Government policy of 'restructuring' agriculture will destroy it: Akahata
editorial, September 22, 2001

The government policy on the management of structural reform in
agriculture, which was published in August, has the danger of destroying
Japan's agriculture and agricultural households.

It is intended to introduce the "restructuring" approach toward cutbacks
in agriculture.

Its centerpiece is agricultural "reforms" based on the policy of
increasing Japan's dependence on imported food, which the government is
going to promote without discussion in the parliament and among the people.

The biggest problem is that the government plans to restrict its support
only to large-scale farmers and corporations. This will result in the
government helping 160,000 large-scale agricultural farmers, excluding the
2.9 million small agricultural households from any administrative support.
Under this program, stock companies will be allowed to freely enter into
agriculture.

Another problem is that the government policy states that only the viable
large-scale agricultural households can be covered by the government safety
net against the price fluctuations of agricultural products.

The biggest cause of the present slump in Japan's agriculture is that the
government has opened Japanese agricultural markets to foreign products and
abandoned the price policy on agricultural products.

The "agricultural restructuring" policy, however, lacks any
self-examination of this. It also reneges on the national task of increasing
self-sufficiency rates for food.

It goes against the true national interest to abandon diversified
agricultural work based on family labor by labeling it as "inefficient."

The Japanese Communist Party is of the opinion that the way to
reconstruct Japan's agriculture is to get the national agricultural budget
used mainly to support agricultural price and guarantee income for producers
and to develop a variety of family-based agricultural management approaches.
The JCP calls for a drastic change in agricultural policy. (end)