Posted on 05/02/2008 6:40:24 AM PDT by Constitutionalist Conservative
SHIRAKAWA, Japan -- When it comes to rice, Japan inhabits a strange and faraway planet.
Consumption of rice has been falling for nearly half a century, yet rice paddies still account for 60 percent of all farmland. Rice farms here are inefficient and tiny -- about 4,000 times smaller, on average, than rice farms in Australia. Yet Japan's harvest vastly exceeds domestic demand.
But what's truly otherworldly about this country's rice is its price -- especially in a year when the cost of Asia's staple food crop has exploded, causing hoarding, riots and hunger.
The price of rice on international markets has nearly doubled since January, to about $1,000 a ton. But it remains an absolute steal compared with rice grown in Japan, which costs more than $2,300 a ton.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
If the Japanese stop protecting their rice crop, their enemies will have an easy time of killing them off.
Unlike the leadership in America, the Japanese leadership cares about the survival of their nation.
The lesson here for the Japanese is protecting commodities - bad, protecting manufacturing - good.
How did you come to that ridiculous conclusion?
You gotta wonder about folks who think a bureaucrat does a better job at economic matters than someone in business.
As a Japanese friend told me, “Only Japanese rice will cling to Japanese chopsticks. Without our own rice, we’d starve.”
If by “work” you mean make everything produced by the protected industry twice as expensive as it would ordinarily be, then yeah, protectionism works. It is corporate welfare paid for by the poor with higher prices. Food prices in this case.
The last time the economy took a serious nose dive, congress passed the Smoot Hawley Act which raised tariffs as much as 50%. Other countries around the world passed similar measures. The result was the Great Depression. Yep protectionism works. It works like a monkey wrench thrown into the gear box of the world economy.
It has been national policy for Japan as long as they were aware of the outside world.
If they don’t protect the rice industry, it will fail.
Once gone, they will be utterly at the mercy of their grocers from outside the country.
Ol’ Walter Williams is dead wrong about how wonderful it is to have a deficit with your grocer.
There’s a lesson there for America that will not be noticed by the PTB.
“As a Japanese friend told me, “Only Japanese rice will cling to Japanese chopsticks. Without our own rice, we’d starve.”
Your friend is either a Japanese rice farmer, or an idiot.
There’s social considerations here that aren’t being discussed or taken into account.
In Japan’s caste system (and there are still vestiges of this, even tho offically outlawed), went from top to bottom:
- Samurai
- Farmers
- Artisans
- Merchants
Farmers swing a pretty big political stick in Japan, and in their food system, Japanese consumers are very, very conservative. They want food to look perfect, and they’re quite willing to pay up for it. They’re perfectly happy to allow farmers to implement trade protectionism as long as they continue to get the same food their parents and grandparents could get.
Interesting NB: the modern study of candlestick patterns in trading charts originated in Japan, with their rice traders. They’re not dumb about rice economics, whatever western “modern” economists might like to think.
What’s idiotic is giving the means for your survival into the hands of your enemies.
Oh dear. How terrible for places like Singapore, Monaco, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, and Hong Kong with no crop land, to be at the mercy of foreign grocers. They must all be starving to death. Oh wait, Their standard of living is among the highest in the world. How can that be?
I think he owns a real estate biz.
The Japanese are very aware that they are an island chain, which in war could be cut off from all sources of foreign food. They are determined to maintain self-sufficiency in domestically-grown food, even if it costs them during times of peace
The Japanese are looking after their own best interests. We could learn something here...
Its amusing to watch people here try to rationalize why some protectionism is good.
Wrong. It will reorganize itself to grow crops more efficiently.
Subsidised, protected, inefficient farming sector? That describes most of the OECD with very few exceptions. Removing protections and subsidies was the one good thing NZ has done in the 80s that lasted and even the Labour governments haven’t undone that....the rest of the western world could take a lesson from that aspect.
That aspect. Not the Flatulence tax, carbon emissions or all the other labour crap we have.
About ten years ago, American rice importers showed up at a rice trade show in Tokyo.
They brough a baggie container about 8oz of American rice.
They were arrested, on the spot, at the trade show.
I saw it on TV.
Your friend is either a Japanese rice farmer, or an idiot.
Well then. With that reasoned discourse, you''ve got ME convinced.
Some FR postings are a turnoff, ya’ know...
I can’t speak for where that person got his ideas but food security is probably the most important national defense need of any country. It isn’t just the rice, it is the food. Japan learned from its WWII experience.
You can probably live a long healthy life and never have access to a nuclear bomb, an army, or an air force, but you won’t live much longer than 6 wks without food. A nation’s forces can’t fight long or hard without food either.
Wrong.
They run the most efficient system possible with what they have.
Hong Kong is part of China.
Singapore is defenseless to begin with and is already under the Chinese thumb.
The other places are insignificant places that could be rolled over by an enemy in a single day.
If the Japanese surrendered their rice production to China they would surrender their nation at the same time.
It’s really simple. They either protect their ability to feed their population with homegrown food or they surrender to their enemies.
It’s amusing to see armchair economists deny the most painful of realities.
Food is life, your enemies growing your food is death.
Singapore has a standing military as well as having it's defense is guaranteed by a military alliance with the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia. That alliance is called the Five Power Defence Arrangements.
Free trade works protectionism does not.
The illusion of strengthening the economy is achieved on the back of free trade. Since no economy practices pure free trade, it is always possible to provide false correlations that the aspects of protectionism made these economies stronger.
It would be better for Japan to buy cheap rice on the open market. The idea that growing subsidized rice has made Japan invulnerable to foreign threats is silly. Their military strength is marginal compared to China. They are not particularly intimidating even for North Korea.
The Japanese economy is less productive due to citizens dedicated to the relatively inefficient task of growing rice. The rice farmers should be dedicated to more productive economic tasks.
It’s irrelevant to the original argument, but see how many of their “friends” will come to bail them out when China moves to integrate them into their own little new world order.
“It would be better for Japan to buy cheap rice on the open market.”
So when their farmers go out of business they can sing happy slave songs while the Chinese take them over without even needing to fire a shot.
As an island nation, their agrarian capabilities are finite.
If the rice farms go they can not be replaced. Once the foreign food is shut off, they starve to death before another rice crop could be brought to harvest.
Oh, but China would never starve their friends the Japanese, any more than they would use Tibetans for target practice.
My thoughts exactly, but for whatever reason you trotted it out there.
"but see how many of their “friends” will come to bail them out when China moves to integrate them into their own little new world order."
I thought they were already under "China's thumb"?
I suspect that when the Chinese cut them off from the rice supply, two things will almost certainly happen:
1. Chinese farmers will lose a valuable source of revenue— damaging their incomes and the larger Chinese economy.
2. Japanese consumers will purchase rice elsewhere within the global market.
So actually, I do not believe the Chinese can take over by producing Japan’s rice consumption.
People in Japan aren’t buying rice like they once were. The media likes to blame the westernization of people’s diets, using the simplified “all Japanese eat rice, and all white people eat bread” paradigm, but the fact is that rice is just too expensive. If you can get your calories from something else, you’ll eat that regularly and make rice a luxury.
I have no pity for farmers who take advantage of government policies to overprice their product and keep regular people poorer.
A valuable source of income?
They want them dead. That will certainly reduce the income of the Chinese farmers a bit, but it won’t stop the Chinese government from exterminating the Japanese if they can.
There are millions in africa who will eat the Chinese rice after they exterminate Japan.
They are firmly in the Chinese sphere of influence.
They will eventually be wholly integrated into China.
It’s the government’s policy to keep the rice farmers in business as a matter of security.
It’s like having a backup generator. You may get your electricity from outside, but if it is shut off and you have no generator you freeze in the dark.
So they buy food from outside when times are good, but they keep the farmers going because times will eventually turn against them and they must be prepared.
Econmics is loads of fun in the classroom, but the world is full of evil people who want to kill you and take your stuff. If you give away your ability to survive, you won’t survive.
Actually, at some point between the end of rice supplies from China and the total extermination of the Japanese people by way of rice starvation, the Japanese will likely purchase alternative sources of rice on the global market.
Killing all of the Japanese rice consumers would reduce demand for rice no matter how many such rice consumers may exist in Africa.
—Not as hyperbolic as your argument, but still a fairly convincing possibility.
As I recall, this has something to do with bizarreness in the composition of the Japanese Diet (Senate), giving extreme power to the rural farmers.
Something akin to the Rotten Boroughs of the early 19th century unreformed England Parliament.
The typical dogmatic response that I'd expect from a free one-way trade advocate. Confronted with evidence to the contrary, simply discount the evidence.
yes. I advocate one way trade.
Thanks for clearing that up.
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