Today’s big topic: Danish fruit and vegetables are in deep crisis
Apple grower Lars Skou Hansen uses pesticides to extend the apples’ shelf life. The orchard is near Guldborg on the island of Lolland. Apples.
What’s happening?
Today Denmark produces feed for cattle and pigs on an area that amounts to half of Jutland. The land we use for vegetables, potatoes, and fruit is about the size of Møn.
Over the past 15 years, six out of 10 full-time Danish market-gardening businesses have vanished, and our ability to feed ourselves with our own fruits and vegetables has dropped dramatically.
Sixty years ago, when the head of Danish Horticulture, Mikael Petersen, was a small child pulling radishes from his parents’ fields near Odense, Denmark was self-sufficient in nine out of 10 vegetables.
Today we get only 26 percent of our vegetables from our own fields, and it could get worse, says Mikael Petersen.
For the fruit sector, things have gone even worse. Denmark is now self-sufficient in only 9 percent of its fruit and berries. The Danish apple, among other things, is in steep decline.
Why it matters!
The steep drop off in production of fruits and vegetables in Denmark does not only make us more dependent on imports from other countries, it also has significant effects on jobs in the agricultural secture. It has been the government’s ambition to reshape Danish agriculture significantly – to produce fewer piglets domestically and shift production away from feed and toward more fruit and vegetables, and far more organic farming.
A large part of the crisis comes down to the fact that certain Danish products have simply been priced out in a world where it is cheaper and more efficient to do the work elsewhere.
Even so, Henning Otte Hansen, food economist at the University of Copenhagen, believes it is possible to raise the share of Danish fruit and vegetables again. He says an understanding is taking hold in agriculture that there needs to be more »value creation« in the field than simply growing feed grain. At the same time, consumers show a strong preference for buying Danish. The conditions for new growth are there.
Still curious? Read the full article here.
In other news
– Danish Dental Association: Denmark will be short 800 dentists – at least
The government is already promising free dental care next year for about 500,000 Danes. The bill has just been sent out for public consultation. But the surge in demand driven by free dental care is nothing compared with how intense the pressure would become if the government, speaheaded by Enhedslisten on this matter, succeeds in delivering on the ambition of free dental care for all adults starting in 2035. That is the conclusion of a new projection from the Danish Dental Association. It shows that it will be close to impossible to carry out the political promise unless capacity is expanded substantially and fast.
Read the full story here.
– Denmark earns a much needed victory at Parken
Denmark got on the board in the Nations League on Sunday with a 2-0 victory over Wales at Parken. The performance was not flawless, but the Danes generally controlled the match and produced both the most chances and the best ones. Among the positives was assistant coach Daniel Agger, who has taken over responsibility for the national team’s set pieces. Both Danish goals after the break came off free-kick deliveries from Mikkel Damsgaard. On the first, Rasmus Højlund forced an own goal, while the second was finished by a lively, relentless Gustav Isaksen, back in the starting lineup after a quiet start to the season with his club, Lazio.
– Forget about cheap loans anytime soon: We need to get used to rising interest rates
The days when interest rates were at historic lows are probably definitively over – for now. That is the view of Frank Hvid Petersen, a financial analyst and economist who regularly explains the economic situation in Politiken. »We now have to relearn that debt has a price. The way it did in the 1990s and 2000s before the financial crisis«, he said.
»For 15 to 20 years, we’ve gotten used to it being insanely cheap to borrow. Now we’ve ended up in a situation where interest rates are back as something we all have to take into account«. The comments come after market rates jumped sharply this week following new data from Europe, the United States and Asia showing an unexpectedly strong economic rebound. It also was not long ago that both the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, the ECB, raised interest rates.
World News Day: The journalist as a modern day Robin Hood
Today is World News Day, when news outlets around the world focus on the importance of trustworthy journalism. It is a good occasion to ask a more fundamental question: What, exactly, should journalism offer the citizen in today’s media landscape?
Perhaps it is time, quite simply, to renew the contract between the citizen and the journalist.
The social value of journalism today lies to a large extent in helping citizens step off the feed. It means slowing the pace of the information stream or, to stay with the metaphor, slowing the wheel so that all of us have a better chance to understand, digest and engage actively with the world.
Today, millions of people across millions of feeds are competing every day to capture our attention with their own version of that explanation.
In a new contract between citizens and journalists, the journalist should see themselves as a kind of Robin Hood of the attention economy. Not by stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but by reclaiming some of the power to define reality from those who have the money, technology and political influence to capture our attention. And by helping give it back to us through more encounters with reality, more quality time and a better chance to understand the world.
In today’s information-saturated society, we need help sorting. Finding what matters – or what those in power are trying to hide from us. Where the press once was largely about being ‘first with the latest,’ today it is even more about being best at figuring out what ‘the latest’ actually means.
Read Amalie Kestler’s entire piece for World News Day here.
This newsletter features stories originally published in Danish. AI was used to shorten and translate the articles into English, after which a member of the editorial staff reviewed and refined the content.