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Differently from, let’s say, the UK, Estonia is not a country used to vast lands belonging to a handful of owners. A basic reason for this is Republic of Estonia’s 1919 land reform whereby large land ownerships were nationalised and afterwards handed out as new farmsteads.
The feelings thereby aroused in the elite in England are laid bare in memoirs of Aino Kallas, wife of the Ambassador Oskar Kallas. Even so, back then the removal of land from the «lords» explicitly answered the sense of justice in the Estonians. Seven hundred years before, the land had been seized by violence and injustice; now, it had to be given back to the people.
Pragmatically (and cynically) speaking, the land reform was an argument resulting in the rapid creation of one of the mightiest armies in the North-Eastern Europe, and winning the War of Independence. School boys and the intellectuals did immediately stand up for freedom for Estonia, while those ploughing fields needed a bit more time to think it over.
A hundred years ago, Estonian politicians took an exceedingly effective decision. To compare: the Russians’ admiral Kolchak was a great warrior, but spurned the rights of the minorities in the empire and showed stiffness regarding land ownership. Lenin deceived both the nations in the empire and her peasants. Estonia fought for its citizens and kept its promises. Kolchak lost; Lenin’s «ideas» were defeated. At the beginning of the 1990ies, Stalin’s empire fell apart and hopefully Putin’s attempts will be its final throes – not the beginning of its restoration.
The people of Estonia has won these battles and we will do everything to keep it that way, while explicitly a state based on the rule of law. Jurists, in their turn, conceder it their motto what the Ancient Roman colleague Celsus put as ius est ars boni et aequi – the law being the art of goodness and equity.
If a company expects its owners’ equity to add a couple of percent in value a year, it is obvious this is no short term investment and they are playing on the very stability of a society and legislation. Having read the story in Postimees today, it does feel the forest owners – fattened fast – have not explicitly understood that the welfare of their native communities is part and parcel of Estonia’s stability. The latter, however, is the very pillar and stay of their forest-owning-business model.
At the moment, economic powers are pulling fields and forests towards the larger kinds of land ownerships. Machines are indeed more effective to sow and reap, capital expenditure thus more important than labour force.
Still, land owners (and especially the forest owners) need to also think of the welfare of the local communities – if they really wish to profit on their investments. The small – i.e. conservative – yearly yield might make the forest funds unit-holders consider that long-term good relations with local communities are for them vital.
The current bureaucracy and delay with answers, foreign for Estonians, would quickly disappear if these funds would realise: Estonia punishes stupidity and procrastination.