Last time I talked about some of the interesting discussions I've seen on Japanese TV shows, even about subjects that one might think would be difficult to debate openly. One of the topics on the "If I Were Prime Minister" show recently was whether Japan should try to be more self-sufficient in light of the food poisoning scare involving frozen Chinese gyoza dumplings that had been tainted with fertilizer. Although everyone thinks of Japan as an industrial powerhouse, its economy is quite geared towards agriculture, with fields squeezing out a crop of rice and of wheat per field per year, or growing other things like grapes or sweet potatoes or those delightful apple-pears. However, with a population half the size of the U.S. crammed into 1/25th the area, it's pretty much impossible for Japan to feed itself. The country is only able to produce 39% of its own food as measured in calories, and thus relies heavily on imports from the U.S., Australia, China and so on. Japan is so dependent on outside countries for its food that trends on the other side of the world can easily affect it, like Canada and Brazil moving away from producing soybeans and towards growing crops for biofuel, which hurts Japan's traditional foods like tofu, natto and miso soup. And yet, Japan's agricultural system is still built around small units, "mom and pop" farms in which the husband often works a normal job to make ends meet, or extremely small companies often operating with limited resources -- basically, the exact opposite of the mammoth agro-business firms you find in the U.S. It occurred to me that one answer to Japan's food quandary might be to take steps to allow more land to be managed by larger companies who would bring greater efficiency and increase production. For some cultural reason that is incomprehensible to me, this doesn't seem like a solution that has occurred to the Japanese, which of course might be for the better, of course, in the end.
4 comments:
The only problem I see with turning the mom and pop farms of Japan into more efficient big-business industry is pretty much what is happening over here in the US with Wallmart and locally owned shops - there is a large amount of culture lost (as a community and for the shop owners as well)when a big company buys out their smaller competition. Not to mention the impact that intensive agriculture takes on its cultural and natural environment (wiki: intensive farming, industrial agriculture).
Er... /rant :S
Oh, I totally agree. No one wants that, me least of all. It'd interesting though, that with all the really big companies and zaibatsu, no one made a Monsanto like company based on agriculture. Part of this is the individual nature of farms and their importance as the basic unit of a productive family from before the industrial era. Also, I gather, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (which is extremely conservative, so that's kind of a silly name) likes things the way they are since farmers are a huge block of support for them.
Small farms are actually better for diversity and quality of the food, which becomes much more important once you have more than enough to meet the calorie demands. The bigger problems are usually that the complexities of the markets which delivers the food from the farmers to your kitchen is that which will let the middlemen get the lion's share of the profit, while limiting the financial gains of the farmer and worsening the quality and diversity of food that you eat.
suppose you go into a Japanese grocery and wanted organically-grown produce. would you find it?
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