Launching Garden Earth in Japan

I am in Japan for the launch of my book, Garden Earth in Japanese. It is published by Doyosha, a smaller publisher.

JONA, Japan Organic & Natural Foods Association is my host here and have made a very intensive visit program. The first day brought us two two organic farms, a cooperativa, a wholesaler, the Ministry of Agriculture and JICA, the Japan public development agency.

Ageing farmers is a very big problem in Japan (see my earlier post Will there be farmers? about this global problem). Only some 5% of the farms are operated by people below 45 years. Paradoxically enough there is quite some land agriculture land abandoned in Japan which seems strange in a country with so little agriculture land and the lowest food self-sufficiency in the world (of the bigger countries at least). This seems to have many reasons, among others, global specialization and competition, the small scale of Japanese farms combined with zoning and other regulations making it hard to consolidate farms into larger units, and the aging farmers that continue to own the land, but stopped managing it.


The government is now supporting young farmers with subsidies in the range of JPY1.5 million per farmer and year for five years. Many of these young farmers go for organic farming, and the Sanbu-Yasai Cooperative has a special program to find land and train young organic farms. A great initiative!

Will there be farmers?

I visited the beautiful village of Jatiluwih in Java some years ago. The women were harvesting rice, with the girls assisting. The boys were swimming in a nearby stream, while the men were idling in the shadow of a huge tree - assumingly pondering over important matters....The place has been named a world heritage. The grow organic red rice with traditional methods. They get good yields, some five tons per hectare, and as they take two crops per year, it is a lot. The certified organic rice fetch a nice price. The system is certainly ecologically sustainable and also economically. But it is not socially sustainable because the children prefer to work in the Balinese tourist industry. A more glamorous job, where you can be clean, indoors and comfortable.

A year ago my colleague in Thailand told me that they had to change their strategies for farm development. Before they had propagated composting and other labour intensive methods to increase crop yields and income. But the population is now aging and the old peoples' bodies are tired.

Fred Pearce  has written an interesting post about this:

"Making firm predictions is difficult.  But I suggest that agriculture may face a new food security issue in coming decades.  Never mind the land and water, will there be enough people to work on the farms?" Forget future land and water scarcity, will there be enough farmers?

Aditi Mukherji, a water professional from India just awarded the Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application 
notes in an interesting post from Bihar that of 5006 households in three villages 40% do not report any income from agriculture at all. Of the rest 60% of villagers who reported some income from agriculture, only 25% reported it as their most important source of income. Another 35% households said that daily wage earning was their main income source.  "it looks like these villages are indeed ‘villages without agriculture’ or more like, ‘villages without much of agriculture’." she says. 

It would be ironic if we would run out of people to work the land, while we are worrying that land or water will run out...

More power to the consumers or?

Has powered over the food chain moved from farmers to consumers or from farmers to huge corporations? 

  

The power in the food chain has moved further and further away from farmers. It has on the one hand  been lost to input suppliers who now control most of the factors of production, financial capital, manufactured capital and all sorts of inputs such as seeds, pesticides and fertilisers. The market share of the four biggest[1] seed companies went from 23 percent (1997) to 33 percent (2004) and for pesticides from 47 percent to 60 percent. Many companies (Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and Bayer) work in both segments. One company, Monsanto, has 91 percent of the market for GMO soy beans. 

There are, very roughly, 25 million coffee farmers in the world, while 40 percent of the trade and 45 percent of the roasting is made by the four biggest companies. Simultaneously as coffee consumption doubled during the 1990s, the coffee producing countries share of the price decreased from one third to ten percent. The trend is the same for cocoa and tea (World Bank 2007). This pattern is not unique for developing country produce; it is basically the same all over the planet. Eighty percent of the meat market in the USA is controlled by four companies; three companies control 80 percent of the maize export and 65 percent of the soy export; four companies control 60 percent of the domestic grain market. Many companies integrate production both ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’[2], e.g. by contract farming. Most of the transnational companies in the food sector are from the USA or Western Europe (USDA 2005). 

  

One could say that the power over food has moved from farmers first to raw material traders (e.g. Cargill); thereafter to food processing giants like Nestlé and Unilever and now finally to multiple retailers. This is also expressed by the spread of supermarket owned brands; private labels. The retail share of private labels among food products has reached 50-60 percent in Switzerland and 20-40 percent in most other Western European countries (Regmi and Gehlhar 2005). The revenue of the world's four biggest multiple retailers was year 2005 for Wal-mart (USA) US$339 billion; Carrefour (France) US$117 billion; Ahold (Netherlands) US$80 billion and Tesco (UK) US$72 billion. Wal-mart was the biggest company of all categories in the world measured in sales, with sales of US$408 billion 2009 (Forbes 2010). The dominance of the retailers is almost total. That the power in this way has moved further away from farmers should mean – at least in theory – that it has moved closer to consumers. But consumers are easily manipulated by advertising, so the much heralded "consumer power" and "voting with the wallet" is to a large extent one of the modern myths of our world.

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[1]       This measure, CR₄ (the market share of the four biggest), is a common measure of concentration in a given sector- With a CR₄ above forty percent the market might be subject to harmful limitations in competition. 

[2]       This terminology is used regarding value-chains and supply-chains, where ’upstream’ denotes something ’earlier’ in the process, e.g. a supplier and ’downstream refers to those ’after’ a process, e.g. a buyer.