> 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 agreed.

This spring showed that even Norway - as rich and well connected as we are - cannot get hold of a simple thing like face masks if there is an emergency.

In Norway, food self-sufficiency has been a political issue ever since the Napoleonic wars and the British naval blockade on Denmark-Norway 200 years ago, to the point that the importance of self-sufficiency were taught from early in primary schools at least until the 1980's.

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.

> It's first in relatively recent time (last 30 years or so) that this has receded in importance.

That's what I mean by decades :-)

I'm 40 now, so this means at least since I was 10.

Yeah, I didn't mean to sound like I was contradicting you. Just more background. This used to be a big deal, until people started forgetting about it, and now people are suddenly remembering it again.

Thanks, I clearly misunderstood then :)

As much as I tend to prefer text I'll still admit there are times when it is harder to understand the intent.

But in a situation like the current pandemic with borders being closed this would provide a good alternative to buying from other countries. Another global pandemic might be even more damaging and might infect plants rather than humans.

Also -> distributed cultivation. You don’t have a single point of failure.