Back to the Land in Japan
Hiroko Tabuchi has an interesting article in the New York Times about an element of Japan’s economic recovery program that aimed at getting unemployed young people to go work on farms. Low-immigration Japan, after all, winds up with a shortfall of agricultural workers even while the recession creates large-scale unemployment in metropolitan areas.
Of course one can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t be smarter instead to try to tackle some of the structural issues in this area. Like all developed countries, Japan has agricultural protection policies that don’t make much economic sense. But my understanding is that Japan is the outlier in terms of going further than the United States or Europe does to try to prop up an agricultural sector that’s ill-suited to today’s realities. The ability of a structural labor shortage to coincide with high levels of unemployment seems to me to mostly just illustrate the point that the distortions involved in this make the Japanese economy less resilient than it otherwise might be.
33 Responses to “Back to the Land in Japan”
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April 18th, 2009 at 9:20 am
But my understanding is that Japan is the outlier in terms of going further than the United States or Europe does to try to prop up an agricultural sector that’s ill-suited to today’s realities.
Then, clearly, they are going at it wrong and need to come up with way to industrialize agriculture (not in the suffering chickens factory farm sense).
max
['Actually, we need to do that too!']
April 18th, 2009 at 9:30 am
I’m not sure I see why this is so crazy. As I understand it, the modern history of Japan is that every time they get into a scrape, their antagonists invariably try to deny them resources. Having a vital domestic food production industry, even at some cost to efficiency, seems like a strategically sound choice.
April 18th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Your RSS feeds been hijacked by the TP blog. Please correct.
April 18th, 2009 at 9:49 am
southpaw Says: Having a vital domestic food production industry, even at some cost to efficiency, seems like a strategically sound choice.
Hmm, monoculture and massive food processing plants have brought us the wonders of tainted peanut butter and spinach, melamine-laced foods…but hurray for that $1 burger!
April 18th, 2009 at 9:51 am
I’m not sure that getting your beef from newly razed rain forest in Brazil and shipping tomatoes from South Africa is really the model of “resilience” that we want to foster. The fetishization of economic efficiency would be far more justifiable if ecological/natural capital costs were internalized.
April 18th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Shorter Matthew: I’m a junkie but it would be inefficient to grow my own opium poppies. I should just depend upon that nice dealer down the street.
April 18th, 2009 at 10:12 am
It’s certainly not the case that Japan needs to just give up and rely more on exports (they already produce <50% of their own food). The problem is that traditional, highly inefficient forms of farming, which are incapable of producing anything like the amount of food 120 million people need, have been preserve for a variety of political and cultural reasons (like us, the Japanese suffer from excessive influence by certain voting blocks. Farmers, whose votes in relatively unpopulated rural districts have been a key to the LDP’s reign have received a lot of protection in return.)
April 18th, 2009 at 10:14 am
*preserved*
April 18th, 2009 at 10:16 am
*imports* (smashes keyboard)
April 18th, 2009 at 10:19 am
The problem with Japanese agriculture is that their agricultural policy deliberately preserved the agricultural status quo circa 1935–i.e. lots of small family farm plots.
It would be as if American agricultural policy for the past 50 years was geared towards preserving the 100 acre family farmof the 1930s. Something that would have been theoretically possible to do with massive enough subsidies. But hardly sustainable from an economic point of view.
I’m no fan of the corporate American agribusiness model. It has a whole other host of problems. But Japanese youth can hardly be faulted for not wanting to follow in the follow in the footsteps of their welfare farmer grandparents, any more than the rural American youth of the early 20th century cannot be faulted for staying on the family farm either.
April 18th, 2009 at 10:21 am
The purpose of government is NOT to be economically efficient — the purpose of government is to ensure the safety and security of its citizens. Ensuring they are not starved into submission by a foreign predator is pretty high on the list.
Economists know jack-shit about government or war. That’s why they should be relegated to jobs as minor functionaries and staff.
I’m talking to you, Larry Summers.
April 18th, 2009 at 10:22 am
err…make that last sentence:
“American youth of the early 20th century cannot be faulted for FLEEING the family farm either.”
April 18th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Okay, I can’t help wonder that.
But I also can’t help wondering if there might be also logical, sensible, and even certain economic motivations in a nation maintaining particular types of agricultural production.
However, I can’t wonder the latter point very much, since it wasn’t even partially discussed here. Clearly we’re supposed to assume the Japanese are unreasonable fools failing to recognize clear and simple economic efficiencies as a primary value.
April 18th, 2009 at 10:28 am
By the way, I heard throughout the 1990s that Americans need not worry about where their future jobs would come from given changing trade patterns given our comparative advantages in the high tech sector and in “financial innovation”.
That was of course 100% right, and we are all better off for it.
April 18th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Re “Japan’s economic recovery program that aimed at getting unemployed young people to go work on farms.”
—————
The Romans developed a program similar to this as their Empire collapsed. It was called “serfs”.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:00 am
On the other hand, OWNING the Manor might be sweet. Global investor Jim Rogers said as much recently in an interview with Maria Bartiromo:
————-
[Maria] Which commodities are worth buying or holding on to?
[Jim Rogers] I recently bought more of all of them. But I really think agriculture is going to be the best place to be. Agriculture’s been a horrible business for 30 years. For decades the money shufflers, the paper shufflers, have been the captains of the universe. That is now changing. The people who produce real things [will be on top]. You’re going to see stockbrokers driving taxis. The smart ones will learn to drive tractors, because they’ll be working for the farmers. It’s going to be the 29-year-old farmers who have the Lamborghinis. So you should find yourself a nice farmer and hook up with him or her, because that’s where the money’s going to be in the next couple of decades. ”
Ref: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_10/b4122017811535_page_2.htm
————-
Ha ha ha I wish I could have seen Manhattanite Maria’s face when Jim suggested she should move to a farm.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:06 am
But my understanding is that Japan is the outlier in terms of going further than the United States or Europe does to try to prop up an agricultural sector that’s ill-suited to today’s realities
Further than the U.S., but not as far as a lot of European countries (France)…
April 18th, 2009 at 11:14 am
I highly doubt it. A lot of the current small holding can be attribute to post-war so-called “land-reform” that break up large land holding.
My family suffered also in so-called “land reform,” in Taiwan in 1953. Lands were confiscated, and given to sharecoppers. The divide and conquer tactics worked and the martial law lasted til 1987. When the agriculture sector was forced open by GATT/WTO, the whole sector was not competitive due to the small size of average plot.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Why is it that the punditocracy seems to want people to buy tomatoes from Guatemala (even when they’re in season in their own country) but ball point pens made in a local factory?
As others have pointed out ad nauseum (and more eloquently) countries still have a vital national interest in food security – a food system that produces more than enough food for their own population; eliminating ag subsidies (badly desgined as they are, or less so) could endanger national security.
The west is only a few centuries removed from a time when food shortages were not politically manifested, and caused significant suffering, and unrest. (As recently as 17th century Germany there were periodic reports of cannibalism, and probably even later than that in countries that were slow to adopt English agricultural innovations.)
We’re already dependent on some of the scariest countries on the planet for oil. (Note that the same people who oppose ag subsidies are also the people who oppose biofuels.) I don’t think we want to become like the Romans who would’ve dumped their troublesome mideast colonies to warlords and looters were it not for their dependence on Egyptian grain.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:45 am
What Japan is interested in is being able to survive in the event of a cutoff of external food trade. Taking the complete free market solution would make perfect sense if Japan
– were not an island
– lived in a world where external threats were inconceivable
Neither is the case.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Also: many poor farmers in the developing world tend to be subsistence farmers not farmers growing for export markets (or even to a significant extent for local or national markets).
What has tended to happen with land reforms in places like Mexico and Latin America (where land is appropriated by governments and distributed to individuals and families or communities) is that within a generation much of the land ends up back in the lands of big land owners and growers and the families end up as subsistence farmers.
You can always find exceptions but I think it’s naive to believe that many of these people would benefit to significant changes to western subsidy programs.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
while the recession creates large-scale unemployment in metropolitan areas.
“large scale” in this case still likely to be less than 5 %.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Matt, please follow the sociology of this one a bit. Your commenters have said some good things about Japan keeping a greater emphasis than some of us on food security, and that involves some kind of “subsidy” for our ag lands. No one equates a wise ag subsidy with the U. S. experience nowdays, but we need to get more people on the land, living it, working it, loving it. If that’s what the Japan objective is, more power to ‘em. It’s hard to re-introduce moderns to rural life & industry, once we’ve so thoroghly trashed it all these decades.
I’m a farm boy, and I’ve tutelled many back-to-the-land eggheads since the 1970’s,
Wayne B.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Just a note to Noah–
I’m not quite sure what you mean about “propping up an ag sector that’s ill suited to today’s realities”, (France, Japan–I think I would include the U. S. too!)
But I want to emphatically re-phrase you: the current modern world–”today’s realities”–are “ill suited” to a vibrant and reasonable interaction with food and the land!
Wayne B.
April 18th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I’m generally pretty opposed to agricultural tariffs, subsidies, and protectionism. However, something I learned in the Asian Humanities course I took in college was that agriculture in general, and especially the rice planting and harvest cycle, are the underlying basis for a large part of Shinto, as well as several of the most important Japanese festivals. For the Japanese, therefore, agricultural protectionism is not just about an island nation trying to preserve its ability to feed itself. It’s also about preserving the national culture and religion.
April 18th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Matt complains:
“The ability of a structural labor shortage to coincide with high levels of unemployment seems to me to mostly just illustrate the point that the distortions involved in this make the Japanese economy less resilient than it otherwise might be.”
Right. In contrast to those idiot Japanese, the wise ruling class of California has chosen to import millions of foreign stoop laborers over the decades, and look how resilient California’s economy has been over the last couple of years: Highest bond ratings in the country, smallest deficit, lowest unemployment rate, lowest number of foreclosures, etc.
April 18th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
It’s pretty funny that anyone from the US would criticize another country for their “wasteful” or “inefficient” food systems, like we’re some sort of paragon of virtue. I’m certain that almost nothing Japan could do would match the ridiculousness of our own subsidy system (which nets us neither good food NOR small family farms).
I think a program like this in the US would do wonders for reinvigorating rural communities, including many that have been decimated by any and all manufacturing jobs going overseas, and I know a lot of young people (myself included!) who would jump at the chance to get out of a stifling, soulless desk job & work outside on something that actually matters to people (shuffling paper for insurance/finance companies may have been the baby boomers’ idea of the best job ever, but it certainly isn’t mine).
April 18th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Actually, McDonald’s hamburgers (and cheeseburgers!) are roughly $1 in Japan too. There’s a whole $1 menu. I used to get a McChicken now and again.
Living on the edge of the Tokyo conglomeration of cities, I go past many small plots for nearly all staple crops (rice, cabbage, daikon radish, even corn!) and the population density is still more than 4 times my hometown (Indianapolis compared to Hiratsuka on wikipedia). Many of these vegetables end up in small (ie, neighborhood-sized) farmers markets, or in the localvore section of supermarkets.
One reason Japanese eat their local food is because of media scares about tainted food. Mad cow in the US, tainted spinach from China, not to mention several people who died after eating frozen dumplings from a Chinese factory. I’d say the media hype is more than it should be, but it’s not like there’s no merit at all.
A last point, many of the older people – the ones who buy this local produce – are living the ideal that people in the US are pushing for — more locally produced vegetables and meat. The prices are higher (if you go to a supermarket, but otherwise are actually rather competitive) and the produce is smaller, but it’s local stuff.
I forgot to look when I was home last, but I don’t recall seeing many origin labels on fresh vegetables. Japan has labels on all produce and fresh meat, so I can decide if I want Aussie, US, or Japanese beef.
April 19th, 2009 at 8:19 am
The quality of the raw ingredients in supermarkets in Japan is far better than those in other developed nations, and the ingredients come from much closer on average.
Why change that and thus change the quality of food? Japan is famous for its food, and while Americans can pretend that they have lessons to teach on this front, the food in America is simply far, far less delicious, far, far less healtful, far, far less sustainable and far, far more susceptable to taint and other safety concerns.
There’s a lot of thing wrong with Japan, but the food is simply not one of them. In fact, I’d say they do it better than anyone else.
April 19th, 2009 at 8:26 am
@7
That <50% statistic is only true on a per-calorie basis. It doesn’t matter tremdously where the corn for your corn oil comes from, but it matters hugely where your cucumbers do, at least on a taste basis.
April 19th, 2009 at 9:59 am
@30
That sounds right, I know that, for example huge amounts of industrial food products like soy beans are imported from the states.
I definitely agree that food is good there, but also expensive. The average Japanese household spends 2x as much money on food as comparable U.S. household, part of this is paying for quality, but a significant pat is also due to excessive tariffs and inefficient farming techniques.
As for safety concerns, there were several tainted food scandals while I lived there, and like the states Japan is extremely reliant on Chinese produce whose safety is always dubious.
April 19th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Wayne Burkhart,
You’re precisely, 100% right of course. But let me advice you that you may not make much headway against Yglesias and his crew. Yglesias probably doesn’t know a sweet potato from a carrot. Agriculture, and hard labor in general, are not Stuff White People Like.
April 20th, 2009 at 12:19 am
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