JCP publishes plan to rebuild Japan’s agriculture

The Japanese Communist Party on March 7 published a plan for the revitalization of Japan’s agriculture.

JCP Chair Shii Kazuo held a news conference on the same day in the Diet to explain the document entitled “Urgent Policy Change Needed for Agriculture to Increase the Nation’s Food Self-Sufficiency Rate and Encourage Farmers to Continue Farming.” 

   The biggest reason Shii gave for releasing the agriculture plan was that “Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate has dropped to 39 percent, the world’s lowest, driving Japan into a serious crisis in food and agriculture.”

   “This requires a drastic change in the government agricultural policy to help farmers survive as farmers,” he added.

   Shii said that the successive Liberal Democratic Party governments are to blame for the agricultural crisis because they have pushed ahead with opening the Japanese market to foreign foods under encouragement from the United States and Japan’s financial circles, which in turn reduced Japan’s food production capacity.  

   Shii pointed out that the LDP policy of encouraging large-scale farming and neglecting smaller family farmers while abolishing the price support system has made family farming next to impossible. “The LDP must be held responsible for destroying agriculture,” he said.

   Shii also referred to recent radical changes taking place in relation to food, such as a sharp increase in grain prices caused by unstable production, an increase in demand for grains, and the huge inflow of speculative money into the food market.

“The thinking that cheap foreign foods are available will just lead to ruining Japan’s agriculture,” he warned.

   The JCP chair said the main focus should be on improving the nation’s food self-sufficiency rate. He said priority should be given to an effort to raise the self-sufficiency rate to 50 percent. “This is the direction the JCP is calling for as the main part of policy change.”

   Explaining the details of the four-point JCP policy (see separate item), Shii said, “The JCP will actively discuss ways to revitalize Japan’s agriculture in cooperation with agricultural cooperatives and consumers’ organizations.”

JCP’s 4-point proposal to rebuild Japanese agriculture

The Japanese Communist Party calls for the following four measures to be taken:

1. Improve the farmers’ income and price support systems with the aim of ensuring the development of a sustainable agriculture;

2. Support family farmers in maintaining their farming operations and conserve farm land by training and developing successors including those of large-scale farmers;

3. Make efforts to establish trade rules that secure “food sovereignty” by maintaining and strengthening safeguards on borders, including tariffs; and

4. Ensure “food safety” and revitalization of local agriculture through increased farmer-consumer cooperation.      

- Akahata, March 8, 2008