they are at odds: one demands binding nature regulation, the other profitability and predictability for primary production. Read more carefully, they tell the same story.

Both want to free Finland from imported fertilisers. Both want nutrient recycling, biogas and plant protein — one in the name of security of supply, the other in the name of the climate. Both want wood construction and higher added value, because less timber can yield more value. And both demand simpler subsidy systems and decision-making based on research.

For a market green, this is a familiar lesson: when harm carries a price tag and actors have incentives, markets do most of the work. Instead of building environmental policy on bans alone, forest owners can be paid for sequestering carbon and increasing biodiversity through a voluntary carbon rent and nature-value markets. The party programme’s “carbon rent mechanism” and the ministry’s “market-based instruments and private climate finance” are, in practice, the same idea.

The same logic works in agriculture. The subsidy system is reformed to be results-based: support is tied to measurable climate, water and nature outcomes, while administration is simplified — something farmers themselves have demanded for decades. Environmentally harmful and ineffective subsidies are abolished and the funds redirected to support the sustainability transition. This way environmental goals are met without permanent increases in public spending — exactly as the ministry’s civil service requires.

Security of supply is also ecological. A state that produces its fertilisers with domestic clean hydrogen, recycles its nutrients and grows its own plant protein is both safer and greener. A national nitrogen strategy, investment conditions for nutrient recycling and a plant protein programme belong to the core of both documents — they are merely argued in different words.

Fisheries policy finds common ground too: restoring migratory fish stocks, updating fishery obligations and removing dams that matter little to energy production all pull in the same direction. And when fur farming is ended by law with a long transition period and exit compensation, the funding can be covered by redirecting harmful subsidies — not with new debt.

This does not mean the differences are not real. Disputes over felling volumes, the binding nature of conservation and the future of animal production will continue. But the market-green answer is that disputes are resolved with incentives, not identity politics: a higher degree of processing reduces pressure on felling volumes, carbon rent turns conservation into a source of income for forest owners, and results-based subsidies steer production without growing bureaucracy.

The next government programme needs a chapter in which food, forests and the countryside are not an arena of confrontation but a shared strategy. The ingredients are already on the table — in one document in green, in the other in civil-service grey. The task of market greens is to write them into one and the same: security of supply and sustainability, on the same budget.