The Norwegian government has signed an agreement to store 30,000 tons of wheat for the next two years. This is not an isolated decision. On the contrary, it is part of a long-term strategy to “prepare for the unthinkable,” as the ministry of agriculture puts it.

What will they do? For now, save up wheat and other types of grain. Last year, it was announced that they would invest around €6 million a year. This is the first step towards a very ambitious goal: to save up to 82,500 tonnes of grain by the end of the decade.

So the NRK Minister of Agriculture announced that there is “enough grain for the consumption of the Norwegian population for three months in case of a crisis that may arise.”

How will you do it? As revealed in El Economista, the Ministers of Agriculture and Finance (Geir Pollestad and Trygve Slagsvold Vedum) formalized the agreement with four private companies. The first 15 thousand tons of wheat will be stored this year, on their own lands, in facilities deemed appropriate by the companies.

Slagsvold Vedum said that, as the Ministry of Finance announced, “there should be an additional level of security in case of major disruptions in international trading systems or failure of national production.” “This is an important part of the government’s work to strengthen national resistance.”

Because right now? Norway stored grain from the 1950s until 2003. That year, the government suspended the reserves because they were deemed unnecessary. So one of the big questions is what happened to a country that had become accustomed to thinking about saving grain again over the long term.

And the truth is that the Government did not go into much detail. Discussions about the initiative in recent months have always had the same axes and examples: the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine or climate change. So the answer was that this was all part of a strategy designed to protect the country from “potential events that could disrupt supply chains or cause strong price increases in staple foods.”

Logical? Of course, strange things have been happening in the cereal market for months. We’ve talked about the “dumpling crisis” that a company the size of Nestlé is experiencing due to a “flour shortage.” But this looks like something else: a much longer-term movement that is, above all, indicative of the increasing uncertainty in today’s world.

Should we take notes? That’s the other big question. First of all, beyond its geographical potential (such as the isolation of our electricity grid from Europe) Spain has no major contingency plans for major disruptions in social, political and economic metabolism.

Spain, like Norway, had enormous control over grain production and storage for much of the 20th century. However, in 1984, the National Silo and Granary Network was disbanded as part of the reforms to enter the European Union and numerous industrial transformations.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink all these decisions. But the situation doesn’t seem simple: None of the big promises made after the pandemic have taken shape (or are progressing very, very slowly). With these precedents, optimism becomes harder to sustain.

Image | Polina Rytova / Max van den Oetelaar

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