The formation of free trade agreements and other international trade efforts are often hampered by points on agricultural policy. Some policy makers remark that the aging of Japan’s population and a related decline of agricutural workers will naturallly pressure changes in agricultural policy–perhaps facilitating trade negotiating. I am not convinced.
The argument is that the decline of workers both practically capable of agricultural labors and able to exercise politicial power will change the debate.
It is true that agricultual workers are rapidly declining. Most japanese can describe a case of a family farm closing solewhere in japan because no sibling cousiin or aynone else is left to farm. Young people who perform their ethical “oya kouko” obligation to their family often find it difficult to even make a family for lack of a spouse.
However this decline in the number of farmers has not been sudden. It does not follow that low numbers of farmers has impacted the ability to farm productively. Prohibitions on non-natural persons (companies) ownership of farms has been one barrier to more effiicient economic farming that comes to mind. However there has been a relaxation of these prohibitions and serious efforts to remove them altogether. There is also Japan’s stuborn refusal to seriously address connections between liberalization of immigration policies and possibility of achieving agricultual policy goals. Thus decline of farmers in Japan does not mean a change of policy is going to happy.
The other prong of the argument about declining farm family numbers relates to political power. Japanese farmers in regional areas exercise significant power by virtue of how diet members are elected. (Diet members are the national legislative representatives to the parliment.) However to effect how rural votes weigh in national elections, you have to have redistricting, and lower numbers may not naturally bring about redistricting. Declining numbers of farmers has happened gradually, and Japan has had many opportunities to resolve electorial districting concerns.
There is something else important to consider when looking at Japan’s agricultural industry. Today the decline measures and shows the total number of people working in the agriculture sector, but of the total only a small portion are actually farmers. The number of people raising the agriculatural bloody shirt in policy debates, naturally may not be granpa and granma whossit living in the hinterland. Like any market sector, interested parties can always hold out a sympathetic mascot to achieve political goals–even if they share little practically with their daily experience.
How can Japan or other countries balance the many complex and important (remember this author grew up in a small Kansas farm town) agriculture concerns with the compelling benefits of free trade? Greater liberalization is key but how to implement liberalization is naturally a throny issue.
Japan could deeply enrich its economy and move closer to finding their answer to resolving agricultrual reform by divesting the central government of regulatory power and strengthening their regional governments. In fact a model very much like the U.S. federalist model has been proposed in a bill in the last diet and past last month. This “doushusei” reform bill could be an important step in achieving better food. better farming, and better government in Japan. This observer intends to follow the reform closely.