Radiation Scares: Now Mushrooms

There is not much more Japanese a hobby than picking mushrooms in the fall. Mushroom hunting symbolizes the slow change in the seasons in Japan, and signals that a cozy winter is not far off. Until now it has been a symbol of health; grampas and grammas out in the cool fall air picking maitake for the miso soup.

But northeast Japan is being denied even that basic enjoyment this fall.

http://sankei.jp.msn.com/region/news/110803/fks11080322140001-n1.htm

Fukushima Prefecture is warning that they will be doing emergency monitoring of mushrooms themselves, as well as soil and fallen leaves. Sellers and hobby pickers are being urged to be careful.

I was kind of intrigued with how detailed the sankei shinbun report was.

The investigation begins with Lactarius volemus. The testing is going to go on to 22 species of wood rotters including oyster mushrooms, Hen of the Woods (grifola frondosa). There are 23 kinds of mushrooms which grow off roots such as Lyophyllum shimeji.

Above you can see a photo of Lactarius volemus I took on July 24, 2005, so we can see we are right in season. (Just in case you care.)

Usually products are tested a month after they are shipped to see if restrictions need apply--but mushrooms do not last that long, so the government is trying to find a way to make sure they are safe. In the case of matsutake, the place where they grow is often secret, so the government is requesting that the "myojin" or local experts submit samples for testing.

Reading between the lines with all this, the Japanese government is trying desperately to come up with a way to do thorough food inspections-- there is no centralized system for performing radiation testing. Bloomberg also notes that half of Japan's rice is grown within range of emissions from the ailing nuclear power plants.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-14/mushrooms-join-growing-list-of-radioactive-threats-to-japan-s-food-chain.html

Futures Trading in Rice

The Japan grain exchange is listing rice as of August 8 to boost flagging volumes and profits in rice agriculture.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-07/japan-revives-rice-futures-trade-as-radiation-threatens-harvest.html

Rice futures are going to attract speculative money, Bloomberg speculates, after the tsunami hammered Japanese agriculture and radiation threatened the viability of products from the northeast. Stocks will be the lowest they have been for four years in 2012. Production is down after the earthquake.

Fukushima and thirteen other prefecture are testing rice samples before harvest and grain which contain cesium over 500 becquerels a kilogram are going to be banned for export. Bloomberg observes Fukushima, Ibaraki, Miyagi and Iwate prefectures grew 1.56 million metric tons of rice last year, out of the country’s total of 8.5 million tons.

Average prices for rice were 12,707 yen per 60-kilogram bag June 30, compared to 14,470 yen last year in August. Bloomberg notes that Japan has effectively blocked participation in Japan's rice market with a tariff of 341 yen ($4.35) a kilogram on imports.

Not surprisingly, the farmers are suspicious of all this. What we have now is a decoupled income subsidy, and a policy designed to adjust production according to need. How is futures going to fit into the current model? A futures market for rice has the potential to change everything. And farmers suspect that a bulk of the rice profits will end up going to investors, not farmers. This kind of craps-table commodity pricing also has the potential to undermine food security Nokyo points out.

Kato Koichi of the LDP has lead a charge to block futures trading in rice.

http://www.jimin.jp/activity/news/111899.html

The Agriculture and Forestry section in the party along with the committee charged with reinvigorating wet-rice agriculture made a strong statement condemning the move in July.

Japanese Agriculture...In Shandong Province

http://www.jacom.or.jp/closeup/foodbiz/2011/foodbiz110720-14285.

Japanese agriculture...how to make it more "competitive"? That is the common refrain. Even the transnational companies think they can accomplish that when they barge into Japan with a free trade agreement.

But what if that "competitiveness" is never going to happen, and it has nothing to do with Nokyo or free trade agreements or subsidies or increasing exports. All we have to do is look at Shouguang City in Shandong Province where Japan gets the bulk of its garlic, ginger, and carrots.

Japan imported 25 million tonnes of vegetables last year if you include fresh and processed foods, which is up 14 percent from last year. In the first five months of this year, imports were 11.9 million tonnes. And while it might be tempting to think it all has to do with the earthquake, experts do not think the earthquake has anything to do with it, perhaps with the exception of frozen spinach.

Half of imported vegetables come from China: the overall ten year average is 51 percent, and the average is 49 percent for this year. Japanese consumers have a negative image of Chinese vegetables, but the reality is that Japan now cannot do without places like Shouguang City with its high tech vegetable production. And except for a few experts, the Japanese public knows nothing about this game-changing trend.

http://www.find.takushoku-u.ac.jp/staff/ou/newpage119.htm

Take what is happening in Shouguang. In the 1970s when China kicked off its opening up process by liberalizing agriculture, specialized vegetable production teams appeared and parts of the farm landscape got converted to specialized vegetable production zones. The rail running between Jinan and Qingdao was then used to transport the vegetables to major cities in Shandong. However, in the 1980s when the Peoples Communes got dismantled and the market economy gathered energy, specialized vegetable farmers appeared in force even in villages.

From the end of the 1980s the standard of living in Chinese cities rose rapidly and people started demanding fresh vegetables in cities even during the bitter winters. (I remember massive piles of bokchoy in Beijing in preparation for the winter even in the early 1990s.) The market for high end precision grown vegetables also grew. The plastic green houses sprouted up in places like Anqiu and Shouguang and vegetable production became much more important than grains.

Nowadays everyone in China knows the significance of two characters Shouguang 寿光. It is just that we in North America and Japan have not really figured it out yet.

All we need to do is look at this "sci-tech vegetable fair" to see where things are going.

The Road to Rebuilding in the Northeast

http://sankei.jp.msn.com/economy/news/110712/biz11071210580003-n1.htm

At a July 12 meeting after a diet session, the agriculture minister Kano Michihiko fielded some questions about radioactive contamination in meat from Minami Soma City nearby the crippled Daiichi reactor in Fukushima prefecture. He emphasized that they were getting a plan together for all of the beef to be detected in the evacuation zones nearby the crippled reactors. He emphasized that the full cooperation of the prefectures is needed if they are going to get this system together; only then will the damage to the reputation of Fukushima producers ever be repaired. The plan is to test all cattle, and then test them again after the carcasses have been processed.

Behind the minister's comments are also some frustrations that have been brewing over the past few months.

For example there was the whole fiasco with Matsumoto Ryu's comments when he visited the governor of Miyagi Prefecture.

It was his first visit as minister of reconstruction made to the northeast region of Japan. Part of the problem was his frustration that he had to wait for the the governor of Miyagi in the reception room, and he expressed his displeasure by refusing to shake Murai's hand when he did show up.

But there was a larger frustration lurking in the conversation. He told the governor that he could not expect any money from the central government until he had a solid rebuilding plan. Clearly the central government has been unable to really properly tackle the clean up and rebuilding efforts when the entire infrastructure has been destroyed in the northeast.

http://sankei.jp.msn.com/economy/news/110712/biz11071210580003-n1.htm

At a July 12 meeting after a diet session, the agriculture minister Kano Michihiko fielded some questions about radioactive contamination in meat from Minami Soma City nearby the crippled Daiichi reactor in Fukushima prefecture. He emphasized that they were getting a plan together for all of the beef to be detected in the evacuation zones nearby the crippled reactors. He emphasized that the full cooperation of the prefectures is needed if they are going to get this system together; only then will the damage to the reputation of Fukushima producers ever be repaired. The plan is to test all cattle, and then test them again after the carcasses have been processed.

Behind the minister's comments are also some frustrations that have been brewing over the past few months.

For example there was the whole fiasco with Matsumoto Ryu's comments when he visited the governor of Miyagi Prefecture.

It was his first visit as minister of reconstruction made to the northeast region of Japan. Part of the problem was his frustration that he had to wait for the the governor of Miyagi in the reception room, and he expressed his displeasure by refusing to shake Murai's hand when he did show up.

But there was a larger frustration lurking in the conversation. He told the governor that he could not expect any money from the central government until he had a solid rebuilding plan. Clearly the central government has been unable to really properly tackle the clean up and rebuilding efforts when the entire infrastructure has been destroyed in the northeast.

Japan Looks to Irish Agriculture for Inspiration?

http://www.agrinews.co.jp/modules/pico/index.php?content_id=8053

I am always intrigued at what Japanese agriculture sees as it comparators. Now their gaze has fallen on Ireland--interesting for me because I have given little thought to Irish agriculture.

The Irish are just getting themselves out of the hole created when the financial markets collapsed in 2008. While there is still very high unemployment, agriculture is doing pretty well. They are putting forward a plan where exports increase by 50 percent by 2020.

Exports grew by 14 percent in the first half of the year in comparison to the same period last year. Incomes were up 28 percent over the disastrous year before. This year, as a result of good prices for milk, meat, and grains, incomes are normal.

From 2001 to 2007 during the economic bubble, the fortunes of agriculture were not nearly as good as those in the manufacturing sector but the price of land went up, and there was lots of employment.

When the bubble broke, jobs outside agriculture were scarce and the rate of farmers working out fell from 42 percent to 30 percent. Most worked out in the construction sector when 90 thousand buildings were created per year, while only about 10 thousand will go up this year. Agricultural land reached a high of 50 thousand euros per hectare, but prices are less than half that now.

With the bursting of the bubble, people's attitudes toward agriculture changed. And while in the past, no one wanted to take over the farm, people wanting to major in agriculture increased by 70 percent over three years. While once agriculture was a dead-end industry, young people are starting to realize its essential competitiveness in Ireland.

Last year the 2020 year ag plan came out. Plans include increasing exports from 8 billion to 12 billion. (That's the 50 percent I was talking about). Within those numbers are 40 percent increase in beef production and 50 percent for dairy.

In 2015, the supply management system is going to end, and farmers are anxious to increase their exports--up to 85 percent if possible. At the moment, Ireland is producing food for 36 million people. Hopes are that number will increase to 50.

Radioactive Straw and Contaminated Wagyu

http://www.agrinews.co.jp/modules/pico/index.php?content_id=8030

Wagyu farmers in Asagawa machi in Fukushima fed straw with high levels of radiation to cattle, and this radiation was detected in the central meat market in Tokyo. This caused the Wagyu market to crash where meat from Kanto and Japan's northeast was selling much cheaper than the equivalent grade in Kyushu. The distributors are demanding that better detection procedures are put in place to get rid of this uncertainty. This is interesting in the context of everything Japan has said to the US and Canada about BSE detection.

This chart shows the March to July movement in 2010 and 2011 of A5 and A3 wagyu. A3 has gone from 1600 yen to 1200 yen. All of it is the cheapest it has been in 5 years. People familiar with the market have watched the low prices spread from Fukushima prefecture to surrounding areas. Prices in Hokkaido, Aomori, and Kyushu remained high though.

Distributors are frustrated: Why doesn't the government hurry up and tell us that it is okay to sell the meat that we have bought. Of course the fatteners are frustrated as well: Not only do we not have the money to buy cattle to feed at this price; we cannot even afford the feed.

So the misery continues.

"Na no hana" Project

I have written a little about rapeseed culture in Japan which goes back centuries, as well as recent developments around Lake Biwa which attempt to reuse cooking oils as fuel.

The following is the entire lifecycle of the "Na no hana" (rapeseed) project in Higashiomi City in Shiga Prefecture.

The project started with unused land in Higashiomi City--rapeseed was planted on about 14 hectares of land. Over the past ten years, overall area has grown by 5 times. The farmer in the yellow Jacket explains that he plants rapeseed in a three-year rotation with rice.

The rapeseed is crushed and the premium oil which results is used for cooking. Rapeseed is only crushed once. The Aito Ecoplaza Nanohana Hall あいとうエコプラザ菜の花館 sells about 1600 litres of this oil per year.

The meal ends up back on the field as fertilizer, and it is mixed in with animal wastes and scraps before it is applied.

There are recycle stations at registered gas stations which collect all household oils, not just rapeseed oil. The recycling is all done by local citizens, including many farmers who have light trucks suited for the job.

One of the things they do is create organic soap from the recycled oil, which has been done since 1981.

The oil then gets refined into biodiesel. 180 litres of BDF will come from 200 litres of recycled oil. Buses, agricultural implements, and diesel generators all use the oil which gives off less sulfuric acid than diesel fuel.

Farmers Fields: A Place to Dump Detritus from Tsunami?

http://www.agrinews.co.jp/modules/pico/index.php?content_id=7432

The March earthquake brought a huge amount of detritus, and there is really no place to put it all. Large amounts of garbage remain both in residential areas as well in rural communities. Miyashiro Prefecture is considering putting some of this garbage on 80 hectares of farmland which was not able to be planted. Farmers will have to be appropriately compensated because the soil will potentially suffer further damage.

How much garbage is there? Almost three million tonnes in Kessennuma City in Miyashiro Prefecture. Finding a place to put the stuff is just a start: facilities to burn it are planned as well. In Iwate Prefecture, there is five million tonnes of detritus, and it will take twice the area of current garbage dumps. That's a lot: at the present there are 140 hectares of landfill in the prefecture.

Renting this land to use as a garbage dump has huge symbolic significance, as it spells the death knell for more rice fields in the area. Already, many of the farmers saw their plots damaged when the earthquake caused the land to sink and many more lost their machinery. Unless someone has a plan, the tsunami will be the end of quite a few farmers's careers.

The whole project is a little depressing. There is going to be salt and heavy metals amongst the garbage which will wash into the soil with rain. If you want to protect the soil, then you spread some kind of tough sheeting over the ground, which has to be protected from holes. That also means there has to be some kind of drainage mechanism in place.

New Interest in Apples in Northeast Japan

http://www.agrinews.co.jp/modules/pico/index.php?content_id=7379

An apple a day keeps radiation away.

Who would have thought an earthquake would have brought a renewed interest in apples in Japan? Aomori apple farmers have been pushing apples as an antidote to radiation poisoning, and have been encouraging people who tried to gain control of the meltdown in the Daiichi nuclear reactor to eat apples.

Republic of Belarus research has shown that the edible fibre pectin in apples when ingested encourages the release of cesium from the body. Here is the rough data below: In a sample of 615 children affected by the Chernobyl disaster, levels of Cesium 137 dropped dramatically in subjects who had eaten apples over a period of 20 days, while levels dropped only marginally in subjects who had not eaten apples.

The story got picked up by Professor Emeritus Tazawa Kenji from Toyama University, and the news started to flow around after a lecture in Hirosaki City at the end of May.

Interestingly, Tazawa has already been doing research on the potential benefits of apples and pectin in suppressing cancer of the large intestine.

An example of research that actually has social relevance!!

Liberalizing the Rice Trade

More on rice...and starvation.

Of the 4.20 billion people in Asia, 2.70 billion of them use rice as their staple food--just a bit better than 60 percent.

And of the 930 million who do not have enough nutrition in their daily lives, many live in Asia. So a lot of the people who are starving are rice eaters/

Of the people in the monsoon region of Asia, 40 percent of their income goes toward food. Imagine what would happen if the price of rice jumped twofold, and the cost of food jumped twofold. If incomes stayed the same, this group would have to decrease their food intake.

If we go with the calculation in the previous post which assumed that Japan would import seven million tonnes of rice, the undernourished population would increase by 270 million.

Rice and the TPP

Interesting to think that a lot of the debate about the TPP in Japan is centered on rice cultivation in Japan. Another interesting editorial about rice in the JA Shimbun.

http://www.jacom.or.jp/tokusyu/2011/tokusyu110602-13692.php

There are some obvious reasons why Japanese rice agriculture is so vuln

erable to a free trade agreement that put agricultural products on the table. The cost of producing rice in Japan is 20 times that of Vietnam and 10 that of the US. This results from a lot of Japanese rice being planted in valleys and in terraced fields, among other things.

Here is some of the lowdown on Japanese rice cultivation. Rice crops in Japan are typically about 1 ha in size and actual rice paddies are about .2 ha. Compare that to the US where rice paddies are typically 30 ha. With the scale being so different in Japan, we are actually talking about a different kind of agriculture with different kinds of machinery and facilities. Interestingly, Thailand, a traditional exporter of rice uses small plots as well (6 ha) but the cost of labour in Thailand is much lower.

Researchers have said that all we can realistically expect from Japanese rice cultivation is 15 ha. Get rid of tariffs, and there is no way that farms this size can compete with the US. Estimates are that in 10 years Japan could be importing seven million tons of rice.

So what does this all have to do with other Asian countries?

600 million farmers produce rice in the monsoon areas in Asia, and most of this is consumed domestically, or in the area in which it is produced. Compared to wheat, rice is almost not traded at all. So does Japan really want to become a massive importer of rice in this kind of environment?

They already have experience. During the massive crop failure of 1993, Japan imported 2.5 million tons of rice, and this kind of trade drastically impacts price. One researcher points to 1979-1981 when Korea imported 3 milion tons of rice, and the international price of rice rose 30 percent. Imagine what 7 million ton imports would look like: At the moment, world trade in rice is about 20 million tons and the world price is 600 dollars/ton based on the Thai price. This could be expected to double, critics of the TPP claim.

Japan's Island Economy

Another way of looking at Japan is from the sea. Japan has five main islands, Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa. However, all told, Japan is made up of 6852 islands, and this island economy is part of what makes up Japan as a nation. In terms of habitation, 700,000 people live on 320 of these islands.

So why is this significant? Well if you look at Japan from the perspective of the Exclusive Economic Zone which surrounds Japanese territory, Japan is the sixth largest ocean territory in the world.

http://www.jacom.or.jp/tokusyu/2011/tokusyu110603-13704.php

A recent editorial in the JA Shimbun by Yamada Yoshihiko of Tokai University points out that these islands are important not only because of fishing and tourism. Let's talk sugar and beef for example. The islands are important production bases for sugar cane and brown sugar and a lot of wagyu beef is grown in these islands as well as the suitable geography for both industries tends to be similar. The islands and the ocean territory cannot easily be separated: it is all connected with tourism, agriculture, fishing being part of the same economy.

The problem is that a significant liberalization of trade is likely to kill off sugar production in Japan, and there are many other areas of the world that can produce sugar much cheaper than Japan. Such a change would begin the final depopulations of the Japanese islands which have been struggling economically for decades.

Let their economies collapse if they can't compete, we might say. Well, Japan's islands which are home to only 0.6 percent of Japan's population play another function. Move the people off the islands, and you suddenly have major security issues as the Japan Self Defence Forces have no way or realistically protecting Japan's islands on a patrol basis.

The editorial also comments that the rolling blackouts in Tokyo were big trauma, but it is a regular thing for people on the outlying islands to have their power knocked out for 2 or 3 days by typhoons and to watch all the food disappear from their shelves. In a way, this group of people is protecting Japan, and they have played this function for thousands of years.

TPP and the Environment

The TPP rhetoric in Japan remains strong.

A treatise on TPP and the environmental destruction which will accompany it can be found here!

http://www.jacom.or.jp/proposal/proposal/2011/proposal110530-13636.php

Korea and FTAs: Japanese Perspective

Here is the basic Nokyo perspective on Korea.

Korea was a latecomer to the FTA business with respect to Japan, and really only got serious about it in 2003 when they released an FTA "roadmap."

By 2006, Korea had signed with Chile and Singapore as well as with Switzerland, Norway, Lichtenstein, and Iceland in the EFTA. In 2007, an ASEAN trade agreement came into effect, and in 2009 another service-based trade agreement came into effect. In 2010, an agreement with India came into effect, Korea came to an agreement with the US and signed with the EU.

The Korean economy is heavily dependent on exports (around 54 % to Japan’s 18), so FTAs were really supporting all this.

Because the government strongly supported the Korean zaibatsu, an increasing gap appeared between the big companies and SMEs. Intermediate materials and parts could be imported just as cheaply, and less was needed from the SMEs, which just intensified the problem. Korea had a huge trade deficit with Japan, because the more they exported, the more intermediate goods they imported from Japan. More exports did not mean more employment. Korea became a country with a very low rate of employment for university graduates.

The disappearance of SMEs affected agriculture as well. The number of full-time farmers is higher than Japan (58 percent). However, among those, 55 are one generation farms, 34 two generation, and 11 percent three generation. And each farm has overwhelmingly one or two people, which means one elderly person or an aging couple. There are not enough farmers.

And look at farm incomes with respect to household expenses. In 1995, it was 71 percent, but by 2000 it had dropped to 61 percent. So farmers have to work out, but with the SME group weakening, there are few opportunities in farming villages. People are leaving farms in Korea. Of course in Japan, older people born early in the Showa period are moving off the farms, but in Korea, it is young healthy people who leave the farms.

There we have have the position of Japanese agriculture on Korean agriculture.

Korea and the TPP

As I have been following the TPP controversy, I had failed to notice another piece of the puzzle: Korea.

http://www.jacom.or.jp/proposal/proposal/2011/proposal110527-13626.php

According to the JA Shimbun, one of the unspoken the proponents of the TPP want the agreement so badly is that they fear Japan is being overtaken economically by Korea.

In 1960, the place was essentially a third world country with a 70 percent illiteracy rate. On average it has seen 7 percent annual growth since then, and it now has an individual GDP of 20,000 dollars, right in the bracket of other developed countries.

They are also threatening Japan in the super-competitive world of electronics products and automobiles. People in the financial world want to compete with Korea's FTA activities by signing Japan's own FTAs, or that is the JA position.

Where We Are At...

http://www.jacom.or.jp/news/2011/05/news110523-13549.php

It is interesting to look at the earthquake and the tsunami in terms of where Japan was before the disaster.

The grey areas on the graph show periods where the economic situation was worsening, so 2001-2 and 2008-9.

The triangles show where mining production has been.

The dots show actual exports.

Mining appears to be bouncing back a little, but exports will continue to plummet.

Now the worry is that the international community is going to at least distance itself from Japan's exports, or restrict them in various ways.

The dust has cleared: The JA figures we are looking at another 0 percent growth year. And the needs of the recovery are going to immediately start to bite.

Where does Japan fit with the overheating newly emerging economies and resource economies, and other stagnating developing countries?

Is a free trade agreement in the offing?

Earthquake Aftermath

The mainstream media has long since lost interest in the earthquake. However, farmers are still suffering in the north east.

http://www.nosai.or.jp/mt/2011/05/post-1651.html

Farmers have faced heartbreaking challenges with mud in their rice paddies, and water damage to their machines. Pumps are broken, so in some cases it is impossible to get rid of waste water from rice plots, and in other cases it is impossible to pump water in.

In many cases, the sea has brought in 3 or 4 centimetres of silt to rice paddies, and salt and sulphur is preventing crops from growing.

Some farmers now have their tractors in the shop, and are painstakingly taking their engines apart to get them running again.

Farmers themselves are often aging, so in many cases the land will simply cease to be cultivated.

In many cases, farmers are just waiting for some kind of recovery plan to come from the government.

The Morikami Museum and Agriculture

http://www.morikami.org/index.php?submenu=OurHistory&src=gendocs&ref=OurHistory&category=Visit

A friend recently alerted me to the fact that the Morikami Museum and gardens are really the remains of a Japanese farmer colony from the early part of the 20th century.

http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2010/9/7/florida-to-amanohashidate/

Here is what wikipedia has to say about the colony.

"The Model Land Company was created by Henry Flagler to hold title to the land granted to his Florida East Coast Railway by the State of Florida. The company encouraged the settlement of its land, particularly by recent immigants, to gain money from the sale of the land and to increase business for the railroad. In 1903, the company was referred to Jo Sakai, a Japanese man who had just graduated from New York University. Sakai purchased 1,000 acres (4 km²) from the Model Land Company, and recruited young men from his hometown of Miyazu, Japan, to settle there. Several hundred settlers grew pineapples, which were shipped from the Yamato station on the Florida East Coast Railway. Pineapple blight destroyed the crop in 1908. In addition, the colony could no longer compete with cheaper (and earlier maturing) pineapples from Cuba. As a result, many of the settlers returned to Japan or moved elsewhere in the United States. The remnants of the colony were dispossessed after the entry of the United States into World War II, when their land was taken to create an Army Air Corps training base (now the site of Florida Atlantic University and the Boca Raton Airport). The only member of the Yamato Colony to stay in the area was George Morikami, who continued to farm in neighboring Delray Beach, Florida until the 1970s, when he donated his farmland to Palm Beach County to preserve it as a park, and to honor the memory of the Yamato Colony."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamato_Colony,_Florida

Here is Sakai-san.

http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2010/9/21/florida-to-amanohashidate/

Yoko Ono and the Miracle Apple

I read a book called "The Miracle Apple" in Japanese last year and posted about it a little as well.

I was intrigued to find that Yoko Ono had noticed the book and decided to translate it on her website

http://imaginepeace.com/miracleapples/?page_id=8

This is what she has to say:

Dear Friends

It is my greatest pleasure to present this book MIRACLE APPLES to you for your consideration.

Let me explain how I came across this book, and what the book is about.

I was sitting in the lounge of JAL in Tokyo waiting to go back to New York. I picked up this book from the newly published books displayed in the corner. Once I started to read the book, I could not put it down. The attendant of the waiting room told me I could take the book with me, so I read the whole book on the plane to New York, and immediately wished there was a second book on this subject.

This book is a revolution. It is a true story of how an apple farmer worked for 10 years to find a way to grow apples without using any insecticide. I assume the method he has discovered does not just apply to growing apples, but any plants raised with insecticide.

As he worked year after year, people of the village and his friends all started to think he had gone crazy. At first, the apple orchard he inherited from his ancestors was destroyed by his not using any insecticide. Clouds of insects came to his orchard from other orchards which used insecticide. His two sons quit school to avoid being teased by their classmates. He lost all his savings, and had to be a bouncer in a local bar for a while. His wife did not say anything, but every day she delivered her handmade lunch in a beautiful lunchbox to the field where he was sitting by himself, unshaved, not doing anything anymore but watching the sky.

After ten years of this, he finally thought he had been wrong in starting this incredible journey. One full moon night, he went up a hill to commit suicide. He sat on a stone, and wondered how he could do it.

Then suddenly a distant tree caught his eye; the tree was shining in the moonlight. It was an apple tree!

“Why would a single apple tree be here on this hill?” he thought.

He ran to the tree and found out that it was not an apple tree, but the tree gave him inspiration. “That’s right! The apple trees in the orchards are all raised at first in a green house and then replanted; the natural roots were cut off. You need the natural roots to raise a strong and healthy tree.” So he got apple trees with natural roots, and sprayed little amounts of vinegar instead of insecticide. The strange thing was that the insects did not come around the apple trees in his orchard anymore.

After this discovery, he was interviewed on TV. A documentary of his story was made, and he became famous. Every day he gets many emails from people wanting to buy his apples. He refuses to mass-produce them, so the apples are sold very slowly to people who line up for them.

The Miracle Apples also do not deteriorate, since there is nothing bad in them. I think that’s how our bodies could be if we didn’t have any poison in them.

If his method is used to raise fruits and vegetables, it will save our children, our grand children, and us, from getting unnecessary illness.

That’s why I call this book a revolution. I hope you will feel the same.

Sincerely,

yoko

Yoko Ono
July 2010
New York City

Confrontation Over Fukushima Radiation

This was a poignant moment: the chairman of JA Central in the lobby of Tokyo Power delivering a formal document protesting the contamination of crops in Northeastern Japan and the contamination of crops which have resulted from the radiation incident from Tokyo Power. "We have suffered terrible damage from the Daiichi reactor in Fukushima. Nonetheless, there has been no explanation, no apologies forthcoming up to now. I deliver this formal protest from the bottom of my heart."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY4UNnQMjpM

TPP, Nokyo, and the Earthquake

It appears that about 24,000 hectares of fields used for crops have been washed away, flooded, or severely damaged during the 3/11 earthquake. In Fukushima, as a result of damage to water channels and radiation concerns,. 14,000 hectares cannot be planted this year.

http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0323/TKY201103230474.html

The TPP negotiation process of course has been put on hold. But this disaster is going to make many Japanese rethink the value of Nokyo given the important role the organization is playing in surveying damage and speaking on behalf of farmers to the government.

For example, the JA has formed a focus group which is considering ways to reduce damage to the reputation of agricultural products coming from northeast Japan, ways to seek compensation from the government, and even ways to pressure Tokyo Power to accept some of the damage done to agriculture through radiation.

JA is trying a soft approach which does not involve legal battles. "Damage" is defined in three ways by the group. 1) Products which have been directly prevented from being shipped by radiation, 2) Cases where business has been prevented by customer concerns, falling prices, or voluntary restraint, and 3) damage to reputation. The latter is still under consideration as the group is just in the process of understanding just how the disaster has affected production and making clear what the producer position actually is.

Nokyo

This is actually kind of an anniversary post, as my first entry was on March 28, 2009. This post is about Nokyo, the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, and this is an appropriate topic.

When I first started my blog, it wandered around a bit before coming to settle in a general way on the online version of the Nokyo Shimbun, the newspaper of the Japan agricultural cooperatives. So while I did not exactly hit every topic of the week in Japanese agriculture, I ended up talking about the issues which were important to Nokyo.

One of the interesting things about Nokyo for me has been to see the deeply negative attitude that western scholars and business community has for Nokyo. Japanese business groups such as Keidanren view Nokyo as the enemy as well.

So it is a little fitting that I stumbled upon a 1981 paper from Pacific Affairs written by an Australian academic called "The Japanese Farm Lobby and Agricultural Policy-Making".

The paper is valuable because it spells some of the basic features of Nokyo in a readily understandable way. In my next one or two posts, I am going to write some of the things Professor George has written, because most of her observations are equally relevant today.

But to me the harsh criticisms by western academics toward Nokyo are a little hard to understand. Here is an example from the paper on page 411.

"Nokyo's unchallenged monopoly of economic activities in the farm sector is matched by its grasp on politics and policy-making for agriculture. It occupies a unique position vis a vis the government, acting as its agent for the administration of a whole range of policies. Agricultural laws integrate Nokyo directly into the functioning of the agriculture and forestry administration. They include the Agricultural Basic Law, the Food Control Law, the Law Relating to Price Stabilization for Livestock Products, and the Feed Demand and Supply Stabilization Law. The government also uses Nokyo as a channel for payments to producers, including subsidies, and other forms of financial assistance. As part of this ancillary role, Nokyo enjoys special budgetary privileges, automatic consultation in policy-making and a close alliance with the governing conservative LDP."

The basic recurring theme in the west is that Nokyo has way more influence and control over policy-making than a backwards, anti- big business, cooperative should have.

While I try to avoid talking about politics in my blog, I am basically sympathetic with the value system that Nokyo represents whether on not the organization is an exemplary business model or not. I understand its desire to maintain rural Japan at any cost and to keep Japan's self-sufficiency rate to be threatened by excessive food imports. I understand the symbolic importance of rice agriculture, for example, which goes far beyond its profitability as a sector.

More on the US and the TPP

Yashiro Youichi, professor and prolific writer on agricultural issues in Japan weighs in on the TPP and the US interest in the initiative.

In response to the question, "What does the TPP mean to the US? he has this to say":

The original configuration of the TPP only involved about four countries and about 26 million people. So it seems that the logic was "we are just small nations; let's put tariffs to zero so we can survive."

The problem is that the US has come butting in. Why?

The answer can be found in a speech by President Obama in November of 2009. A new focus of the Obama administration was going to be exports, he explained. And a key new market was going to be Asia. So let's make an American-style Pacific free-trade sphere. But what he had in mind was not just lowering tariffs, but getting rid of trade barriers all together.

In the same speech, Obama asserted that he was America's first Pacific president, and he the US was going to rejoin other Pacific nations.

The Hatoyama administration misunderstood this message. Or, at least they did not thoroughly understand it.

The Asia region has been virgin soil as far as free trade has gone, but in 2005 China started promoting an ASEAN + 3 (Japan, China, Korea) with a common East Asian body. With Hatoyama's new government, Hatoyama firmyl shook hands with Hu Jintao and one again appealed for a common East Asian trade body.

The US was furious about this. Was this "Asia body without the US" not just a Chinese initiative? Kissinger, Armitage and other people familiar with Japan led the charge.

The US started doing its best to get Japan back into its own camp.

Yashiro Youichi spells it out: "Let's think about the real content of the TPP"

http://www.jacom.or.jp/tokusyu/2011/tokusyu110316-12864.php

More On Resentments

My last post was about the hidden resentments behind the angry response to the TPP negotiations in Japan. It is going to be interesting to see how this issue plays out. Look at the US position on beef vis a vis the TPP.

http://theindependent.com/articles/2011/03/09/news/local/doc4d76e5a9c85e1108222941.txt

U.S. Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., teamed up with other senators to push the Obama administration to get Japan to fully open its markets to U.S. beef now with Japan’s interest in joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

“Japan is an important trading partner to the U.S. and I would strongly support a robust trade agreement that includes both countries, but it has no leg to stand on without fixing the beef issue first,” said Johanns.

He said the U.S. beef industry has been unfairly targeted and restricted for far too long. “Japan’s restrictions are not based in science and irrationally punish one of our most competitive industries,” he said.

Johanns said U.S. farmers and ranchers have always produced the “highest quality beef and our internationally renowned food safety system has protected consumers for decades.”

“It’s time for Japan to recognize these efforts and remove their unjustifiable barriers,” he said.

And Kyodo News picked this up:

http://www.istockanalyst.com/business/news/4957033/u-s-frets-slow-progress-in-market-access-for-beef-in-japan

WASHINGTON, Mar. 9, 2011 (Kyodo News International) -- U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk expressed displeasure Wednesday in congressional testimony over slow progress in gaining market access for beef products in Asian countries such as Japan.

''We are exceptionally frustrated with the slow pace'' at which Asian countries are complying with international health standards and lifting restrictions imposed on U.S. beef products due to fears over mad cow disease, Kirk said.

Stressing that American beef has been scientifically proven to be safe and meets international standards, Kirk told the Senate Finance Committee, ''Our goal in every case, whether it's (South) Korea, whether it's China, whether it's Taiwan, whether it is Japan, is to have them comply with those international standards.''

''We're negotiating with them trying to gain their compliance. We will continue to do that,'' the top U.S. trade diplomat said.

He made the remarks in response to a question from Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, who voiced concern that Japan's possible participation in a trans-Pacific free trade accord could have a negative impact on U.S. farmers if the beef issue is not resolved.

Great article from Akahata, the Red Flag, mouthpiece of Japan's communist party:

Headline: Lifting the Ban on Dangerous US Beef?