Squeezing out family farmers
By AKIO OGAWA, Special to The Asahi Shimbun
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government is busy spreading pain far and wide. Victims include the man, woman and child on the street, who are facing, among other problems, hiked fees for national health service, dismantled labor protection rules and reduced child care programs.
In addition, average citizens are bracing for higher premiums for pensions, smaller benefits and more taxes, while the high and mighty await large tax breaks for stock investments and cuts in inheritance taxes.
Yoichi Tashiro, a professor of economics at the graduate school of Yokohama National University, notes that farmers have been missing from the mass media's list of victims of Koizumi's brutal juggernaut.
In his latest book, ``Nihon ni Nogyo wa Iki-nokoreru ka'' (Can agriculture survive in Japan?, Otsuki Shoten, 2,400 yen), Tashiro warns that millions of family farmers, especially those with small and medium-sized holdings, are destined to fade away fast.
Like most other reform programs trumpeted by Koizumi, the professor argues, his farm and rural policies are just an extension or acceleration of those long practiced by the Liberal Democratic Party, big business and the bureaucracy.
The book notes that a new agricultural basic law was enacted in 1999, replacing the 1961 basic law that guaranteed all farmers an existence and equal income, at least on paper.
Under the new basic law, all these guarantees disappeared. Then in 2000, the LDP proposed that the nation's 2.4 million primary farmers be reduced to 400,000 in the future. Farm outlays in national and local budgets would go to those chosen few.
Why 400,000? Tashiro delved into mountains of documents and came across a report prepared in 2000 by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries that most city dwellers or family farmers, for that matter, have never heard of.
The report envisages a 2010 agricultural scene of from 330,000 to 370,000 farmers with salaries rivaling those of people in industrial and service sectors, plus 30,000 to 40,000 others in corporate and other enterprises related to agriculture.
Perhaps too late, family farmers now realize the new basic law formally allowed corporations to own farmland and their agents to become members of agricultural cooperatives for the first time since the war.
Under these arrangements, some farm experts and economists feared, big businesses would grab up fields and paddies in urban areas and turn them into apartment houses or office and shopping centers.
But Tashiro presents a worst-case scenario with trading houses, banks and other big businesses controlling most of the selected 400,000 large farms and agricultural cooperatives.
True, a 2000 census showed that persons 65 years or older represented 55 percent of all farmers, large and small. Thus, it seems just a matter of time before family farmers disappear into a historical oblivion, but now the government is aggressively accelerating the process.
Pet projects get priority
To make matters worse, the Koizumi government has begun cutting public works projects for rural towns and villages, while keeping big projects like highways, airports and dams intact.
There are numerous wasteful public works projects, but it is also true that many smaller public works have long been lifelines for family farmers, making up for the income gap with city dwellers.
In addition, the Koizumi administration has begun reducing subsidies to rural areas, using the savings for his pet programs focused on what he calls the rebirth of cities.
Bluntly put, however, his pet programs are designed to help developers build tall apartment houses and office buildings in Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka and other big cities.
Until a few decades ago, farmers in this country looked like new aristocrats and were the envy of factory and office workers in cities. Every farm family owned a couple of cars, lived in a big house and enjoyed fat government subsidies for its products, especially rice. What has brought about the decline?
Tashiro puts farmers' plight in a historical perspective.
First, the nation's farmers have become a small minority from a majority as a result of fast industrialization and urbanization since the end of the war. Even in 1970 the agricultural sector totaled 20.7 percent of the total population but dropped to 4.8 percent in 1997.
Second, agricultural technology has made great progress, producing giant surpluses of rice. In fact, the government is taking a third of the country's paddies out of cultivation and spending thousands of millions of yen to store surplus rice.
Third, farm exporters led by the United States have torn down most of Japan's protectionist barriers for farm products, with the nation's self-sufficiency rate down to 40 percent, lowest among advanced industrialized nations.
In his latest book the author notes that since the end of the Cold War the United States has increased pressure on Japan to open up its farm market faster and on all fronts, since Washington no longer has to worry about Tokyo's full support in any confrontation with Russia.
In Tashiro's eyes, Japan's ruling elite decided to sacrifice farmers years ago to secure export markets in the United States and elsewhere. He points out that the ruling party felt it could ignore farmers, once its primary power base, after they became a tiny minority.
Tashiro's book forces readers to look at the bleak future of the nation's rural landscape, perhaps their hometowns or villages, and to shudder.
It is a sad picture, as small family farmers have kept this country's remote areas green and their rivers running since ancient times.
* * *
The reviewer is a former senior writer for the Asahi Evening News.(IHT/Asahi: March 29,2002)
By AKIO OGAWA, Special to The Asahi Shimbun
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government is busy spreading pain far and wide. Victims include the man, woman and child on the street, who are facing, among other problems, hiked fees for national health service, dismantled labor protection rules and reduced child care programs.
In addition, average citizens are bracing for higher premiums for pensions, smaller benefits and more taxes, while the high and mighty await large tax breaks for stock investments and cuts in inheritance taxes.
Yoichi Tashiro, a professor of economics at the graduate school of Yokohama National University, notes that farmers have been missing from the mass media's list of victims of Koizumi's brutal juggernaut.
In his latest book, ``Nihon ni Nogyo wa Iki-nokoreru ka'' (Can agriculture survive in Japan?, Otsuki Shoten, 2,400 yen), Tashiro warns that millions of family farmers, especially those with small and medium-sized holdings, are destined to fade away fast.
Like most other reform programs trumpeted by Koizumi, the professor argues, his farm and rural policies are just an extension or acceleration of those long practiced by the Liberal Democratic Party, big business and the bureaucracy.
The book notes that a new agricultural basic law was enacted in 1999, replacing the 1961 basic law that guaranteed all farmers an existence and equal income, at least on paper.
Under the new basic law, all these guarantees disappeared. Then in 2000, the LDP proposed that the nation's 2.4 million primary farmers be reduced to 400,000 in the future. Farm outlays in national and local budgets would go to those chosen few.
Why 400,000? Tashiro delved into mountains of documents and came across a report prepared in 2000 by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries that most city dwellers or family farmers, for that matter, have never heard of.
The report envisages a 2010 agricultural scene of from 330,000 to 370,000 farmers with salaries rivaling those of people in industrial and service sectors, plus 30,000 to 40,000 others in corporate and other enterprises related to agriculture.
Perhaps too late, family farmers now realize the new basic law formally allowed corporations to own farmland and their agents to become members of agricultural cooperatives for the first time since the war.
Under these arrangements, some farm experts and economists feared, big businesses would grab up fields and paddies in urban areas and turn them into apartment houses or office and shopping centers.
But Tashiro presents a worst-case scenario with trading houses, banks and other big businesses controlling most of the selected 400,000 large farms and agricultural cooperatives.
True, a 2000 census showed that persons 65 years or older represented 55 percent of all farmers, large and small. Thus, it seems just a matter of time before family farmers disappear into a historical oblivion, but now the government is aggressively accelerating the process.
Pet projects get priority
To make matters worse, the Koizumi government has begun cutting public works projects for rural towns and villages, while keeping big projects like highways, airports and dams intact.
There are numerous wasteful public works projects, but it is also true that many smaller public works have long been lifelines for family farmers, making up for the income gap with city dwellers.
In addition, the Koizumi administration has begun reducing subsidies to rural areas, using the savings for his pet programs focused on what he calls the rebirth of cities.
Bluntly put, however, his pet programs are designed to help developers build tall apartment houses and office buildings in Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka and other big cities.
Until a few decades ago, farmers in this country looked like new aristocrats and were the envy of factory and office workers in cities. Every farm family owned a couple of cars, lived in a big house and enjoyed fat government subsidies for its products, especially rice. What has brought about the decline?
Tashiro puts farmers' plight in a historical perspective.
First, the nation's farmers have become a small minority from a majority as a result of fast industrialization and urbanization since the end of the war. Even in 1970 the agricultural sector totaled 20.7 percent of the total population but dropped to 4.8 percent in 1997.
Second, agricultural technology has made great progress, producing giant surpluses of rice. In fact, the government is taking a third of the country's paddies out of cultivation and spending thousands of millions of yen to store surplus rice.
Third, farm exporters led by the United States have torn down most of Japan's protectionist barriers for farm products, with the nation's self-sufficiency rate down to 40 percent, lowest among advanced industrialized nations.
In his latest book the author notes that since the end of the Cold War the United States has increased pressure on Japan to open up its farm market faster and on all fronts, since Washington no longer has to worry about Tokyo's full support in any confrontation with Russia.
In Tashiro's eyes, Japan's ruling elite decided to sacrifice farmers years ago to secure export markets in the United States and elsewhere. He points out that the ruling party felt it could ignore farmers, once its primary power base, after they became a tiny minority.
Tashiro's book forces readers to look at the bleak future of the nation's rural landscape, perhaps their hometowns or villages, and to shudder.
It is a sad picture, as small family farmers have kept this country's remote areas green and their rivers running since ancient times.
* * *
The reviewer is a former senior writer for the Asahi Evening News.(IHT/Asahi: March 29,2002)
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