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.