Japan struggles to boost homegrown food

I remain skeptical of the attempt to blame foreign food.... the japanese businesses and governmint depts have created the current situation. I and all my neighbors grow far more food than we can eat,.. so much is left to rot in garden. Japan could grow a lot more animals, but prefer to grow cedar.

Sure, let's go back to a low protein diet and watch the next generation shrink 2 cm. Ultimately, people want to eat an interesting variety of foods and generally as cheap as possible. This push to change the ratio is malarkey and defies basic economics of global trade. As long as you can import it, why produce food locally if you don't have the land or the farmers available at cost effective rates? Actually, I'd like to be able to walk into the local supermarket and purchase basmati or Thai Jasmine rice in decent quantities. I think many Japanese would also prefer them with Indian curry or Thai curry. Most young people have over the once prevalent propaganda that their geographically isolated intestines can only digest Japanese rice.

“I think we’re entering a phase when the Japanese are trying to preserve their own types of food,” Miura said. “You can’t separate the issues of food self-sufficiency and food culture.”

The majority of Japanese, who live in the cities, couldn't give a damn where their food comes from.

Homegrown or not, most Japanese foodstuffs bought in supermarkets are more well traveled that the average Japanese,not fresh or tasty.

Get rid of the middleman system and the homegrown foods might be fresher and cheaper. Get rid of the JA 'if it grows, drown it in pesticide' monopoly and the homegrown product might be safer. Then Japanese people might buy homegrown foodstuffs rather than the imported products.

Will this happen? Of course not, so let's get back to the mystique of Japanese foodstuffs and the Japanese themselves......

A total joke, deserving of a 10 year old

'You can’t separate the issues of food self-sufficiency and food culture.”

dogdog, so you're saying Japan should not strive for higher food self-sufficiency? I'm just trying to figure out the logic behind your diatribe.

As far as I see it, your arguments about safety etc are moot when compared to the power the almighty yen has over the average consumer doing their daily grocery shopping. This is not a situation unique to Japan, so I don't see why you're so critical.

i actually support home grown food. the problem is promoting it without resorting to xenophobic arguments

dogdog, so you're saying Japan should not strive for higher food self-sufficiency? I'm just trying to figure out the logic behind your diatribe.

Primarily Japan should live, like the USA and Europe should, within economic realities that prosper their citizens as a whole and not just a small interest group. The economics of Japanese food self sufficiency are unattainable. Tariffs on imports ,of 700%, and subsidies of trillions of yen of taxpayers' money (taxpayers who live in shoe boxes in overcrowded concrete islands) have to be in place to maintain the present level of Japanese food self sufficiency.

On a second level, Japan has a moral responsibility, just like the USA and Europe does, to defeat world poverty by allowing a fair and free global competitive market to exist for all products and not just those that they dominate the world in.

In Japan how can we counter the above arguments? Not by telling the consummer that our 10kgs of rice produced with 100 kgs of pesticide is safer, wouldn't take long for the truth to come out if we did. Not that our domestically grown onions are fresher than those chinese ones, because any shopper with a grain of sense soon realizes the fallacy of that one.

I know let's give it the old nihonjinron food culture line spiced up with a bit of xenophobe food auturky. That should allow the greatest tax rip off in Japanese history to continue for another 50 years.

dogdog has it about right. the powers that be decided to base the japanese economy (and hence their own profits)on a value added industrial base. This involved moving the population from the countryside to the cities. They then chose to base their agricultural policy on one single product, rice. Japan has ample space and a benign climate to produce most of its food, but that won't happen till the zaibatsu can make it so they make huge profits.

What is food? Is it merely a consumer commodity? Is it the bland processed mystery nuggets that travel 1000’s of miles to your table, or is it fresh organic photosynthetic greens loaded with enzymes and antioxidants? American food sufficiency is high because subsidized corporate farms grow highly mechanized monoculture GM crops by dumping tons of petro chemical fertilizer on sterile ground. That may be ethanol, but is it food?

From a standpoint of health, food sufficiency and conserving resources alone, Japan must act to insure that a greater percentage of its food is domestic. Locally grown food must be recognized & protected as a national asset no matter what county it is grown in.

No one knows the future. Six months ago, oil was $147 now it is $37. But we do know this; the exploding third world population is putting extreme pressure on the planet's finite resources. In just 11 years, the world is set to add another 1 billion people. The world's population, on its current growth trajectory, is expected to reach nearly 9 billion by the year 2042. Can anyone say, “Resource wars”?

What will happen when there no longer is a global food surplus for Japan to import? Can Japan risk the future based on unstable oil supplies, voodoo economics or the purchasing power of the yen? The managed global trade deals that favor importation of food over Japanese food security need to be reevaluated in Darwinian terms. Unfortunately, the need to become food self sufficient may not cross the minds of a generation spoiled on convenience foods until it is too late.

This article is about food sufficiency and that is a matter of national security. If a major war were to break out and global shipping were disrupted - Japan would be screwed. Governement is responsible for the protection of the citizens. If the country can only supply 40% of its food in a time of emergency, the government should correct this and set up a stockpile of food similar to national reserves of oil and gasoline. Japan's solution to World crisis that cuts off the food supply shouldn't be: eat what you've got, then eat some leaves, then eat your pet.

My cat would be a mere McNugget, so that solution won't go far. I try to buy locally grown food as much as possible...I've found the farm ladies who haul it in from Akiko on the trains in huge furoshikis, for instance. I check what country my packaged food is from and only buy chicken from Japan. Red meat, never. I grow an interesting amount of greens most of the year on my typical veranda, along with some flowers for cuttings.

We can all do quite a lot, even in our little rabbit hutches. We can start today, and not wait for the rest of the world to solve the problem...or not. A pretty tough problem...

So now foreign food is being blamed for 'metaborikku'. Are they going to cut beer out of the diet, too? because seems to me a lot of the people who are overweight in Japan love to indulge in alcohol.

Asking the populace to eat more rice is not going to do anything except create more problems. Rice is not nutritional, hence China is adding chemicals to it to make it so. Grow more vegetables and fresh fruits if you want to wean the public off foreign foods, and come up with some decent alternatives to the fair that people have come to love. I'm not saying at all that Japanese food is not decent or delicious, on the contrary, it is; but if you want to wean a kid of hamburgers you need to offer them something similar but made in Japan.

Oh, and stop the mislabelling scandals and price gouging.

There is not enough agricultural land in Japan to feed 120m people. Forget handwringing about foreign hamburgers, even soyabeans are imported.

Unless Japan reduces its population and increases its agricultural land, it will need to rely on imports.

With the recent strength of the yen, foreign food just got a lot cheaper.

Meanwhile, Japan's declining population will help Japan reduce its dependence on foreign food.

There is not enough agricultural land in Japan to feed 120m people.

There is plenty of land that can be put into production. Hokkaido is something like 200% food self sufficient and presently there are farms everywhere that are abandon. Japanese people have been lulled into a false sense of security by decades of relative prosperity. If the country suffers from war, economic or currency collapse, doing nothing with the existing land now virtually insures that 120m people will starve at some point. Just because Japan can never reach 100% self sufficiency doesn't mean it should not make the attempt. It is a matter of national security. This is a wake up call for Japan.

If a small thing of local grown rice didnt cost more then 50lb sacks in usa it might be different...

Hokkaido is something like 200% food self sufficient and presently there are farms everywhere that are abandon.

Yes, but the cost to the Kansai - Kanto urban taxpayer is astronomical.

What Japan failed to have during it's drive to industrialization and needs to have today is an agricultural revolution along the lines of the British enclosure acts, which will force the unproductive farmer landowners to be either a salaried farm worker or move to urban areas and become a salaried industrial worker.

This draining of our taxes into a very under efficent agricultural sector, all under the charade of the drive for food auturky, will neither help the Japanese drive to food self sufficiency or benefit Japanese society as a whole.

It is only when the present small farm holdings are augmented into larger efficent holdings, a sort of economic darwanism 'survival of the fittest', that Japan will realisticly strife to the goal of less dependence on imported food.

population goes down, food sufficiency goes up! nature at work?

force the unproductive farmer landowners

People don't need to be "forced", they need incentive. Any present cost to urban tax payers is a result of myopic international trade deals that have consistently under cut the profitability of Japan's farmers. Its not like people don't need to eat.

Japanese farmers are unproductive as compared to what? The large industrial mega farms in the West? Japanese farmers are hard working, very productive and very efficient. Traditionally, J-farmers have never had a lot of land to waste.

small farm holdings are augmented into larger efficient holdings

This is ignorant. The small holdings are small because of Japan's geographic limitations. The very nature of farming small plots is labor intensive. Growing food should not a horse race for international markets to pick winners and loosers. Would you take the farmer's land away and flatten out the hills and mountains?

population goes down, food sufficiency goes up! nature at work?

Nature is not the same as nurture. Domestic food sufficiency (DFS) as a ratio of caloric intake will not go up as population goes down. On the contrary, DFS will go down as new farmers are not recruited (or born) and older farmers with experience and knowledge die off. Result? A greater dependency on imported food for dependent urban people.

Any present cost to urban tax payers is a result of myopic international trade deals that have consistently under cut the profitability of Japan's farmers.

The above quote must go down as one of the most nonsensical sentences ever put together on JT. I can guess the 'myopic international trade deals' you refer to are the FTA's that Japan has signed with such countries as Mexico, Singapore etc, where the motive of the METI negotiators was to ensure that the 7% tariffs allowed under any FTA were exclusively on agricultural imports to Japan. I know this from people who were involved in the negotiations (the Singapore FTA discussions nearly broke off over the issue of importing goldfish into Japan). The result of these FTA's is that the Japanese info tech industries have to pay heavier tariffs on their exports, in return for the protection of Japanese agriculture from imports - yet again the Japanese value added industry subsidizing the under efficient Japanese agricultural sector.

As for the inefficiency of Japanese agriculture because of smallholding farms, I suggest you do some research. However a very good read on this is 'Japan in the 21st Century' By Pradyumna Prasad Karan, Dick Gilbreath. If you google it, you can actually read that one over the net.

"a series of imported food contamination scandals"

Ito Ham is imported now? And the tainted rice was imported, but the Japanese company was the one who distributed it knowingly. I actually trust American imports a lot more than "Japanese" foods. Oh, and hamburgers and gyudon are bad, blah blah, but I have never seen a veggie burger or a veggie don in all the times I've been to restaurants in Japan. And another factor in obesity is sugar. Moms should stop feeding their kids candy and snacks endlessly to keep them quiet and actually cut some fruit or carrot sticks once in a while. A baggie of mildly sweet cereal or granola is even a lot better than some Koala March or other sugar-laced snacks. Then people wouldn't need to put sugar in every bread and sauce imaginable to make it taste "good".

Hate to say this, but I do not trust Japanese officials enough to believe the food will be safe... At least with Chinese we know it's not so can take proper measures to clean the food before eating it.

@30061015

"small farm holdings are augmented into larger efficient holdings"

This is ignorant. The small holdings are small because of Japan's geographic limitations. The very nature of farming small plots is labor intensive. Growing food should not a horse race for international markets to pick winners and loosers. Would you take the farmer's land away and flatten out the hills and mountains?

Have you seen the plots in Japan? Even those in small valleys are cut-up into small patchwork plots. Plots to which rice-planters have to transported in spring and rice-pickers in Autumn. For each plot. Very inefficient.

Consolidate plots and efficiency will go up, and costs will go down.

cut-up into small patchwork plots

My point exactly. You cant grow giant fields of rice the way corn grows in the US. Most rice paddies are terraced in mountainous Japan & serviced by a series of engineered gravity flow irrigation ditches. The paddies have to hold water for half the year, thereby limiting the actual physical size of the field.

Consolidate plots and efficiency will go up, and costs will go down.

Simplistic thinking. Rice is a communal crop. No doubt planting and harvesting equipment makes it easier to grow rice today than in the past. However, with just rohjin doing all the work now & no kids left on the farm, the work is just as, if not more labor intensive given the shortage of farm helpers. The biggest problem is that farmers don't know what their costs will be from year to year, or if they can even break even at harvest. What kind of businessman would invest under suck risky conditions? That's asking a lot. Farmers provide food for the public so they can eat, drink and be merry, but they need a safety net/social contract to keep them on the land.

protection of Japanese agriculture from imports

Dogdog, Why shouldn't certain human activities/economies/cultural values be protected? Why should money grubbing Wall street trade dealers dictate that every tribe on earth submit to the kind of clusterf#&k rules of engagement that hurt hard working salt of the earth people the world over? These are the same people that want you to eat GM tomatoes in your GM sandwich because they own all the genetic varieties and stand to make millions as you masticate away in virtual gastronomic bliss. Enjoy.

You cant grow giant fields of rice the way corn grows in the US.

Have you ever been to California or Florida and before you say that Japanese rice is different, sorry, the Californian strain of Japanese rice tastes exactly the same as home grown Japanese rice?

Rice is a communal crop?

Sorry Nihonjinron claptrap? Next you'll be throwing in the intestine line. Califonia, Australia, China and India. Most of the rice is cultivated on autonomous family held holdings.

Nihonjinron claptrap?

Gosh, you sound very bitter dog. Raising, growing, harvesting and killing food is part of a timeless cycle that hinges on the spiritual. Food is cultural & no matter where you go, guess what? ...without it, we perish. Farming is not the same as Joe-six-pack factory work and obviously, you have never put meat in the freezer or grown a carrot, but you can explain the virtues of imported food perfectly because it all tastes the same to you.

This article is about increasing the % of homegrown food in Japan & food security for a dependent & resource poor nation. Japan is 100% food sufficient in rice, precisely because of protectionism. If the globalist "free(?)trade" scammers had their way, Japan would have been forced to import every grain of rice a long time ago, while the last vestige of farming in Japan was destroyed. As it is, Japan is forced to import tons of surplus rice from the US that it doesnt need or want because of wasteful managed trade deals. Free traders in bankers clothing have destroyed good paying value added jobs in the U.S. with NAFTA & GATT in exchange for dead-end WalMartyr and McDelusional servitude careers for the harried debt driven masses. Your thinking would kick 65 year old farmers off their land and into the factories, where they could get retrained just in time to be laid off and die.

Californian strain of Japanese rice tastes exactly the same as home grown Japanese rice

To you maybe, but NOT to 120m Japanese. When the s#!t hits the fan, I'm sure 120 million hungry Japanese people will be glad they listened to you.

Raising, growing, harvesting and killing food is part of a timeless cycle that hinges on the spiritual.

Gosh you sound very naive.

If the globalist "free(?)trade" scammers had their way,

Look I know this may be hard for you to comprehend, but Globalization was first coined by a Japanese and Japan is the country which has prospered most from globalization. Without access to the markets of others Japan, would never have had the ability to develop a value added industrial economy - it could never have been built on a domestic siege economy - and become the second most powerful economy in the world.

As it is, Japan is forced to import tons of surplus rice from the US that it doesnt need or want because of wasteful managed trade deals

Japan does this under the terms of the WTO agreement, an agreement that gives Japan access to the markets of others for its manufactured goods. Yet Japan still manges to welch on this by not allowing that rice to directly enter the domestic market. Imagine if the EC and NAFTA played by the same rules concerning Japanese electronic products?

This article is about increasing the % of homegrown food in Japan & food security for a dependent & resource poor nation

Directly yes, but the bigger picture, like a lot of Coleman's articles ( go read his articles for the LA Times concerning whaling and WW II history among other thing) promote a very slanted Japanese perspective that border on the 'Japan is unique, therefore must behave on the world stage to its own unique standards' angle. Indirectly the article is about maintaining the existing Japanese agricultural model at any expense to the Japanese economy as a whole and no matter the cost to the Japanese taxpayer. You're assumption that opening the Japanese agricultural markets to global competition would ring in the death of Japanese agriclture (by the way this is not Japan specific, I have the same complaints about the US and EC)is completely flawed. Any rational person can see that Japanese agriculture would find its niche in the market that don't have to be heavily subsidised by my taxes.

To you maybe, but NOT to 120m Japanese.

And there is the real chink in the armour. The japanese government doesn't trust the Japanese people enough to allow them, with their hard earned cash, most often made from exports to other countries, to make their own value judgement on what is best for them as a consummer.

Any rational person can see that Japanese agriculture would find its niche in the market that don't have to be heavily subsidised by my taxes.

Boo-hoo :~( From the Founding Fathers to the Beatles, no one likes taxes anymore than me. Welcome to the world. Unfortunately, everything is subsidized in our virtual economy, whether its Detroit, health care, Wall Street, watermelons or Madoff economics. The globalists must keep labor cheep, banks lending, politicians crooked and corporations selling. Something only "finds its niche" if it makes a profit. Soft drink companies have made a niche hooking billions on sugar & caffeine while sending them to a diabetic grave. It doesn't make it right. The criteria governing food production should not be canonized purely by greed in any country, just because everything else with a price tag is.

what is best for them as a consummer

They don't like American cars, they like McDonalds. They like Disneyland, they don't like root beer. I think Japanese can speak for themselves. They are finally waking up to the fact that they have been sold out by globalist policies that are now biting back. Sure, Japan has benefited from globalism, who hasn't unless you are in N. Korea?

very naive

Wan-wan. You are barking up the wrong tree. Japan needs to increase its domestic food production. In the end, hungry people will care little about how it gets done.

like a lot of Coleman's articles ( go read his articles for the LA Times concerning whaling and WW II history among other thing) promote a very slanted Japanese perspective that border on the 'Japan is unique, therefore must behave on the world stage to its own unique standards' angle.

So Coleman's terrible sin is that he has a perceived bias vis a vis Japan? What a huge difference from the fair, balanced, and neutral perspective on all things Japanese displayed by your posts, right Dogdog?

"Raising, growing, harvesting and killing food is part of a timeless cycle that hinges on the spiritual."

Sheer poetry.