Ratio between domestic production and consumption

Finland’s key objective is to protect the security of supply by ensuring the supply of domestic food to meet consumers’ needs. To measure the success of this objective, the domestic production, consumption, storage volumes, imports and exports of key food products are monitored annually. Under normal circumstances, Finnish agriculture can respond well to consumers’ needs, albeit there are some product-specific differences. Crop production shows significant variation in terms of harvest volumes, imports and exports from one year to the next due to different weather conditions during the growing season and changing conditions in global markets. It is natural that self-sufficiency is very low in several individual food products (e.g. fruit, vegetables, spices) or that there is no domestic production in the Nordic conditions.

Finland’s self-sufficiency rate is high in most commonly used food products. Self-sufficiency in beef has remained at more than 80%, whereas the domestic production of pork has mainly been at the level of consumption in recent years. Poultry meat production has increased, driven by the significant increase in its consumption, and self-sufficiency is constantly above 90%. The production and consumption of liquid milk products have for long been roughly the same, with self-sufficiency being almost 100%. At the same time, significant volumes of domestic cheeses are exported and foreign cheeses are imported. Indeed, the self-sufficiency of all dairy products is just over 70% if self-sufficiency is calculated as the proportion of milk fat and protein produced in Finland as a proportion of the total milk fat and protein consumed.

In crop production, there are significant changes from one year to the next. For example, self-sufficiency in bread cereals was 68% in 2018, while in recent years domestic production accounted for has been more than 100% of consumption.