October 2007
Japanese agriculture - perspective
Comment by Matthew Cawood* (just back from Japan)

Drought-stricken Australia is only just now considering food security, but it's an issue that's been weighing on the minds of the Japanese for decades.

Since the late 1990s, Japan has managed to supply only about 40 per cent of its own food (by calorific value) to the 127 million people crammed onto the country's 3000 islands, which combined cover an area one-twentieth that of Australia.

From Australia, a prodigious exporter, it's hard to comprehend this obsession with self-sufficiency. But in Japan, whose self-sufficiency-driven expansionist policies of the 1930s took it into WWII and the deprivations that resulted, the consequences of having a food and energy supply dependent on the goodwill of others remains a strong folk memory.

Especially when Japan's neighbours include missile-happy North Korea, and China, whose own folk memories of Japanese expansionism still fester. And then there's the new, borderless food security threat, global warming.

Japan's self-sufficiency challenges come partly from changing dietary habits. The number of calories derived from rice have nearly halved since 1965, while those from livestock products have more than doubled. Japan is strong on rice production, but 90 per cent of the feed for its livestock industries is imported.

More significant is the inability of Japan's limited farmland and its constricted agricultural sector to feed the world's 10th largest population.

The average farm size in Japan is 1.8 hectares. About 57 per cent of farm workers are over 65 years of age, and 70 per cent are over 60. Average farm income is US$11,200 compared to US$27,100 in the US; more than half Japan's two million farms earn off-farm income.

Meanwhile, the Japanese agriculture ministry has changed hands three times in four months; one of the former agriculture ministers committed suicide.

To further complicate these already considerable stresses, Japanese policy makers are pushing for greatly expanded exports of Japan's agricultural products, and a biofuels program - policies that seem to contradict the facts of urbanisation of farmland, declining agricultural production over the past 25 years, and the concern over food self-sufficiency.

As one agricultural expert, Professor Kazunuki Ohizumi of Miyagi University, observed, to meet the official biofuels target of supplementing 10 per cent of domestic fuel consumption by 2020 would take 50 per cent of Japan's arable land with first-generation biofuels technology.

Overlaying everything is the fact that rice is far more than a product: it is the "culture" in Japan's agriculture. Japan's historical and cultural links with the grain are so strong that maintaining the paddies seems to be one of the main drivers of agricultural policy.

The official plan for revitalising Japanese agriculture is to consolidate Japan's roughly two million farms into about 400,000 by 2015 - an extraordinary structural and social adjustment. Unofficially, the revolution is already in progress. The editor of one progressive farming magazine told me that a growing number of young farmers are seizing the initiative, bypassing restrictive policy guidelines aimed at maintaining the culture of Japanese farming, and consolidating and diversifying to create a more Western, economics-based farm model. Not without opposition from their conservative countrymen, the editor added.

Australia wants to negotiate a Free Trade Agreement with Japan. It remains to be seen whether the Japanese government is prepared to throw its older, less efficient farmers to the Australian wolves; or protect the ideal world of Mizuho, "the land of rice and water" and continue to strive for self-sufficiency.

* Matthew Cawood won the Farm Writers’ Star Prize for Rural Writing in NSW in 2007 and as part of his prize attended the 51st International Agricultural Journalists Association World Congress in Japan. His attendance at the Congress was funded by the Farm Writers Association of NSW and his travel to Japan was sponsored by Meat and Livestock Australia.

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