I'm no economist or number cruncher but just seeing it as it is at the moment, here in Japan. Don't know whether to welcome a second wave because of the cash bargains and opportunities etc or worry about the people who will be affected and lose their jobs, homes and possibly families.
I know I've mentioned this before, but how much stronger would Japans economy be without it's embarrasing farm sector? You have 3 million farmers on tiny silly little plots, and it's costing in excess of 50 billion a year to keep them. All for the privilage of Japan then having to import 60% of it's food and pay higher food prices at the till due to the tarrifs imposed on the imports.
If Japan had never subsidised it's farmers in the first place, millions would have went bust or left the industry, but now you'd be left with an efficient, dynamic, farm sector, a few hundred thousand farmers on sensible sized farms, and not being dependent on welfare.
It's up to Japan to fix it, because it will just get worse and worse and harder to fix, the longer it's left as is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/world/asia/29japan.html?_r=1
.........."SHONAI, Japan — This broad coastal plain near the Sea of Japan, blessed with abundant water and rich soil and checkered with rice paddies hued golden yellow in the early spring, is one of the country’s most fertile granaries. But there is an unmistakable malaise here.
Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
A retired rice farmer in Yamagata in her greenhouse. Most of Japan’s three million farmers are older than 60.
The farmers who work the paddies are graying and dwindling in number. Abandoned, overgrown plots are a common sight. Because of how small their farms are and how far rice prices have fallen, many farmers find it impossible to make ends meet.
“Japanese agriculture has no money, no youth, no future,” said one farmer, Hitoshi Suzuki, 57, who stood on his 450-year-old family farm as an icy wind blew from the sea.
The troubles on the farm are emblematic of an overall feeling of paralysis gripping Japan, the world’s second-largest economy. Faced with mounting challenges from an aging population and chronic low growth, the nation has tried to preserve the status quo, in essence by burning through its vast accumulated wealth, rather than make tough changes, economists say.
“Japan’s rural crisis offers a glimpse of the entire nation’s future,” said Yasunari Ueno, an economist at Mizuho Securities in Tokyo.
To hear many farmers and agricultural experts tell it, rural Japan is fast approaching some sort of dead end, the result of depopulation, trade liberalization and depleted government coffers. They speak of the worst rural crisis since World War II. In Shonai, farmland prices have dropped as much as 70 percent in the past 15 years, and the number of farmers has shrunk by half since 1990.
Across Japan, production of rice, the traditional staple grain, has fallen 20 percent in a decade, raising alarms in a nation that now imports 61 percent of its food, according to the government’s Statistics Bureau.
Aging is seen as the biggest problem in rural areas, where, according to the Agriculture Ministry, 70 percent of Japan’s three million farmers are 60 or older. Since 2000, soaring deficits have forced Tokyo to halve spending on public works projects, which propped up rural economies, and plunging exports have now eliminated factory jobs on which many farming households depended for extra income.
While the current global financial crisis has added to the grimness, the root causes lie in Japan’s rural economic system of tiny, woefully inefficient family farms, which dates back to the end of World War II. But while many farmers and agriculture experts agree that this system is breaking down, change has been blocked by an array of vested interests and a fear of disturbing the established ways.
Mr. Saito and other farmers said the government also throws up barriers against the most obvious remedy to agriculture’s problems, the creation of larger, more efficient farms. The average Japanese commercial farm is now just 4.6 acres, compared with about 440 acres for the average American farm".........
See ya's.
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